Revolt Against Democracy

The breadth and intensity of the President and his followers’ revolt against the incontestable results of the presidential election represent an extraordinary threat to the American democracy.  The most recent and perhaps most brazen action was the Texas Attorney General’s suit asking the Supreme Court — without providing any evidence of wrong-doing — to overturn the results of the November election.  Twenty-seven other states’ Republican attorneys general and 127 Republican members of the House of Representatives signed on to an amicus brief in support.  This is despite the failure of over fifty legal challenges since the election that have claimed fraud or other reason for rejecting its legitimacy.  The Supreme Court summarily dismissed this one, too.  

This is not a case, as his congressional supporters claim, of assuring that the President is afforded all his constitutional legal rights.  This is a case, rather, of siding with Trump and his supporters’ baseless claims as they subvert the democratic process.  Just three days before the Electoral College met, only 27 congressional Republicans accepted Biden’s win a month earlier.  

The Electoral College has now certified the results of the presidential election.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has acknowledged Joe Biden as President-Elect, but anyone who believes that Donald Trump will change his behavior as a result of these events hasn’t been paying attention to the President since November 3 or, actually, long before.  He won’t change that behavior after Joe Biden is sworn in as President on January 20, either.  What will be “interesting” (as an approaching tsunami might be called “interesting”) is how many of his congressional followers will continue to support his claim to the presidency.  At this point, 48 hours after the Electoral College vote, most Republicans in Congress have yet to acknowledge Biden’s victory

What is going on?  I cannot believe that even President Trump now actually thinks he will change the results of the election.  But he does apparently actually believe that the election was stolen from him.  And he appears to be positioning himself to remain the leader of the Republican Party.  Six weeks after the election, according to a Fox News poll, 77% of Trump voters and 68% of all Republicans believe that Trump was robbed of the election.  The President is well positioned to lead a movement that will continue to challenge the legitimacy of the election, the Biden presidency, and the American democratic process.

It’s a time of enormous uncertainty.  What power will citizen Donald Trump have after January 20?  Will the Republican Party continue to follow President Trump down this rabbit hole of rebellion?  If enough people distrust the legitimacy of the election, will that become the rallying cry for nationalists for years?

In the more immediate future, how will our democracy function if over a third of the country refuses to believe that Joe Biden has a legitimate claim to the presidency?  

The President-Elect seems to recognize the danger and is, it seems, making every effort to reach out to the Republicans in Congress and speak to those Americans who distrust him.  Restoring that trust may be the most important task of his presidency. 

The Electoral College Is Anti-Democratic … and Intended to Be So

On December 14, the Electoral College will choose the next president of the United States.  This rather esoteric body has in the last years risen in our consciousness but is often vague in our minds.  I’ve written about the Electoral College before (here and here, for instance), but now might be an appropriate time to review its origin, original purpose, how it works today, and its impact.

Just to be clear from the start, although there have been examples in history of "faithless electors" (who vote against the candidate they’ve been appointed to represent), there have never been enough to change election results.  Indeed, historically, faithless electors usually vote for a third-party candidate rather than the other party.  Furthermore, thirty-two states and the District of Columbia now have laws to prevent faithless electors.  Despite President Trump’s best efforts, the Electoral College will function as it is supposed to on next Monday.  President-elect Biden will be the next president of the United States.

The Electoral College is a decidedly antidemocratic institution … as it was intended to be.  The Founders were afraid that majority rule would give the non-elite (95% of the population) too much control over the government, which could then expropriate wealth from the rich (the 5% of the population who were white, male, property holders and redistribute it more equally.  Given the gross economic inequality of the time, it was not an unreasonable fear.    

In writing the Constitution, therefore, the Founders created institutions that were intentionally antidemocratic.  I’ve reviewed this briefly here.  Of the three branches of government, only half of the legislative branch (the House of Representatives) was actually elected by the people.  The other half, Senators, were appointed by state legislatures (ie the elite); the president was chosen by the Electoral College, to which electors were appointed by the state legislators (ie, the elite).  The Supreme Court judges were appointed by the president.  

