Sunday, January 26, 2025
Thursday, January 23, 2025
Tuesday, January 21, 2025
Monday, January 20, 2025
Constitutionally Disqualified
In less than twelve hours a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist and, pertinently, adjudicated insurrectionist will take the oath of office to become the forty-seventh president of the United States, despite being barred from doing so by the Constitution.
By training, I am an English teacher and by vocation, a writer, not a lawyer or Constitutional scholar. Yet, the legal as well as moral and practical reasons the soon-to-be Felon in Chief ought not to take office are obvious to me. To name just a few non legal disqualifications: He does not have the intelligence, mental competence, attention span, education, breadth of knowledge, public spirit or integrity to serve as dogcatcher, much less President of the United States. For decades he has been well known to welch on his debts, stiff his contractors, mistreat his employees, lie in his business dealings, drive enterprise after enterprise into bankruptcy and cheat on and abuse his wives. Rumors of incest with his elder daughter have swirled around him, even after her marriage, rumors that seem totally believable given his character (or lack thereof). Even absent his many civil and criminal legal, er, problems, DJT is by no stretch of the imagination presidential material.
Add in those legal entanglements, most notably his Constitutional disability, and we are left with someone who is not only odious, but will become an illegitimate president the moment he takes the oath of office. And, I’ve barely scratched the surface of his villainy and depravity!
Endless hours of commentary and magnums of ink have already been spent on how and why he won the Electoral College vote and eked out the barest of pluralities in the popular vote. Everyone has a different idea and Democrats remain, as always, un-wrangleable cats. Being a Democrat is worse than being a Red Sox fan. The Sox eventually got their shit together. But, you get two Dems together, and you end up with three opinions. It’s aggravating! Besides, all this blothiating is worse than useless, since it distracts from the point at hand: As of 12:01 Monday, January 20 2025, the United States of America will have an illegitimate president, whose government is committed to destroying this country in the interests of making obscenely rich individuals and corporations even richer, while the MAGA controlled Congress bows and scrapes, and rushes to do his bidding. It’s a horror I never expected to experience in my beloved America. I don’t know how – or if – we are going to survive it.