I recently commented to a friend, “Enough is enough, this administration has gone too far,” to which they asked, “When did it cross the line.”
It was a good question.
Where is the line and what can we do as individuals when it gets crossed.
While polls indicate somewhere between 34% and 43% of the population approve of the President’s actions, and his approval ratings continue to drop, it’s not lost on me that three or four out of 10 people reading this will see what I write as patently absurd.
I welcome any rebuttal from that group in these pages.
The current brouhaha over green algae in the reflecting pool should be a minor issue, despite the poor sowing it will make of the pool on the country’s 250th Independence Day celebration.
This President, however, has accused anonymous saboteurs of damaging the pool’s new painted blue lining and arresting curious passersby who’d knelt by the pool, examining loosened pieces of that blue lining.
National Guard soldiers now patrol the edges of the pool to prevent any mischief.
Meanwhile, we learned that the President’s motorcade with him in his personal limousine, “The Beast,” estimated to weigh between 15,000 and 20,000 pounds, drove through the drained pool during the President’s inspection tour of it on May 7.
This isn’t the first time I’ve noted the irony of this administration’s President, cabinet staff and others pointing to outside their coterie of conspirators when the most likely source of an issue is themselves.
That’s not the real issue today. The real issue is that innocent people are being detained for something they could not have been a part of. That is the definition of an oppressive authoritarian regime, using the state’s authority to exercise rigid, repressive control.
Yesterday, a federal judge blocked the U.S. Justice Department’s Grand Jury subpoenas of the Minnesota Governor and legislators, calling it unlawful and unethical, in invoking the Constitutional principle of Federalism. The principle, which reserves to the states powers not explicitly given to the federal government in the U.S. Constitution, allows protection of the state’s residents from egregious federal immigration overreach.
The judge’s ruling effectively called it harassment, just as arresting, Washington D.C.’s
reflecting pool tourists, or call them gawkers if you wish (but neither is illegal in an open public area under any law most of us are aware of).
Each day brings further excess that the majority seems unable to restrict or thwart, given the federal government’s penchant for ignoring long-time conventions and legal sanctions.
We are obviously on a path to more of it if the past year and a half are any indication.
We can’t keep letting the line beyond which we’ll not accept the administration’s overreach; it needs to be drawn on January 6, 2021, and stay there.
There are hundreds of egregious examples of missteps, including drawing us into a useless war in Iran that’s caused pain for much of the world and offered little in the way of benefit to anyone, including the U.S. and Israeli Presidents who seem to have masterminded it, but now suffer from dropping support at home.
How can we each bring our creativity to bear on developing the critical mass to block further attempts to restrict our Constitutional freedoms?
I wish I had the answer, but I stand ready to listen to other’s suggestions for action.
July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding, is not a day to celebrate loss of freedoms, but to draw and maintain the line where it belongs.
Enough is enough.
Paul Fixx, editor
Paul Fixx is editor of The Hardwick Gazette and lives in Hardwick.
