My Fellow Americans!

I have little in common with millions of you. We like different drinks, root for different teams, watch different shows and vote differently. 325 million Americans, and our lives and choices almost never touch.

But we do one important thing together: we vote every two years for people to govern us from Washington. They make laws, conduct foreign negotiations and foreign wars, and enforce policies that affect all of us together, theoretically equally. So at this moment, I care about what all of you do.

I care about your votes, because I want the air I breathe and the water I drink to be safe. That seems like our most basic right. We know that we can’t just trust big corporations to put our health in front of their profits, so we need government to insure that they don’t dump dangerous chemicals into our environment. But the Environmental Protection Agency has now decided to ignore health hazards caused by the presence of the most toxic chemicals in the air, ground or water. For example, when the EPA analyzes the risks of the dry-cleaning solvent perchloroethylene, all it will test are hazards for those who directly handle it. The fact that that chemical occurs in drinking water in 44 states, because of unsafe disposal, will not be evaluated. This EPA decision is a direct result of the national vote in 2016.

I care about your votes, because I want our politicians to be good human beings, thoughtful, knowledgeable, honest people. Some of the candidates on the ballot in November will be nothing like that. Across the country, candidates with despicable views or despicable behavior have been getting hundreds of thousands of votes. In Alabama, Roy Moore, who refused to enforce our laws and had to be removed twice from the Alabama Supreme Court, and who is a despicable person besides, nearly won a US Senate seat. Twenty thousand people in Illinois’ 3^rd Congressional District voted in the primary for Arthur Jones, a neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier. Don Blankenship of West Virginia went to jail, because 29 men died in an explosion in one of his company’s mines in 2010, but he got 20% of primary votes. We don’t have to vote for the worst human beings.

I care about your votes, because I depend on professional media to inform me about the world, the same media that many politicians say represents “fake news”. Voting for them means moving our national politics even further away from facts to propaganda. While trust in the mass media has fallen somewhat over the past 20 years, some voters have basically given up entirely on the nation’s most professional sources of news: less than 14% of Republicans have a “fair amount” of trust in the mass media. How else can we decide who is the best candidate?

I care about your votes, because only government can solve some of our most pressing problems: widespread poverty, pollution, continuing discrimination against minorities and women. But government can’t solve our problems if Americans don’t vote for good candidates. If we are just left to individual action, if we have no counterweight to the self-interested decisions of giant corporations or of the richest, most powerful people, our communities will suffer.

But today less than one-third of Americans believe that government officials are credible. Among the 28 countries surveyed by Edelman for its Trust Barometer, the college-educated “informed public” in the US ranks last in trust of our institutions. Just one year ago, the US was among the international leaders in trust for our institutions, with 68% expressing trust; now it’s only 45%. Trust in our institutions dropped from 2017 to 2018 more than in any other country. Only we, the voters, can do something to reverse this trend. Only we can find and vote for trustworthy people who will create a trustworthy government.

It’s more complicated than just avoiding Nazis. We must seek out people who demonstrate compassion for all Americans, who exemplify honesty in their personal and public lives, who seek solutions to conflicts rather than fomenting them.

How do ordinary Americans change the direction of America? The Southern Baptist Convention just showed how: they elected a young pastor as president, who urged his brethren to repent their “failure to honor women and racial minorities”. The SBC is breaking its partisan support of the Republican Party. They will change our politics, because they were willing to change their minds.

My fellow Americans, it’s up to us. We can’t magically make our country healthy again in November, but we can reverse disastrous recent trends. We can make America great again, not by being an ugly neighbor, not by trashing other nations, not by just looking out for ourselves, but by electing great Americans and encouraging them to represent the best in us.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, June 19, 2018

Obama Spied on My Campaign!

“Obama Spied on My Campaign! Tried to Throw Election to Hillary!”

What a perfect story to excite all Republicans who are thinking about an election in five months. A Watergate for their side.