How are the appointees to the Electoral College chosen?  Each state is allotted the number of electors equal in number to their representation in Congress, that is, its number of Representatives in the House, plus its number of Senators.  Each state may then decide for itself how it will choose the Electors, although they can’t be a House Representative or Senator.  Originally, those who were doing the choosing, of course, were members of the states’ legislatures (that is, the elite, again).  Historically, states have used many different methods, but today all but two states appoint all of their Electors on a “winner take all” basis from slates chosen by the presidential candidate with the most votes.  Two states—Maine and Nebraska—award the Electors by Congressional District and give their remaining two electoral votes to the statewide winner.  Importantly, the state legislatures could constitutionally choose anyone they wanted to.  (This is why Trump has gone to several states to have them change their electors, which they could according to the Constitution.)

In one sense, the Electoral College is democratic: the state legislatures choose the slate of electors selected by the winner of the popular vote in that state.  In two other senses, however, it is antidemocratic:

• Each state receives one electoral vote for each of its delegates to the House of Representatives (each delegate across the country thus represents approximately the same population).  But each state also gets an Electoral College member fort each senator, (two per state regardless of population size).  This means that voters of less populated states have much more power per voter than residents of more populated states.  For instance, California has 53 Representatives and two Senators for 55 electoral votes, one for every 400,000 voters; Wyoming has one member of the House and two Senators for three electoral votes, one for every 90,000 voters.  That gives each Wyoming voter over four times the power of the California voter in electing the president … nothing close to “one person one vote.”  In today’s political environment, small states tend to vote Republican and large states Democratic.  This is a significant part of the reason why Democrats can win the national popular vote yet still lose presidential elections.  Of the three presidents chosen in elections between 2000 and 2016, Democrats won the popular vote in all but Bush’s second term but only Obama became president.
• Technically, state legislators make the final decisions.  According to the US Constitution, they can choose whomever they want regardless of who wins the presidential election in their state.  They don’t, but they could!  This year, President Trump tried unsuccessfully to convince state political leaders in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia to award their electoral votes to him despite Biden’s unequivocal victories in each state.
• The electoral college is also antidemocratic because almost all states choose their Electors in a “winner-take-all” fashion.  So, one party can win an election by just a few votes and yet win the entire slate of electors.  Since most states are either reliably Republican or reliably Democratic, a small number of “battleground states” decide the winner of the presidential election.  If the election is close in any of those states, just a few votes can determine the electors.  In 2000, a switch of less than five hundred voters from Republican to Democrat would have given the election to Gore.   In 2016 Hillary Clinton defeated Donald Trump in the national election by three million votes but lost in the electoral college; if (out of 137,000,000 voters nationwide) a total of 80,000 people in the states of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania had changed their votes that year, Clinton would have won the election.  This year if 44,000 of Trump voters had gone to Trump, the Electoral College would have been tied.  (One practical result of this is that the people in the non-battleground states are effectively disenfranchised.  Candidates are essentially guaranteed victory in those states, so they don’t need to campaign in or bend their platforms in response to the opinions of people in the non-battleground states.)

As anti-democratic as the Electoral College is, it would take a constitutional amendment to change it, and, of course, the smaller states (with a high Senator-to-House-Representative ratio) have little incentive to change the process.  There is another possibility, however.  

Former US Attorney General Eric Holder and the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact are pursuing an agreement among states to bypass the Electoral College.  In this compact, individual state legislatures would award all of their electors to the winner of the national popular election.  Once the number of electors under the control of compact states reaches 270, the agreement will go into effect making the winner of the national popular election the winner of the Electoral College.  At present, states controlling 181 electoral votes have signed the compact, leaving only 89 votes to put it into effect.

Opponents of this project have maintained that it would give one party an advantage over the other but statistical studies have disputed this:

there’s almost no correlation between which party has the Electoral College advantage in one election and which has it four years later. It can bounce back and forth based on relatively subtle changes in the electorate.

For instance, John Kerry lost the popular election in 2004 by three million votes (about the same as Clinton over Trump) but came close to winning the electoral vote 251-286 .

The Electoral College is an archaic, antidemocratic institution that distorts American politics.  It does not consistently reward one party or the other.  It deserves to be eliminated or at least by-passed.

