Saturday, December 10, 2016
Article II of the Constitution, Letter #22
12/10/16
Dear Assailant-in-Chief,
Article II of the Constitution outlines how a President is chosen, what the various duties and powers of the office are, and the reasons for which a President may be removed from office. I recommend that you read it carefully.
The tradition of the Electoral College harks from a time when instant communication was not possible; the use of delegates for such things as framing the Constitution in the first place had already been established. Originally the idea was to send people you trusted to make a sensible choice; the rise of party politics has led to the present situation where party loyalty is held to be the most important qualification. Notably, nothing in the Constitution holds the states to a particular means of choosing electors; the current "winner takes all" method is common but not universal practice. I point this out because, as we all know, if the Electoral College hewed more closely to the popular vote, not only would you not be the President-elect, but we would have probably had President Gore rather than President Bush. I know you've made the assertion that if the system were different you would have campaigned differently and won anyway, but you also claimed that millions of people voted illegally. That is, since you have established that you are full of shit, I don't place any credence in anything you have to say at any point.
There are, you will find, consequences to being a baldfaced liar. I suppose you've never been held to account very much, what with being born with enough money to cushion you from most anything. But you are about to step into a role where lying to the public has consequences, lying to your political allies (and enemies) has consequences, and most especially lying to other heads of state has consequences. I know this is a little hard for you to believe, because it has worked out so far. But, see...your base might believe you no matter what, but they are not in the majority. Don't forget that.
Because while laws are not your job, treaties are. And nobody with any sense is going to believe you when you say you are going to do something. So that kind of puts you at a disadvantage in the whole treaty-making endeavor. For much the same reason that nobody trusts you in business (which is why you license your name rather than actually build anything any more), nobody is going to trust you to make deals for this country. The biggest thing you ran on, like most of the other promises you made, is a thing you can't do. Not in this case because it's not within the President's responsibilities, but because it's not within your character.
Likewise, your power as President to "recommend" action to Congress, and to appoint judges, ambassadors, and the rest, relies in great measure upon other people's faith in you. All of the warnings that you weren't fit to hold the office weren't just people being mean; it's also a realistic assessment of how your, shall we say, combative and mercurial style is going to actually work. That is aside from the epic disaster and transparent corruption of your actual choices. I don't know whether I should hope that we minimize the damage, or that you fuck up so spectacularly that people will get up off their asses and do something about it. The far edge of that latter scenario worries me quite a bit, as there's no particular guarantee that "doing something" will automatically mean "doing better." But since President Bush was not a sufficient imperative even though the world economy nearly ran off a cliff, if you must be the herald of transformation, so be it, I suppose. May we all survive, especially the defenseless and downtrodden...preferably them. The field mice of this world have my sympathy. The likes of you, not so much.
All of this would be funny if it weren't so dire. I love my country. To paraphrase a friend, I didn't realize how much until presented with the spectacle of a bunch of jackals trying to destroy it.
Yours sincerely,
Sara Amis
Citizen of these United States of America
From Dorine Jennette:
PLEASE JOIN ME IN WRITING THE ASSAILANT-IN-CHIEF
Please join me in bombarding the Assailant-in-Chief with letters: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/contact. I will write to him every day through his first 100 days in office, maybe longer if momentum holds. I am asking others to write just ONE letter. Let's not just vent our grief to each other--let's speak truth to power together. Please WRITE and please SHARE this plan with your friends. Pass it on!
You do not need to be a woman or an assault survivor to address the Assailant-in-Chief as such. If you are a man who has a daughter, a sister, a wife, a woman colleague or friend you respect, or a mother (hint: that last one is all of you!), then you have something to say to the Assailant-in-Chief. Your letter might be a brief one-liner. That's great! Please send it! Women need our allies now. Here's the link to DJT's contact page--this might take you one minute or less! https://www.donaldjtrump.com/contact
Or, maybe you will start a related project addressing any one of the many groups Trump has already harmed . . .
As we talk with each other, let's break the bubble and also send our complaints straight to the source. He won't read them and won't care if he does, so probably this is a placeholder action while we figure out what we're really going to do . . . but it's something.
Dorine's posts can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/dorine.jennette
PS from Sara: I've taken to just tweeting these at him. He's not going to read them anyway, but I might as well use the platform that he actually responds to. *snort*
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