Before 49.8% of the voters handed our country to the Trump/Project 2025 regime, some people were saying they didn’t like Donald Trump but liked his policies.
And if you only heard what you wanted to, some of his ideas sounded fine. We all want lower prices, and nobody wants violent criminals coming to our country.
But once Trump and his Project 2025ers took control, GOP members of Congress realized how awful their agenda is. So awful, in fact, that just six weeks after Inauguration Day, House Speaker Mike Johnson advised against holding town halls.
That was about a year ago, when Elon Musk’s Department of Government “Efficiency” was busy decimating the government but before all this:
* Defense/War Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Signalgate debacle
* Cost increases from “Liberation Day” tariffs
* Stonewalling on the Epstein files
* ICE’s shopping spree for more concentration camp sites
* The destruction of the White House’s East Wing
* Military deployments to U.S. cities
* Attacks in the Caribbean and on Venezuela
* The groundless and ever-widening Middle East war
Decent public officials who think before they act and who put the nation’s best interests ahead of their own would have prevented disasters like those or would have resigned if they inadvertently caused one.
Not this money-grubbing, power-mad regime, which has managed to intimidate nearly all GOP members of Congress. To keep them groveling and obedient, it’s following its party’s playbook.
As Pennsylvania’s Democratic House Speaker Joanna McClinton once put it: “When they don’t win, they want to rewrite the rules or throw out the vote.”
Trump was trying to justify such efforts with false claims of widespread voter fraud even before he lost to Joe Biden in 2020. Now he doesn’t even bother to hide his self-serving motives.
Like a child throwing a tantrum, he’s refused to sign any bill that senators pass until they vote to “guarantee the midterms” by approving the SAVE America (from voters against the Trump/Project 2025 regime) Act.
The goal is to place more obstacles to registering to vote and casting a ballot.
Whether you’re a new voter or have moved, you wouldn’t be able to register without showing a government-issued photo ID along with a birth certificate, passport or other proof of citizenship, none of which everyone has or can easily obtain.
And although the GOP pushes marriage, a woman who takes her husband’s last name would face more hurdles.
When I moved back to Pennsylvania and needed a driver’s license, I had to show PennDOT an official birth certificate (the one the hospital gave my mother wouldn’t do), as well as the certificates of my first marriage, divorce and second marriage.
Later I did it all over again to get a REAL ID license, but even that wouldn’t be enough under the “SAVE” Act because it doesn’t show my citizenship status.
I never expected to vote by mail, even after Pennsylvania’s GOP Legislature decided in 2019 that any registered voter could. But now I do.
Besides skipping lines at the polls, I found that I make more informed decisions when I fill out a ballot at home. So I can’t help wondering if that’s one reason Trump commanded the Senate to amend the House-passed version of the “SAVE” Act to end voting by mail except for people who are serving in the military, traveling, ill or disabled.
GOP senators may or may not overcome a Democratic filibuster, but the “SAVE” Act isn’t the regime’s only weapon against voters.
Last year Trump started a gerrymandering war by ordering red states to rejig their congressional districts – which they’d approved less than four years earlier – to create more safe GOP seats. He’s even talked about “nationalizing” elections, and BFF Steve Bannon has called for stationing ICE at polling places.
And because Georgia officials, including Republicans, refused in 2020 to “find” 11,780 votes that would have won the state for Trump, his regime seized ballots on Jan. 28 from Fulton County, which includes Atlanta and happens to be heavily Democratic.
“Fulton County may be the test case, but it must not become the template,” county Commissioner Mo Ivory wrote in an op-ed for The Hill. “What happens here will influence whether local democracy across the United States remains resilient or becomes vulnerable to partisan control.”
Even if this regime doesn’t prevail, we must remember not only what it did but what it’s trying to do – and to make every one of its congressional accomplices pay in November.
Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.
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