The Rearview Mirror

Donald Trump has finally allowed the transition to the Joe Biden presidency to begin; he has acknowledged that he will leave the White House after the Electoral College votes Biden President.  These are important political developments that appear to rule out the most feared, although remote, possibilities: full-blown rebellions in places around the country and/or the need to forcibly remove the President from the White House.  Yet the President still does not formally concede the election, still persists in his lawsuits, and still trashes any Republican who does not support his resistance.

The President still denounces a “rigged” election.  “This was a stolen election,” he recently tweeted.  Similar claims have run rampant on social media.  So, Trump has set his supporters up to reject even the formal election results for a long time after his departure from the White House.

What’s he doing?  Any reading of Trump’s speeches, tweets, and press conferences makes it clear he is preparing his base and the politicians they support to keep him installed as the leader of the Republican Party.  

Why should we care?  There are some chilling possibilities.

• Trump’s continuing challenge to the legitimacy of the election may cause American partisanship to increase even further in breadth and intensity.  The right-wing violence that has begun — along with the sometimes-violent left-wing response it inspires — may spread.
• In a nation where high percentages of people do not trust the government, Trump’s refusal to accept his defeat may shatter what little remains of that trust.  
• Depending on Trump’s response to the vaccine’s distribution campaign*, there could be wide-spread refusal to accept actual vaccination.
• Congress will most likely remain stymied as most attempts at action will be interpreted, by one side or the other, as partisan.  Cooperation with even moderate Biden proposals will be interpreted by the radical right as betrayal and will not be tolerated.  The fact that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has still not acknowledged Biden’s election gives us some idea of the possibility of future congressional cooperation and action.

There are some long-shot possibilities that might make positive action in the Senate possible.  In the unlikely event that the winners of the up-coming senatorial elections in Georgia are Democrats, that would flip the Senate to Democratic control.  It is also possible that several of the Republican senators who have sometimes shown independence from Trump — Mitt Romney from Utah, Ben Sasse from Nebraska, Susan Collins from Maine and Lisa Murkowski from Alaska — could join the Democrats on particular issues: immigration, prison reform and the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), but past history does not bode well for any substantial cooperation.

Aside from the immediate impact, Could the long-term impact of Trump’s defiance threaten democracy?

• As above, partisanship and mistrust of government will most likely grow, at least in the short range. 
  
• A large portion of the vast swath of broken norms that the President will leave will be almost impossible to restore.
• Because the inability of Congress over the last four years to check presidential abuse of power, even the capacity of the Senate to fulfill its Article I responsibilities is in question.  Will the Senate have the power to limit the president when the next emergency arises?
• Perhaps the greatest danger is that Trump’s presidency will inspire and create models for future authoritarian presidents:
• Presidents may use the pardon to encourage cooperation by the high-level government staff.
• If the co-optation of the Justice Department were repeated, it could be used to extend the potential reach of the president’s threats and would almost certainly discourage future whistleblowers.
• Trump is unlikely to be legally prosecuted for even the most brazen abuses, reinforcing future autocrats’ assumptions that they are free to do almost anything without fear of retribution, especially since removal from office by Congress is so unlikely.  

Trump and Trumpism are not going away.  The myths of the stolen election and others “will probably persist for years or even decades,” says Kate Starbird, a University of Washington professor and online misinformation expert.

Whatever Donald Trump’s legal or political future, his impact upon American democracy will be profound.  The future looks better under Joe Biden, but we, or at least some of us, must also keep our eye firmly on the rear-view mirror.  Donald Trump and his progeny will be with us for a long time.
_________________________

*So far, the President has trumpeted and appropriately taken much credit for the astonishingly rapid development of several highly-efficient vaccines and will be sure to recommend their use.  But unless the world continues to publicly acknowledge his contributions, it seems likely he will find a way to disparage the further development, production and distribution of the vaccine and begin to speak against it.

Protection from the Majority

The 2016 election of Donald Trump and his 2020 near-election confront the United States with a most basic question of democracy: What would happen if the majority of the voters in the country were not particularly concerned about the basic freedoms, rights and responsibilities of democracy?

We have come too close to the answer to that previously unthinkable question.  We must face it head-on.

A “democracy” is usually defined as a country run by the will of the people.  In its simpler form — direct democracy — those eligible decide by vote upon the issue.  This might work well in a town of 500 but less well in a country of 330 million.  Twenty-three states, however, currently allow for popular referenda on particular issues: A minimum number of signatures is generally required on a petition to place the issue on the ballot, which is then voted upon directly by the electorate.  

