One year after Jan. 6, your vote matters more than ever

One year after the traitorous assault on the U.S. Capitol, it’s become clear that the deadly attack and the Republican Party machinations before and after it have brought our nation to the brink of disaster.

The good news is that we, as Americans, have a solution to this madness if we are watchful and resolved enough to implement it: We must vote later this year, and again in 2024, for candidates who are committed to protecting our democracy, our Constitution and our rule of law. Nothing less will do if we are to save this 246-year-old land we call our home.

This is not hyperbole, but an observation rooted in cold, hard fact. Even as the average American family is preoccupied with the latest COVID-19 variant, Republican officials across America are busy putting the people and the procedures in place to decide who will count the votes in 2024 to elect our next president.

If they are successful, it will be the greatest con job in American history, with our system of selfgovernment and our Constitution stolen and gone forever. This is why it’s so important to vote this year and again in 2024.

In a shocking new story by the Associated Press titled “Slow-motion insurrection: How GOP seizes election power,” the Republican Party plan is laid bare: The Jan. 6, 2021, coup failed in part because of the courage of some state- and local-level Republican officials who refused to bow to Donald Trump’s demands to fix the election in his favor. The 2022 Republican solution? Fire those troublesome election officials and replace them with political toadies willing to do anything to put Republicans back in power.

It’s happening now in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. Over the past year, 16 Republican governors have signed laws making it more difficult to vote. Steve Levitsky, co-author of the book “How Democracies Die,” tells the Associated Press, “It’s not clear that the Republican Party is willing to accept defeat anymore. The party itself has become an anti-democratic force.”

Now, you might be asking yourself, who would fall for such an obvious con job? Is my vote really that important?

The results of a new Washington Post-University of Maryland poll might shock you back into the realty of our post-Jan. 6, 2021, America. Seven in 10 Americans say President Biden was legitimately elected — but among Republicans in a Post-ABC poll in 2020, it was just the opposite: 70 percent said Biden wasn’t legitimately elected.

The poll also found that a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, 90 percent of Americans expressed pride in American democracy. As of last week, that number is just 54 percent. Perhaps even more troubling — if that’s possible —the percentage of Americans who say “violent action against the government is justified” is now at 34 percent, the highest it’s been in two decades.

This is all part of the poisonous political fallout of Jan. 6, 2021, and the ongoing con job that the Republican Party is inflicting on the American public.

The traitors who assaulted the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 aren’t like you and me, no matter how much they claim to be “patriots” or care about “democracy.” They include fans of the Southern Confederacy, racists, anti-Semites, white supremacists, militia members and more. While most Americans worry about their jobs, the economy and the health of their families, this mob of 2,000 Trump supporters — and the tens of millions more back in the states — want just one thing: to overturn the will of the American voter and install an autocratic Trump government, a self-ruling, despotic government in which the power rests in one man, not the people.

More than 200 years ago, our Founding Fathers decided America would be governed by the rule of law, a guiding principle under which all persons, institutions and entities are accountable to laws that are publicly made, equally enforced and independently adjudicated. It’s that America that is now under attack, one year after the attack on our nation’s Capitol.

So I am asking you today that, whether or not you voted for President Joe Biden, whether you believe he’s responsible for some particular issue or whether it’s a still-unresolved matter from the previous administration, it’s paramount that we as Americans vote this year and again in 2024 for candidates who will solemnly pledge to uphold our democracy, our American system of government and our rule of law. Because to do anything less is to capitulate to extremism and to ensure the death of our beloved nation.