If I had a baseball card it would say ‘Bats L Throws R’

I’m theoretically right-handed. I write with my right hand, type messages into my phone with my right hand and throw a ball with my right hand…but for almost everything else I do, I default to my port-side hand.

I suspect – but can’t prove – that my parents detected my left-handedness at birth and turned me around as an infant. (If they had known how much a mediocre left-handed pitcher could make in the Major League, they might have reconsidered that decision.)

Anyhow, I became a kind of hybrid, using my left hand to hold a phone, open a jar lid and eat with a fork, and my right hand to swing a tennis racket, paint a wall and operate tools. My guitars are strung for a right-handed person, which I always considered odd because the left hand does most of the work, and my drums were arranged for a right-handed person as well.

So that brings me to baseball.

When I was a little kid, the boys in my neighborhood played baseball on a small patch of grass in my friend’s side yard. There was no left field to speak of, just a garage a few feet behind third base, which meant that about once a week, someone would hit a ball over the bag and break out the window in the garage. The offender had to pay for repairs.

About the time my parents decided they didn’t like buying new glass for the garage window, it occurred to me that right field was a lot of green grass with no garages and no windows to break, so I got the brilliant idea to start batting left-handed. It was awkward at first, but if I did manage to hit the ball, it would find its way into that cool ocean of green. Eventually, I got pretty good at it.

When I started Little League, my dad informed me that I was right-handed and would therefore bat accordingly, so I did as he instructed. However, in my effort to be both productive as a hitter and look good doing it, I developed a “hitch” in my swing and became the pop-out king of the Fairmont Lions Baseball Club.

I didn’t play ball for several years after Little League, but in college I started playing slow-pitch softball. With nothing really to lose, I started batting left-handed again. Because I was naturally right-handed, batting lefty was uncomfortable at first, meaning I had to concentrate on my mechanics to produce a level, effective swing. When I did that, it was like a miracle. The “hitch” went away and I became a decent singles hitter, consistently hitting the ball over the second baseman’s head or, if I caught an inside pitch, sharply down the right field line.

I was still a skinny guy with no real muscles to speak of, so I was never going to hit home runs, but I did get a lot of hits and I was pretty fast, so I got on base a lot and could go from first to third on a single and score on a sacrifice fly. I played softball well into my 40s and might have played longer if I hadn’t been transferred out of town.

So when people asked me why I threw with my right hand but batted from the left side, I told them this story, which usually bored them to tears. I don't play softball any longer, but I'm still telling the story, which means I have probably bored you to tears as well. 

For so it goes.

Liberty without regulation is anarchy…and how do we legislate happiness?

A bakery in Buckhannon, West Virginia, made headlines this week when its owners openly defied an order from the governor requiring that masks be worn in indoor public spaces. The bakery’s two owners were relying on some non-specific “rights” they believe were granted to them by an unidentified god which empowered them to ignore the governor’s order and break the law.

In their statement issued to the public and the media, the owners said, “We still believe in freedom and our US Constitution and the rights guaranteed by our creator.”

Apparently, they are referring to the line in the Declaration of Independence (not the Constitution) which reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

And that has inspired me to offer two points of view.

Point #1: The Declaration of Independence is not a collection of laws. It is a collection of grievances against the King of England written to explain why the colonies in America had chosen to separate themselves from the motherland. In fact, the well-known statement above about unalienable rights is followed in the Declaration by these words: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”

In other words, “We’re waving goodbye to England now, and we’ll be back to write down our laws at a later date.”

That said, let’s re-read the Declaration of Independence and break down these so-called “rights” one at a time.

First, the right to life, in the context it was written, seems to expand on the idea that all men are created equal, and thus all men are “endowed by their creator” with an equal right to exist. That’s a nice thought for sure, but it was just a thought until it was codified years later in the Bill of Rights. It was never intended to mean that decades later, during a deadly pandemic in the 21^st Century, a business owner has the right to endanger the lives of countless other people by violating laws intended to protect them from harm.