For the most part, however, we are a democratic republic in which the people elect representatives who decide upon the issues facing the country.    

The most serious challenge to either of these forms of straightforward democracy is that there is no protection for the rights of the minority nor is there a guarantee of individual human liberties, such as freedom of speech.  In other words, majority rule does not make a country a real democracy nor a place we’d want to live in.  In addition to majority rule, a true democracy — as most of us conceive it — also guarantees:

• the rule of law and fair legal procedures,
• free and fair elections,
• freedom of speech,
• freedom of the press,
• the right to assemble,
• freedom of religion and
• the protection of property.  

The term “liberal democracy” has traditionally been used to refer to such government.  In this context, the term “liberal” refers not to the current “liberal” vs “conservative” political divide but to the 18th and 19th century English philosophical systems based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law.  Democracies that do not guarantee these rights are called “illiberal democracies.”

How does a liberal democracy keep the majority from changing those requirements when they become inconvenient … yet still remain a democracy?  Ordinarily, we create a constitution that guarantees those basic rights.  How do we prevent the majority from changing the constitution?  We create a constitution that makes spur-of-the-moment, in-the-heat-of-strong-emotions decisions impossible.  We write a constitution that makes itself very difficult and time-consuming to change.

Within two years of passing the American Constitution, the Founders added the Bill of Rights, ten amendments that became part of the Constitution, and they were ratified by the states almost immediately.  Those amendments enshrine individual rights in the American Constitution, and they are difficult to change.  

The process for amending the Constitution requires that

• upon a two-thirds vote of both houses, Congress submits the proposed amendment(s) to the states and
• three-fourths of state legislatures then ratify the exact wording of the text.

As Trump works to destroy our liberal democracy and we seek to save it, we can be grateful to our Founders who — for all their faults — left us a Constitution that — with all its faults — remains firmly on our side and genuinely supports our struggle. 

When Many Believe the Election Was Rigged

Following his recent defeat at the polls, President Trump has taken the only consistent path forward: to persist in claiming loudly and passionately he was cheated at the polls and is the rightful president of the United States.   Prior to and even after the election, he maintained, “the only way we are going to lose this election is if the election is rigged.”  

So, what can we expect from here on out?

1. We can assume from his history of never acknowledging an error in judgment that Trump will continue his claims, refuse to concede and leave the White House insisting that he was cheated.
2. It’s likely that after the election has been certified, many congressional Republicans will eventually acknowledge the President’s defeat.  But what is also clear is that long into the future a large segment of Trump’s base will still believe he was cheated.  
3. Said one senior Republican official naїvely, “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change.”  Ask the transition teams in intelligence agencies what the downside is!.
4. It’s likely, therefore, that many congresspeople will give ongoing support to the ex-President, ignoring reality and claiming that President’s Biden’s presidency is illegitimate.  They will have every reason to obstruct his presidency at every turn.

[To get some idea of how long Trump could keep this lie going, consider that he was one of the early proponents of “birtherism,” the false claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and therefore not eligible to be president.  Only after incontrovertible proof from a longform birth certificate presented eight years later did Trump grudgingly acknowledge that Obama was born here.  But by that time, 72% of Republicans still believed that the birther lie.]

5. Given the persistence of such an obvious lie as birtherism, it’s almost inconceivable that the “rigged-election” lie will disappear, considering especially the large number of die-hard Trump supporters who will be unable to deal with the cognitive dissonance of a Biden victory. 

6. If they are dependent on those supporters for re-election, some Republican legislators will continue to maintain that Trump was cheated.   Trumpism will not go away.

7. Will even the Republican leadership strongly and publicly denounce the lie?  Given their unwillingness to accept the evidence in the impeachment hearings, it is doubtful.

When government becomes that dysfunctional, when large numbers of politicians propagate the lies, why would anyone have faith in democracy?

 

I realize how speculative this sounds.  None of us knows the future.  Our democracy survived the Civil War, and we could survive this.  But we have also never had a president so incompetent, so deceitful, or less committed to our democracy.

The election of President-elect Joe Biden certainly gives us reason to hope.  This 244-year old democracy has been enormously resilient.  But we are in new territory.  It will demand something new from us.

