The opening salvos in the modern war on Democracy, revived by the post Jim Crow oligarchs of our generation, were fired by Newt Gingrich at the end of the last millennium. Since then, they have fought as dirty as they could get away with, on as many fronts and platforms as they could successfully co-opt and control. They are perilously close to succeeding, but they are also facing existential threats as their corruption, perversion, and greed is exposed by the arrogance and recklessness of the orange monster they unleashed upon the world. My question is this: how do you plan to balance the need to do whatever is necessary to save the greatest political experiment in Western history from its imminent demise with the need to maintain it’s core principles in the process or risk becoming the very lawless, amoral, power addicted monster you are battling? Specifically, what honorable, yet effective actions and policies can you pursue that be both principled and effective when our adversaries are cheating? Recent examples of the kind of solutions I’m hoping you can offer invite California’s citizen approved temporary gerrymander, NJ’s threatened closure of the Delaney Hall concentration camp over non-compliance with health inspections, and the Montana Plan’s render Citizen’s United moot, so we don’t even have to fight it, by simply redefining what a corporation is to be what it was probably supposed to be, a purely economic fiction that had no political voice. I am far from alone in brief that it will require a lot more of this kind of creative, out-of-the-box thinking to counter the looming threats of election rigging, state-sponsored domestic terrorism, economic extortion, global political and environmental catastrophe. Now is no more the time for half measures than it is for moral, or ethical compromise. What can you propose that is strong enough to be effective at this critical moment, yet firmly grounded in Montana values?
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