Vote Harris

I am not under any illusion that this will change any minds, but it seems worth saying. If you have not voted, you should vote, and you should vote for Kamala Harris to be President.

She’s Good Actually

First of all, you should vote for her because she seems like she’ll be a good President. Her campaign, put together in short order, has been well run. She is not Joe Biden, but she looks to be inclined to govern in a similar fashion as Biden. And he has been, in my opinion, the most capable President in the last 60 years. He pushed and passed two enormous, generational pieces of legislation: the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act along with some other significant legislation like CHIPS & Science and Bipartisan Infrastructure. His administration engineered a soft landing to the economy instead of what financial experts like Bloomberg and others insisted would definitely be a recession. Post-COVID inflation hit other countries harder and looks like it has been tamed. He united the world in opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Biden administration has been the most pro-labor since LBJ and it has given teeth to Consumer Protection and anti-trust for the first time in a long time.

I also happen to be a supporter of reproductive rights which are a major campaign issue. Harris supports leaving those rights in the hands of individuals where they have been recognized for 50 years. The pro-Trump narrative is that these rights have been “returned to the states.” But this is a bullshit framing. Trump’s Supreme Court Justices stripped those rights away from individuals and placed them in the hands of state legislators. He and his supporters will go a step further and put such rights even further away from individuals, into the hands of federal government with a Congressional ban.

Also, even if you don’t like Democratic policies, she will be a normal Democrat doing normal Democrat things and will leave when she loses an election or terms out. Leaving when it was time to go used to be something we took for granted in our major party candidates, but not anymore. It is perhaps the most important commitment we require of an office holder. That leads me to:

Trump is Really Bad

Trump tried to overthrow our government when he lost the 2020 election. That is disqualifying. Period. It’s so bad that the Constitution prohibits such a person from holding federal office. Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment says that no person may hold federal office if, having previously taken an oath to support the Constitution, has engaged in insurrection against the same. He plotted and arranged a violent attempt to prevent the elected President from taking office so that he could retain power.

That’s the part that makes voting against him a simple matter of preserving our Republic. But also, there is all the other stuff. I’ll quote David Frum who, in the course of suggesting that whatever the next horrible thing Trump did would not change the election dynamic asked sardonically:

“Do you think somebody possibly has video of Trump mocking the handicapped, demeaning US prisoners of war, boasting about sexually assaulting women, praising Vladimir Putin, or urging a violent attack on the US Capitol? That would be huge.

Confessing that he spied on underage girls undressing? Promising to release his tax returns, but never doing it? Reminiscing fondly about his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein? Publicly fantasizing about “dating” his own daughter? Imagine if there were video of any of that.

Belittling the mother of a soldier who died in combat for the United States? Congratulating himself that for years he paid no income taxes to the United States? Exulting over swapping “love letters” with the dictator of North Korea? What if any of that was available to view?

Can you imagine if he denied the US citizenship of the first black president? Denounced an Indiana-born judge as untrustworthy because he was “Mexican”? Told a Jewish audience that they were uniquely shrewd with money and loyal only to Israel? What if that were on record?

What if Trump were proven to have paid hush money to a porn star – or to cheating people who enrolled in his scam university – or to defrauding banks who lent money to his company – or were fined half a billion dollars for a rip-off multilevel marketing scheme? Bombshells?

What if Trump raped a woman and then lied about it until he was hit with almost $90 million in damages? What if he stole ultra-secret government documents and shared them with foreign nationals? What if he offered the judge in that 2nd case an appointment as attorney general?”

And that’s not nearly all of it. But it all makes voting against him easy and the right thing to do.

Immigration

The boogeyman that Trump and Trump supporters seem to be rallying around to justify voting for him is that illegal immigration is out of control. With the recent Puerto Rico and Haitians-(here legally)-eating-dogs discourse, we saw that the illegal part of “illegal immigration” is just a fig leaf. The real objection is to people who aren’t Real Americans ™. What constitutes a Real American varies from Trump-supporter to Trump-supporter. Brown people seem to dominate the not-a-real-American landscape. But, one gets the sense that Democrats are also not Real Americans. In any event, when it comes to immigration, Trump torched a bipartisan immigration bill that would have addressed many of the problems. But he and his supporters don’t really want to fix problems, they want a scapegoat.

Even taking the immigration issue at face value, it’s a close question whether immigrants take more than they receive in terms of tax dollars. Even if they get fake social security numbers, like as not, they’ll have taxes withheld and not claim a refund. Not to mention sales tax. But even if you contend that the scales are tipped in favor of government services received versus taxes paid by immigrants who are in the country illegally, you can’t credibly say it’s a fiscal issue for you if you then support Trump’s “mass deportation” rhetoric because that will be hideously expensive to implement. And that’s before you get to the inevitable human rights abuses and due process violations.

Third Party Voting

Like it or not, voting for President is a binary choice. A third party will not win. In a binary system, voting for a third party or not voting is acquiescing to the greater evil. If you think the two major party candidates are equally good or equally bad, it doesn’t really matter — it’s fine to leave it up to people who have an opinion on the two because it makes no difference to you which of them is elected. In the more likely event that you believe one of the two is worse than the other and, in a perfect world, you would like some third party candidate. But we don’t live in a perfect world. That does not absolve us of a moral responsibility to act in a way that helps protect our friends and neighbors from the lesser evil.