How Could This Happen?

I was working at my desk four days after the election when I heard noise on 16th St a few hundred feet from our apartment.  I knew what it meant — the networks had called the election for Vice-President Joe Biden.  My wife Marja and I began walking down 16th toward the White House.  It was a carnival!  People cheered, cars honked … for hours.

We walked down to Black Lives Matter Plaza, the half-mile portion of 16th St leading to the White House that was renamed by the mayor during the George Floyd protests.  People filled the streets; the crowd seemed huge.  (Almost everyone was masked.) We walked back home up 15th St and people were pouring past us going downtown.

We were celebrating and with good reason.

But through my head runs the repeated question: How could this election have been even close?  Switch 100,000 votes in a few swing states, and Donald Trump would be president for the next four years.  How could this not have been a landslide for Biden?  How could such large numbers of people have voted for a person who

• refused to (and continues to refuse to) commit himself to accepting the results of any free election,
• encouraged violence among his supporters,
• labeled the free press the “enemy of the people,
• attacked political opponents as “treasonous” and threatened to “lock ‘em up,”
• told well over 20,000 lies, many despite incontrovertible proof, and
• expressed admiration for some of the world’s worst dictators.

After four years as president, Donald Trump has proved that he has no commitment to democracy or to the Constitution.  

How could so many people not care about that?

I am not writing here about issues or policies.  They’re bad enough, but I can imagine that sincere people would have different opinions about immigration, race, court appointments and so on.  But how is it possible to want as a leader of our democracy a person who is indifferent to democracy?

My shock over the election is about what it portends for our democracy.  It’s not merely that all the other issues that compose our divisiveness outweigh the concern for American democracy.  My shock is that democracy doesn’t seem to matter much at all.

In the election exit polls the impact on our democracy isn’t even mentioned as important … whether on either side.  In the coming weeks the pundits will most likely discuss the Hispanic vote, the less-than-expected Black vote, Trump’s extraordinary ability to convince others that the COVID-19 epidemic has almost passed, abortion, the country’s worsening financial inequality and so on.  Those are those crucial discussions.  But so far, I haven’t read a single article, seen an opinion piece, or heard any public discussion about how unimportant democracy has become to vast portions of the American electorate … right or left.

I suppose all this should come as no surprise.  I have written before about studies that reveal the stunning American indifference to democracy, especially among younger people.  I am 75-years old.  The polls indicate that over 70% of my generation finds democracy maximally “essential” But one reliable study, confirmed by several others, less than one-third of Americans millennials believe that democracy is essential to their lives.  Other studies show that if the US government weren’t working well (as it isn’t currently), over half of Americans would support one of the following:      

• military rule,
• a strong leader who does not have to bother with Congress and elections, or
• another form of non-democratic rule.      

Right now, I don’t want to think about how to respond to all of this.  It’s just too difficult for me to understand.

It is important, of course, that Joe Biden won this election.  It will give us a breather, opportunity to understand and respond.  We can celebrate … and get back to work.

Collecting Power

As the election nears, President Trump has been giving us an ever-clearer picture of what his second Administration would look like, especially if a Republican Senate continued to show no interest in stopping his march toward autocracy.  The President’s ongoing attempts to bring the Cabinet and their departments under his personal control, subject to his personal needs have been accelerating.

A recent example has been the President’s attempts to use “my” Attorney General to discredit the family of his political adversary, Joe Biden.  Citing alleged improper business dealings between Biden’s son, Hunter, and a Ukrainian company, Trump said recently:

“We have got to get the attorney general to act. He’s got to act and he’s got to act fast …  "This is major corruption and this has to be known about before the election.”

The Trump Administration and congressional Republicans have investigated such charges against Hunter Biden several times before, most recently in a Senate committee looking into similar allegations.  Trump’s “new” allegations follow unsubstantiated reports that a laptop purportedly belonging to the younger Biden contains incriminating emails.  Follow-up by mainstream media has found no basis for these reports. 

These allegations are not just wrong, are not just lies.  They are clear steps on the President’s path toward autocracy.  This is how the President thinks his power should be used.  Indeed, it may be just a foretaste of how it will be used if he were to be reelected.

