President Trump likes to complain about “Fake News.”
So, here’s some very real news for him:
Republican control of Capitol Hill and the White House is based on a “fake majority.”
“A majority of the Senate now represents just 18 percent of the nation’s population,” David Wasserman, an editor for The Cook Political Report, wrote in a recent New York Times column.
He added that the crucial Senate seats this November would be “much whiter, more rural and pro-Trump than the nation as a whole. In effect, geography could again be Mr. Trump’s greatest protector: After all, the Senate — not the House — would have the final say on any impeachment proceedings,” Wasserman argued.
Think about this — America’s politics are being run by a cabal in the Senate that fails to represent 82 percent of the American people.
For starters, the 18 percent controlling the Senate have their own right-wing agenda beyond protecting an unpopular president.
They want a Supreme Court majority that reflects their views and not the views of the majority of the people.
To take control of the court they blocked President Obama — a Democrat twice elected with a majority of the popular vote as well as a majority of the electoral college — for close to a year from appointing a centrist judge to the high court.
Senate Republicans, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (Iowa), who will preside over this week’s hearings, refused to even give Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland a hearing, let alone an up or down vote.
And now having already replaced Garland and installed a solid conservative — Neil Gorsuch — the Senate Republicans, who represent fewer than 1-in-5 Americans, are about to force another conservative on the Supreme Court.
If they succeed in locking in another conservative, this time Judge Brett Kavanaugh, they will cement a conservative majority on the court for decades in an act that might be described as tyranny.
It is not just the Senate that is acting against the will of the majority.
Remember that both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh were nominated by a president who lost the popular vote by almost three million votes.
If Kavanaugh is confirmed, there is nothing stopping the 5-4 conservative majority on the Court from overturning Roe v. Wade and denying millions of American women the right to an abortion.
This despite the fact that only 29 percent of Americans want abortion to be illegal in all or most cases, according to a July Quinnipiac poll. The vast majority of Americans, 64 percent, want it legal in all or most cases.
Then there is the tyranny of Trump-led GOP efforts to cripple the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
With Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) death, there is nothing stopping the 18-percent-Senate-majority from passing their bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act and strip health care from millions of Americans — even though the latest Kaiser poll taken over the summer shows that 50 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the ACA compared to 41 percent who view it unfavorably.
A June Quinnipiac poll similarly found that 51 percent want the ACA to remain in place and 44 percent want it repealed. McCain famously killed the repeal effort because, for all their complaints, Republicans never came up with a better bill to help Americans with the high cost of healthcare.
Will the Arizona Republican who is appointed to fill his seat display the same courage?
Then there is the tyranny of GOP tax cuts.
The 18-percent-Senate-majority passed tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest one percent of Americans.
Forty-six percent of Americans disapprove of the Trump tax law, according to Quinnipiac polling.
An August Fox poll found that ObamaCare is now more popular than the Republican tax cuts. More than half of voters, 51 percent, favor ObamaCare compared to 40 percent who approved of the tax cuts.
That finding is bolstered by another poll, a CNBC survey from June, which found that 49 percent of working American adults — a plurality of all the people polled — said they do not have more take-home pay because of the law.
How about the president’s aggressive focus on border security?
Again, a majority in the Fox poll said they disapprove. Overall, 57 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump’s handling of immigration policy.
And when it comes to the Republican president’s handling of race relations, 58 percent in the Fox poll said they disapproved.
So, to recap: The lives of over 300 million Americans are being affected by policies foisted on them by a Senate “majority” that represents less than one-fifth of them and a president who was elected with three million fewer votes than his opponent.
Meanwhile, even as daily controversy, including federal convictions of his associates, surrounds Trump, the 18 percent represented by the GOP majority in the Senate protects the president from impeachment.
What is wrong with this picture?
Liberal comedian Bill Maher has long said that the Constitution is in need of a “page one rewrite.”
That’s funny, but the joke has a bite to it.
Trump has normalized many horrible things in our politics: racism, lying, scapegoating and corruption.
Future historians may look back and conclude one of the most corrosive things he normalized was minority-posing-as-majority tyranny that cheats the majority of the American people out of their democracy.
