Let’s make America good again; let’s begin the National Restoration. It’s time to restore the forces of goodness, decency and democracy. It’s a tall order, but it can happen if we all work hard together to make it so.
Let’s restore the checks and balances that help maintain a distribution of power among the three branches of government – executive, legislative, judicial. Founding Father James Madison’s checks-and-balances concept is the crucial safeguard against the lopsided misuse of power, against the tentacles of tyranny.
Let’s restore policies and enact iron-clad laws to limit presidential power. The dangerous drift toward an “Imperial Presidency” must be stopped because we have seen all too well how the autocratic, reckless exercise of power can veer alarmingly close to tyranny.
Let’s restore every word, comma and period of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was unwisely weakened by a U.S. Supreme Court decision seven years ago.
Let’s further restore election confidence by illegalizing voter-suppression schemes, which have increased drastically in recent years. They include consolidating polling places or moving them to far-flung places, limiting early-voting days and placing hurdles in the way of voters trying to register. Those partisan schemes were and are aimed at limiting voting among targeted demographic groups – mainly Blacks.
Let’s restore and/or create national standards for all elections. Wobbly variations of voting processes not only cause intolerable situations such as people having to stand in line all day to vote, but they also undermine the cherished right that every voter, every vote should count. Local jurisdictions would still conduct their own elections, but they would have to adhere to uniform standards.
Let’s restore and strengthen the concept of one person-one vote by abolishing the cockeyed electoral-college system. Yes, it’s in the U.S. Constitution, but it’s one of those ideas whose time has come – to go!
Let’s restore the integrity of voting by abolishing the practice of gerrymandering – the skewed partisan re-drawing of U.S. House legislative boundary lines every 10 years based on U.S. Census results. Let’s end it. Instead, bipartisan or nonpartisan committees working with precise, objective computer data should determine the boundaries.
Let’s further restore election confidence by forming a permanent federal agency to root out and to combat efforts by foreign countries to meddle in democratic processes. That insidious cyber war can undermine our trust in the voting process and faith in our democracy.
Let’s restore, tighten and enforce campaign-finance laws so corporations and the wealthiest cannot dictate, through their congressional puppets, the direction and circumstances of everybody’s daily lives.
Let’s restore confidence in our institutions, forbidding the politicizing or weaponizing of them. We have seen with creeping dread how they can be manipulated by the impulsive whims of corrupt movers and shakers.
Let’s restore all laws and regulations that protect our environment, and let’s rejoin the Paris Climate Accords so all countries can work together fast and furious to slow and stop apocalyptic climate change.
Let’s restore our mutual alliances with friendly countries.
Let’s restore detailed plans for comprehensive immigration reform and reunite children who were viciously snatched from parents at the U.S.-Mexican border. And fully reinstate the “Dreamers” Act.
Let’s restore adherence to facts, evidence, truths and science while rejecting lunatic conspiracy theories and bloated lies that proliferate on social media.
With renewed commitment, let’s restore five decades of civil-rights laws so they truly do, in fact, make possible equal opportunities for Blacks, who should not have to live in fear of hate crimes and white supremacists.
Finally, let’s fully restore the Affordable Care Act and work hard to make it much better and more efficient for one and all.
If we Americans, through visionary leaders and our legislators (the ones who are true public servants), insist upon those restorations/reforms, we can help restore national unity and a renewed trust in our institutions so that ours will become a life-enhancing nation for all of us. And then, at long last, America will be restored as a major leader of the Free World.