In normal times, a president’s effort to pressure a member of his Cabinet to investigate the family of his political opponent would be extraordinary, especially since the President explicitly invoked the election as reason to do so.  In normal times such a breach of norms would threaten to bring a president down.  But these are not normal times.

A more widespread effort to bring the Executive Branch under the President’s personal control is an executive order issued in October that would remove job security from thousands of civil servants in the federal bureaucracy.  The order

strips long-held civil service protections from employees whose work involves policymaking, allowing them to be dismissed with little cause or recourse, much like the political appointees who come and go with each administration.

On its face, the order seems like a simple corporate attempt to weaken an employee union. 

Civil Service employees saw the ruse immediately.  Ronald Sanders, Trump’s appointee as director of a key advisory council on the civil service, resigned in protest, writing that

[the order] is nothing more than a smoke screen for what is clearly an attempt to require the political loyalty of those who advise the President, or failing that, to enable their removal with little if any due process. …

Sanders continued that this Administration seeks

to replace apolitical expertise with political obeisance. Career Federal employees are legally and duty-bound to be nonpartisan; they take an oath to preserve and protect our Constitution and the rule of law … not to be loyal to a particular President or Administration

I order to understand the importance of Trump’s order, one must understand the difference between civil servants and political appointees.  The former are long-term government employees hired in a competitive process to do the ongoing, day-to-day work of government.  They are expressly nonpolitical and generally maintain their positions from administration to administration.  Their job is safe from political pressure; under normal circumstances they are fired only for inadequate job performance.  They have full union protection. 

Political appointees, on the other hand, serve at the pleasure of the president and generally change with every new administration.  They are expected to bend to the president’s political needs.  They have no union and no job protection.  Trump has, quite legally, used his power to hire and fire at will as a cudgel to keep his political appointees in line.  Cross the President, and you’re in danger of dismissal!

Trump’s order could affect tens of thousands of positions involved in making or carrying out policy.  The new executive order does not actually transform these high-level civil servants into political appointments.  Rather, it subjects these career Federal employees under to political pressure.  Their job as nonpartisan policymakers involves questioning and challenging every step of the policy-making process in order to find the best solutions.  That process, of course, can create tension with their supervising political appointees, who are under pressure from the President.  This has been most recently noticeable in the tension between the professionals at The Centers for Disease and Prevention (CDC) and the Trump-appointed director of the department, Robert Redfield, as he has had to walk a narrow line between CDC professional advice and the President’s needs.

As another example, supposedly objective reports about climate change have sometimes been “edited” before becoming available to the public.

It is appropriate for politically appointed senior staff to try to bring their advice in line with the president’s policy.  It is not appropriate to pressure career civil servants to give false or misleading opinions.  It is doubly inappropriate to threaten their job protections. 

The practical implication of this order for Trump’s (highly unlikely) second term would be frightening.  The President is clearly signaling his intention is to continuing to remove dissenting voices from his administration.  Like any tin-pot “democracy,” the United States’ government and citizens themselves would have less and less access to the truth behind government thinking and actions.  Some whistleblowers, for instance, could find their job at risk this executive orders unlikely to have much practical effect

It is true is that this executive order is unlikely to have much practical effect. The technical details of the order delay possible implementation until the day before the Inauguration, after which Biden would presumably reverse it.  It serves primarily as another example of how low our democracy has descended. 

To be clear, a Trump election victory seems highly unlikely now two days before the election, so the issues may seem irrelevant, but

1. Regardless of the election results, Donald Trump will still occupy his office for the two-and-one-half more months that he is still in office.
2. Many of Trump’s worst offenses are not specific orders or actions but offenses against the unwritten norms of American government.  In too many places, these offenses have seeped down into the political rungs below, for instance, the tendency to demonize political opponents.  (A joint ad by opposing Republican and Democrat candidates for Utah governor is a welcome relief and give us, in contrast, some idea of how far our norms have fallen.)
3. A norm is not a law.  It is not reversed with the stroke of a pen.  Norm-building takes years of decisions in the interest of the country rather than of the “other side.”  It also takes courage to make oneself vulnerable.  To the extent possible public needs to be educated about the importance of norms and reestablishing

After the election, even assuming Trump is defeated, it will important for us as citizens to recognize how far off course our country has deviated.  Reversing all of the changes that the President has wrought will be both extraordinarily difficult and absolutely essential.