Trump pushes that story in capital letters. Three weeks ago, he announced, “SPYGATE could be one of the biggest political scandals in history!” Not just one spy, but a whole Criminal Deep State: “Look how things have turned around on the Criminal Deep State. They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and end up getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before!”

But it never happened.

The story revolves around a professor who was an FBI informant, had served in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations, and campaigned for George H.W. Bush. The real story depends on information we don’t know, locked up in official SECRET folders, so we can’t figure out what actually happened.

But Trump is the only one telling his treasonous story. Republicans who saw the folders say it’s baloney.

Trey Gowdy is chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, so he was one of the nine who witnessed the FBI presentation about the incident. He told Fox News, “I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got, and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump.”

Paul Ryan attended as Majority Leader:  “I think Chairman Gowdy’s initial assessment is accurate.”

Richard Burr, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was there, too: “I have no disagreement with the description Trey Gowdy gave.”

FOX News rejected Trump’s accusation. Host Shepard Smith spoke for the network: “The president calls it Spygate. Fox News can confirm it is not. Fox News knows of no evidence to support the president’s claim.” A Trump favorite on FOX, Andrew Napolitano, said Trump’s “outrageous accusation” was “baseless”.

If there was a shred of truth to Trump’s story of Democratic skullduggery, Republicans and their media allies would broadcast it from here to November.

Trump made no mistake. He has never stopped saying that our government is a Criminal Deep State.

He spent years asserting that Obama was an illegitimate President. He said the government knew in advance about the September 11 attacks, and hinted that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had been murdered. He said over and over again during his campaign that our elections were rigged. He tweeted three weeks before the election: “The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary - but also at many polling places - SAD”.

The story did not change after he won: at a rally a month later in Pensacola, he said four times that our system was rigged: “We have a sick system from the inside.”

After he lost the popular vote by the largest margin ever by an Electoral College winner, he made up “millions of people who voted illegally”. He was more specific in January 2017: 3 to 5 million illegal immigrants. He created a highly partisan Commision on Election Integrity” to show how flawed our voting is, which accomplished only one thing, to show there had been no fraud to find.

Trump has made American government his biggest target. Now he has a new story to show he was always right.

The majority of Americans reject Trump’s accusations about a dysfunctional and dishonest government, 56% to 33%. Supporters of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump and his campaign beat critics, 48%-44%. But Trump doesn’t care about facts or need a majority. He makes up stories for his avid supporters, that is, most Republican voters.

Trump has used the reservoir of distrust which exists in every democracy, and nurtured it, amplified it in service to himself. At a rally in Nashville two weeks ago, he asked the crowd to raise their hands if they were secretly FBI informants.

He took the next logical step on May 29: “The 13 Angry Democrats (plus people who worked 8 years for Obama) working on the rigged Russia Witch Hunt, will be MEDDLING with the mid-term elections, especially now that Republicans (stay tough!) are taking the lead in Polls.”

Nobody but Trump benefits from invented stories about how our democracy is a sham.

But so many conservatives are willing to believe the wildest lies about everything. 81% of Republicans labeled Mueller’s investigation not legitimate, a “witch hunt”. Two-thirds of Republicans accept Trump’s story about “Spygate”.

The believers say they are the best Americans: “we Trump supporters, which the left wing media calls The Deplorables, pay the bills that makes this country run. We are the backbone of the military, the bedrock of the economy, and we utterly reject the CNN, MSNBC, AKA extreme left partisan propaganda.”

No matter what happens in November, more people, urged on by Trump, will suspect the results.

When he finally leaves office, that may be his only significant accomplishment – to have convinced many Americans that our political system is corrupt.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, June 12, 2018

Why Vote Against Equal Rights For Women?

“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” That’s pretty simple and quite limited. Nothing about how we have to act in our personal lives. Just a clear statement that our governments cannot discriminate against women or men.

But it’s been controversial for a century, and still is not the law of our land. Most Republicans hate this idea.

