No Loss for Words

Now that the Mueller report has been submitted, what is the next step?  I guess it depends upon what Mueller was actually investigating.

I think we have reasonable agreement that foreign governments or their surrogates have used technology to influence American elections to some degree for several years.  The Mueller investigation was predicated on there being a relationship between Donald Trump and Russian efforts to interfere.

Keep in mind that our government has known about Russian efforts and those of several other countries to interfere in one way or another for years.  President Obama knew about them and yet he still minimized the actual impact on any election we could point to. He never instructed his Attorney General to investigate Russian meddling; probably because he knew Hillary Clinton was actually in bed with the Russians. That should be incorporated into the discussion.  Foreign interference in our elections was never identified as a significant threat to our country before Donald Trump came on the scene.

What we learned in the course of the nearly two-year investigation was that people associated with Donald Trump misled investigators.  Some like Mike Flynn and Paul Manafort might spend years in prison for their lack of candor.  The important conclusion we should arrive at is Trump and his team didn’t interact with Russia inappropriately.

My personal view is that Mike Flynn was targeted because he was a strong advocate for American security evidenced by his dismissal from the Obama Administration for his criticism of the administration’s incompetence. Flynn was a target of the Obama holdovers in the DOJ and FBI from the time he signed on with Trump.  At that time, there was discussion about how Flynn knew where the bodies were buried in the Obama Administration because of his very high position.  His relationship with Trump represented a threat to exposure of evidence that Obama Administration officials were involved in criminal activities, even up to treason.  It was absolutely a priority to discredit Mike Flynn and hopefully silence him.  Surprise, Surprise, Mike Flynn was snuffed.

The good news now is that we might get to see the evidence they tried mightily to keep in the dark.  After two years of this torture there are indications that the new Attorney General might be shifting the attention of the DOJ over to investigating the real crimes committed going back as far as 2014.

We learned that in the pursuit of Paul Manafort that timeliness of the crime is not important.  He is going to jail for crimes he committed years before Trump ever heard of him.  Members of Congress and TV pundits were clear that allegations of criminal acts warrant investigation and if there is actual evidence, prosecution should follow.  Prosecutors squeezed Manafort mightily and they came up with old crimes that would ruin his life moving forward, but they didn’t get a thing implicating Trump in anything dirty.

The lesson is that allegations of crimes by government officials regardless of their timeline or intent are worthy of investigation and if there is evidence of crimes then prosecution is required.  Paul Manafort will most likely spend the remainder of his life in prison for minor crimes so I don’t think it’s improper to demand that every one of the folks at the Department of Justice and FBI who conspired to take down a President (regardless of their suspicions about Trump) are pursued and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

We cannot sweep this under a rug and hope it goes away.  Crimes against our country demand investigation.  Covering up crimes against our country demand investigation.  Conspiring to undermine an election demand investigation.  Destroying evidence of Espionage and National Security crimes demand investigation.  Obstructing justice by anyone in the government or by anyone in a political campaign to prevent exposure of criminal acts by others demands investigation.

The model for the Department of Justice moving forward needs to reflect the aggression and zeal of the Trump-Russia Special Counsel investigation.  We are entitled to justice but more importantly, we need justice to restore the integrity of our institutions.

Attorney General Barr needs to get on with the process.  The time clock is running.  A Presidential election could squelch an ongoing investigation in 2020.  Start with the evidence we all are aware of and work your way up.  Shake the tree.  If you can squeeze lower level rats to sing, we can work our way to the divas at the top of the pyramid.  Let the evidence lead us to the criminals.

As a lifelong resident of Washington state, I can tell you that this is God’s country.  Where else in the country can you find the diversity of almost everything you find in the northwest corner of the lower 48.  The climate in our state varies from rain forest on the peninsula to desert on the east side.  The Pacific Ocean on the coast and the Cascade Mountains a hundred miles inland.  High tech and manufacturing on the west side and farming and ranching on the east side.  Big cities with high population and traffic congestion on the west side and wide-open range with small town USA stretching from north to south to the east.  The contrasts that exist in our state can be breathtaking.  Breathtaking in one way in particular; the concentration of power not just on the west side, in the greater Seattle/King County area.

As the high tech and manufacturing companies have boomed in King County, the population has exploded accordingly.  From an economic standpoint the region is thriving but along with the boon come the trickle-down impacts that aren’t always kind to all socio-economic segments of the population.  Property values and rents have sky-rocketed as the demand outpaced the addition of new housing options.  For the new tech workers, it established a new norm.  For the lower income base, it created a crisis in housing.  Poorer people were either forced to move further out to the suburbs or they became homeless, living in tents and cardboard boxes throughout the urban landscape.

If you look at the state from the legislative standpoint the level of diversity is evident.  Corresponding to the growth of high tech in the Puget Sound region, the way voters have selected their representatives has changed dramatically.  Almost all of the central Puget Sound area now sends Democrats to the legislature where there previously was a balance.  The net result is that the makeup of the legislature is dominated by Democrats and by extension, they control the agenda and the focus of state resources.

Parts of the state feel helpless as King County Democrats determine their fate.  They have representatives in the legislature, but their influence is marginalized by their chronic minority status.  As much as they appeal for a voice and a fair share, they are reminded that there are consequences of elections.

From a political point of view, the state of Washington is less diverse than we have ever been for many decades.  For the residents of the suburban counties and rural counties there is little chance to have a meaningful voice because the population and concentration of Democrats in the urban counties is so dominant.  One county has so many Democrat votes it controls the whole state.  That’s the reality in Washington state today.

This scenario is played out is other states as well.  As the population centers have grown, their political power has increased proportionally to the point where the states of Oregon and California to our south are also dominated by Democrats in limited geographic concentrations.  The balance of power has sharply shifted to the left because of the concentration of Democrat voters in the urban areas.

The conclusion I came to is that concentrating all the power in one location isn’t healthy for our whole state as it isn’t for our neighbors either.

Now, when you think about why our founding fathers adopted the Electoral College to elect our president you will see that in order to equalize the states with much higher populations with the smaller states with fewer residents the big states were only granted so many electors based upon their representation in Congress.  The founders knew that New York could determine the fate of the country because of their population disparity with their smaller neighbors if only the popular vote was used.  The founders knew that in order that every state could participate in the presidential election process, they needed to shift influence to smaller states by guaranteeing that their votes counted.

The founders recognized that the nation needed the benefits of both the rural and urban economies but if the power was only allocated by population, the control would accrue in the urban.

If the presidential election process abandons the Electoral College, the voters in five or six cities will have enough votes to call all of the shots and our votes will matter as much as those in Okanogan County in our state legislature.