About once every four years I rub the bump on the back of my head after the bludgeoning by the GOP over the issue of States’ Rights. Their mantra of Democratic socialism and the redistribution of wealth is always followed by the fear of consolidation of government. Clinton was going to create a business model that would ruin private enterprise, was the Republican fear. Barack Obama was going to terminate states’ rights, redistribute wealth, and start with taking your guns away. The jump in private enterprise started when President Clinton presided over the biggest dot com boom in American history and privatization prospered to such a point that the country was left with a 280 billion dollar budget surplus. Enter George W. Bush who conceived the idea that redistribution to the wealthy was a good idea, and poof… bye—bye surplus.

We all remember Joe the “fake” Plumber confronting former President Barack Obama accusing him of redistributing wealth and taking away his dream of opening his own—plumbing business. By the way, gun sales were never better than under the Obama administration and we now have more guns than people in America.

Bill Clinton fixed George H.W. Bush’s mess and Barack Obama continued the assault on GOP trickle-down with clean up on aisle 43. Donald Trump, of course, is taking full credit for everything Obama did right and is using his fingers and toes to point at him when things go wrong. A few days ago Mr. Trump gave away his hole card, as no good poker player would ever do. If you look up the word Totalitarianism it means—a system of government that is centralized and dictatorial and requires complete subservience to the state; the root word is total. In what are obvious evening propaganda rallies orchestrated for tv for his supporters, flanked by the exasperated faces of experts, Donald Trump told the world that the American Constitution does not apply to him. He wrongly asserted he has “total authority” over the vaunted Republican construct of States’ Rights.

The Tenth Amendment says otherwise, according to Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley who famously excused the President’s behavior over the Ukrainian impeachment matter. Turley wrote, ‘… federalism, in which states are granted a large degree of autonomy, was one of the ways the framers sought to avoid authoritarianism. The other was to limit the possibility of “constitutional drift” – in which individual officials or branches of the federal government slowly expand their authority – by creating “clear structural limitations” on the powers of the federal government.’

Mr. Trump has abandoned the states when they complain of protective gear shortages, testing kit shortages and ventilator distribution, saying that the United States government is not a shipping clerk. “As with testing—the governors are supposed to be doing it,” he said. As is his pattern, pointing a finger to distract from his own failures, then stepping in to be the hero king when the hordes recede. That is not only a failure of leadership it is cowardice in the face of the enemy. He is destroying the intelligence apparatus and is on a Jihad to smear the press. We cannot wait and see if the Republicans draw the line at the Constitution.

Vote in 2020 for Change.