Next comes the right to liberty. The signers of the Declaration were notifying the king that our citizens were “endowed by their creator” with the right to be free from the tyranny imposed on them by the monarchy of England. Again, who can argue with that? What it doesn’t say, however, is that in America, anything goes. The word “liberty” is defined in part as “the quality or state of being free; the power to do as one pleases; (and) the positive enjoyment of various social, political, or economic rights and privileges.”

But liberty without restraint leads to chaos. The “power to do as one pleases” without some form of regulation is pure anarchy. No matter how you read the Constitution, none of us has that right, and that is surely not what the framers had in mind. In no way does this statement apply to a defiant bakery shop owner who doesn’t like wearing a mask.

And finally, the right to pursue happiness is an ambiguous feel-good phrase that can’t be quantified as a matter of law. How does one even attempt to legislate happiness? By passing the Happiness Act of 2020? We all want to be happy, but when one person’s idea of happiness collides with another person’s conflicting idea of happiness, somebody has to yield.

So listen…if you read the documents that formed this country – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights – it’s clear that our laws are set forth in the Constitution and its subsequent amendments and not in our declaration of separation from England. And that brings me to Point #2: Nowhere in the Constitution is there a law endowing any rights by any creator to any citizen of the United States, and not one single word of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights was written by any god.

The Constitution was written 11 years after the Declaration of Independence and ratified two years after that. While the framers might have been inspired by the words “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” they didn’t write any laws to specifically address those “unalienable rights,” nor did they attribute any of their work to a creator of any kind. A word search of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights did not find the words “god,” “creator” or “unalienable rights” at all, and the sole reference to the word “religion” appears only in the First Amendment.

So my conclusion is this: If people believe they have a god-given right to walk into a Walmart or a supermarket or a bakery shop without a mask in defiance of a state mandate to do so, they are flat wrong. The Constitution, which they like to flaunt, doesn’t give them that right, and the Declaration of Independence, which does mention rights to freedom and such, was never put into an actual law.

Besides, it said my creator gave me the right to live, but what does that really mean? Do I have the right to live a life of crime? It said I had the right to freedom, but not the absolute freedom to murder, steal, set fires, drive 100 miles an hour or abuse children. It said I have the right to pursue happiness, but not if my happiness means violating the happiness of others. For those rights that are granted to us, we turn to the Constitution and other local laws and not a document full of grievances that merely said goodbye to English rule.

I have read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights more than once, and I guarantee that not one word of those laws was written by anybody’s god.

Things for Democrats to do starting on Day 1

Now that Joe Biden has been elected president and the party held onto majority control of the House of Representatives, attention turns to a pair of runoff elections in Georgia to fill two seats in the U.S. Senate. Should Democrats manage to win those seats, they will find themselves in control of two branches of the federal government.

If that happens, there will be a lot of pressure from the various factions inside the party to implement their specific agendas immediately. 

Far from being philosophically united, the Democratic Party is comprised of a few semi-conservatives and a fair number of centrists, plus leftists, far leftists, farther leftists and extreme leftists. There are the Clintonites, the Bernie Bros, AOC and her Gang of Three (known as The Squad) and the Elizabeth Warren policy wonks, just to name a few of the factions. All of them will have issues they want addressed by the president starting as soon as the inauguration speeches end.

But first things must come first.

Before an all-out effort is made to ram through Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, sensible gun control legislation, free college tuition, criminal justice reform, an end to systemic racism, an effort to slow global climate change and many other programs that liberals support, the president and Congress need to address the Number 1 priority – making sure the Republican Party can never steal another election and that nobody as unqualified, un-American, disengaged and mentally unstable as Donald Trump could ever be elected president again.

The first package of legislation – I’ll call it the Safeguard and Guarantee Our Free and Fair Elections Program – should include at least the following components:

* Restoring the parts of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court stripped away in 2013. The intent, clearly, was to suppress minority voting and to deny to people of color rights they had enjoyed since 1965.

* Eliminating burdensome voter ID laws that serve the same purpose, making it difficult for African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans to vote without the “proper” form of identification.

