Will Youngkin rise to the occasion?
Whenever one party takes over government from another party the winning party attempts to roll back the laws and policies of the previous administration. Trump and the Republicans certainly did it in big way to Obama. Now comes Glen Youngkin and the Republicans who have their sights set on Virginia’s government. Youngkin won’t be as insulting and overtly racist as Trump because he ran as a reasonable business-friendly basketball playing dad, all be it one who is worth $300 million. His concession to the crazies was to highlight Critical Race Theory.
Already the Republicans have defined themselves concerning Covid as not one Republican member of the House wore a mask during its initial meeting. This ignores that Virginia was quite successful in dealing with the pandemic in comparison with other states. The Republicans are also touting their business-friendly policies and again this ignores that Virginia has one the most business-friendly environments. The other areas where the Republicans have already introduced bills are voting rights, gun legislation, abortion and the environment. Public opinion and the Democratic slim majority in the Senate is going to work against a lot of what the Republicans want to do.
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Consequently, Youngkin is going to end up disappointing a lot of people. He is certainly going to disappoint the Trump-inspired crazies by not going far enough. I think his approval rating is going to very low throughout his term. The governorship of Glen Youngkin might just be a blip in the leftward turn of Virginia’s politics, but it is a blip that is going to be with us for the next four years and there is very little we can do about.
LOUIS HARPSTER
Shipman
Voter suppression a prelude to dictatorship
The most basic right of a citizen of the United States is the right to be part of the great adventure of government, the right to vote. It seems now that one major party in the US is devoting (pun intended) much of their energy in denying that right to the citizenry. Why the Republican/Trumpians feel they must use voter suppression to win elections just demonstrates in no small measure how devoid of ideas they are.
For way too long this major party has been marching to the drum of autocracy, forsaking the great experiment of the Founding Fathers and the conservatism of their later leaders. I wonder what Patrick Henry or Thomas Jefferson would say to anyone supporting these radical politicians who would forsake two centuries of American progress.
The Democrats on the other hand seek to make voting accessible to more of the citizens through two pieces of legislation that has been stalled in the Senate. Two supposedly Democratic Senators, Sinema of Arizona and Manchin of West Virginia are so enamored of the Senate filibuster that they are ready to dismiss the right to vote and the democracy. Adding to these two useless Democrats, no Republican senators are ready to defy the dictator wannabe.
The country is therefore going to take a big step towards that dictatorship when the voting rights of millions of citizens are denied and/or compromised by radical Trumpian operatives on the state and local levels nationwide this fall. Perhaps we deserve the dictatorship and all the bloodletting that will come from it. A warning to the world, a major nuclear power is becoming unhinged from reality and humanity.
Speaking of being unhinged from reality, why is the US still leading the world in Covid cases and deaths? We only have about 4% of the world’s population but the Johns Hopkins Covid data website, https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html, shows almost 30% of the global cases of the last 28 days are here as are 22% of the Covid deaths. In the last 4 weeks the US has had 13.5 million new cases of the virus; only three other countries, the UK, India, and Brazil, have had more cases than that during the entire epidemic. Since we are probably the least vaccinated major industrial country such statistics are no surprise. They just show our epidemic of stupidity is of much greater concern than a mere virus.