This amendment to the US Constitution was just approved by the Illinois legislature. The Senate approved the measure 43-12. Then the House approved 72-45, making Illinois the 37th state to ratify the ERA.

Here’s how the voting went in the Senate: Democrats supported it unanimously, Republicans voted against it 12 to 8. In the House, 62 Democrats and 10 Republicans voted yes, 5 Democrats and 40 Republicans voted no. In committee hearings, Republicans were nearly unanimously opposed – one “yes” vote in the Senate Executive Committee, none in the House Human Services Committee.

Republicans opposed to the ERA talked about toilets in the 1970s, and talk about abortion today. Some Illinois Republican arguments against the ERA are lies, such as Rep. Peter Breen’s assertion: “The only alleged benefit ... that I’ve heard about ... is that it will expand taxpayer funding of abortions. They have no other thing they want to do.” Or the claim by the Illinois Family Institute that it’s about “eradicating sex as a legitimate characteristic on which to base reasonable distinctions.” Denial of equal rights is not “reasonable”.

Some Republicans can’t even imagine equality. Rep. Jeanne Ives doesn’t believe it’s possible: “The fact of the matter is that women will not be protected until men decide to protect them and decide to stop the sexual harassment decide to stop the domestic abuse, decide to stop the sex trafficking, decide in the work places when they are in charge that they will protect the women under their charge.” This is a very different view of how the state should treat gender. Men will decide when and if they wish to “protect” women who are “in their charge”.

Republicans were not forced to vote against the ERA to show Party loyalty. Rep. Steve Andersson said, “I’m glad that the common sense, the recognition that women deserve and are entitled to the same protections as men won the day. What we’re going to do is raise the level of all ships. Men, women, everyone does better because of this.”

I would not have known how my own representative to the Illinois Legislature, C.D. Davidsmeyer, voted on the ERA, so I did some internet research. Davidsmeyer’s home page explains in detail his objections to the budget bill that had just been passed. There’s another big story headlined, “Davidsmeyer’s Back Pay Legislation Passes House”. Some undeserved back-patting here: Davidsmeyer was one of about 50 co-sponsors, a follower, not a leader. Other items he thinks are important to communicate to his constituents: an announcement about Opportunity Zones in our district and a report of his photo-op with FFA students.

Not a word about the ERA. Davidsmeyer voted “no”.

The website of the Illinois General Assembly shows that the ERA bill was filed back in February 2017, passed the Illinois Senate this April, and the bill “Arrived in House” on April 11. Over the next couple of weeks, 41 members of the House signed on as co-sponsors. Davidsmeyer had plenty of time to think about his vote.

Republicans have not always made a special point to be hostile to women. From 1923 to 1990, there were more Republican than Democratic women in the Illinois House every term but 1957-1964. The number of Republican women has fallen since the 1990s, while the number of Democratic women has doubled, lately reaching 3 times the Republican total.

Why did Rep. Davidsmeyer decide to vote no?

He wasn’t yet born when discrimination against women became a national issue in the 1960s, or when the ERA was proposed, ratified quickly by 34 states, then stalled during the 1970s. His generation of men and women, which includes my children, has enjoyed more gender equality than any in American history. The reduction of inequality was a direct result of decades of struggle against the forces of “no”, and the ERA was central to that struggle. Every day we still see the traumas of inequality in the news, partly because the ERA is still not the law of the land. Is Davidsmeyer okay with that? Does he agree with Ives that “women will not be protected until men decide to protect them,” and he’s not going to be one of those men?

Does he think it’s okay when “Equality of rights under the law” are “denied or abridged by the United States or by any State”? Why is that the Illinois Republican consensus?

Doesn’t he have something to say about his vote on an amendment to the US Constitution? Why isn’t he saying it in public?

I think the whole issue makes him uncomfortable. His vote against treating women equally makes me uncomfortable.

Steve Hochstadt

Jacksonville IL

Published in the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, June 5, 2018