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The O. Zone: Biden bridged gap but it’s time for Harris to take on ‘America’s Hitler’
Joe must go.
I’ve fully evolved since the June 27 Debate Debacle from thinking President Joe Biden should stay in the race at this late date, given the passage of the primaries and campaign donations, to thinking the 81-year-old longtime denizen of the Senate needs to pass the baton to his veep.
Kamala Harris, also a former U.S. senator, as well as a hard-nosed California prosecutor, needs to be the nominee at age 59. She will be able to clearly outline for the voting public the many freedoms we have lost at the hands of former President Donald Trump, including reproductive choice and the ability to select our political leaders at the polls without election interference.
Biden admirably and soundly beat Trump in 2020, salvaged the economy from the death throes of COVID and, with the barest of margins in Congress, helped pass and sign into law transformative legislation on everything from climate change and healthcare (the Inflation Reduction Act) to domestic manufacturing (the CHIPS and Science Act) to revamping our decaying highways, pipelines and transmission lines (the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law).
Trump’s accomplishments in his four years in office are far less impressive: A massive corporate giveaway in the form of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which radically ballooned the deficit and led to record corporate profits, and three far-right Supreme Court justices who proceeded to shred 50 years of precedence in overturning Roe v. Wade, endangering the lives of millions of women.
Less infamously, the Trump-stacked Roberts’ Court has ruled to overturn decades of environmental law, from the Clean Water Act to the ability of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to safeguard our air and combat climate change. The Trump-aligned Project 2025 initiative, written by dozens of his former administration officials, will further erode basic civil rights and neuter government agencies charged with keeping corporate polluters in check.
Finally, and most reprehensively, Trump’s 6-3 conservative-majority SCOTUS crapped on the Constitution by ruling presidents are immune from prosecution for certain “official acts” while in the White House, meaning lower courts will now have to parse the Jan. 6 insurrection case to determine whether Trump was acting officially when he sent a mob of supporters to attack Congress and hang his own vice president for failing to throw out Biden’s lawful, fair election.
Harris will be able to clearly enunciate these many abuses of power and the need for swift and certain court reform to impose a code of ethics that prohibits the greed, graft and clear self-dealing of justices such as Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito; term limits to more fairly distribute the appointment of court members; and perhaps even three or more new justices.
She’ll also be able to clearly prosecute the case against Trump in the court of public opinion on issues such as immigration and abortion rights – demonstrating that Trump and his recent vice-presidential pick, J.D. Vance (replacing Mike Pence because he dared to uphold the Constitution) will do the bidding of the religious right and push hard for a national abortion ban. If Vance has his way – as with his home state of Ohio – it would contain no exceptions for rape and incest.
Biden is a diminished candidate, sadly buckling under the demands of time after four tough years in the White House, but Trump, at 78, is diminished, deranged and dangerous (deadly even if you count the lives lost on Jan. 6 and the thousands of unnecessary deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic as he spread misinformation about treatments and questioned vaccines).
And make absolutely no mistake, Trump will enact Project 2025, including its concentration camps for undocumented residents that will break up families, devastate our workforce and crush our economy.
Harris, a strong Black, Asian-American woman, will hammer Trump in the next debate on Sept. 10, clearly countering Trump’s lies in a way Biden is no longer capable of, and Trump’s ensuing apoplectic rage will send any uncertain unaffiliated voters into the Save Democracy camp.
I think Pete Buttigieg, a former mayor and U.S. Navy intelligence officer who served in Afghanistan and is now the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, would be an ideal running mate. The fact he’s a gay family man would equally enrage Trump and his misanthropic, homophobic, racist, right-wing followers.
Harris would surely have better answers than Biden did recently when asked about Democratic rhetoric targeting the authoritarian-wannabe Trump and whether it contributed to last weekend’s assassination attempt. Biden ineffectively hemmed and hawed instead of simply pointing out Trump’s many instances of fomenting violence, threatening to shoot protesters, bullying of critics and then mic dropping his clear and damning policy differences with Trump.
Biden wants to ban military-style assault weapons. Trump and his radical gun-rights backers want everyone to own an AR-15 so a good guy with a gun can stop the epidemic of school, church, parade, concert, mall, restaurant and bar shootings that have taken away our basic freedom of public assembly without fear of being gunned down.
The problem, of course, is that even when the good guys are the Secret Service protecting a presidential candidate exercising his First Amendment right to further radicalize and enrage his followers, they can’t stop a 20-year-old registered Republican from squeezing off a few rounds that wounded the former president and killed one of his supporters.
The only answer is dramatically reducing the number of assault weapons on our streets, raising the age for buying guns and making it much harder to obtain them through universal background checks, licensing procedures that are at least as difficult as earning the right to drive a vehicle (if not much more stringent) and opening up gun companies to punitive litigation.
The Trump assassination attempt perfectly underscores the many ways in which we’ve failed generation after generation to end a gun-violence epidemic that’s currently the leading cause of death for children and teens in America.
Now is the time to pivot to a Harris-Buttigieg ticket so that Americans can win in November and try to claw back some of the freedoms lost to Trump and his lapdog Supreme Court.
Otherwise, we may never be able to get Trump and his ilk out of the White House, forever locking in the legacy of a man Vance himself called “America’s Hitler”, among many other prescient and highly critical comments about his new boss before he was named bootlicker in chief.
Editor’s note: The O. Zone is a recurring opinion column by RealVail.com publisher David O. Williams.
David O. Williams