* Addressing the issue of gerrymandering that has tilted representation in favor of Republicans by creating voting districts that look like runaway Rorschach tests.

* Appropriating the funds necessary to investigate voter interference from foreign countries and making whatever security measures are necessary to prevent it from happening again. This would include identifying the guilty countries and assessing strong sanctions against them.

* Making it illegal for unauthorized “poll watchers” to be within one mile of any place of voting, which would include drop boxes, mail boxes, courthouses and precinct locations, and arresting violators on the spot, especially those carrying assault rifles and hand grenades.

* Making mail-in voting the standard for all citizens regardless of the status of Covid-19 and setting strict regulations to prevent voter fraud, even though very little fraud is ever proven. This would include restoring the Postal Service to its pre-DeJoy condition and appointing a Postmaster General who would make handling election mail the top priority for his or her employees.   

* And finally, introducing a Constitutional Amendment to abolish the Electoral College and assure that the winner of the popular vote is elected president. (I know this will be difficult if not impossible, but as an alternative, I propose legislation that would require all electors in all states to cast their votes for the candidate who received the most votes nationally and not just in their particular state. Otherwise, as it stands now, every vote cast for the winner of the popular vote is nullified if the voter chooses the losing candidate in his or her state.)

The second round of priorities would include legislation to require all candidates for president to undergo a thorough psychiatric examination by at least three independent psychiatrists, provide tax returns for at least the last 20 years and be able to pass the same basic citizenship test given to immigrants who apply to become Americans. (They might also be required to watch the Schoolhouse Rock video of “How a Bill Becomes a Law.) Never again should we be governed by a man or woman who lacks even a rudimentary understanding of how the country works.  

Round 3 would be a package of bills to (1) eliminate any roadblock to indicting a sitting president who commits one or more crimes, (2) limit the president’s pardon power and (3) strengthen the Emoluments Clause to prevent a president from using the office as a profit center and a mechanism to “promote his brand.” Throw in some anti-nepotism requirements as well, and the stipulation that no relative, friend or donor can serve in the White House if they couldn’t pass the security clearance required to become a dishwasher in the Capitol cafeteria.

And Round 4 would include two major bills. One would change Senate rules to require a vote of 60% (or better yet, two-thirds) to confirm a Supreme Court justice who is going to serve a lifetime appointment on the nation’s highest court. I mean, c’mon, any job guaranteed for life that has a profound impact on the lives of so many everyday citizens demands stronger, bi-partisan support than a simple majority of the particular party in power. The second bill would seek to overturn Citizens United and bring campaign finance rules under control.

I could go on and cite a whole long list of examples where Republicans have cheated to win elections, but here are just a few off the top of my head:

* Texas Governor Greg Abbott launched a plan to suppress voting by limiting each county to a single drop-box for mail-in ballots, regardless of the size or population. This applied the same regulation to the smallest rural county as it did to Harris County, where Houston is located, with a population of 4,767,540.

* In California, the Republican Party admitted to placing 50 bogus drop boxes for mail-in ballots in various targeted locations, an obvious act that could lead to voter fraud. They wanted to place 100 but got stopped before they could finish.

* In Georgia in 2018, Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the state’s top elections official — while still serving in that office — allegedly manipulated ballots and suppressed voting to make himself the governor, effectively stealing the election from the more popular candidate, Stacy Abrams, by a margin of 50% to 49%.

* Nationally, Senate Republicans blocked an effort by Democrats to unanimously pass three election security-related bills that would require campaigns to alert the FBI and Federal Election Commission about foreign offers of assistance, as well as legislation to provide more election funding and ban voting machines from being connected to the internet. And don’t even get me started on all of the other bills that would have addressed election issues that have been blocked by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Please don’t get me wrong. I wholeheartedly support Medicare for All, sensible gun laws, college tuition assistance, criminal justice reform, combatting global climate change and many other programs that liberal politicians support. (As for systemic racism, I’m not sure we can ever end that, but we should certainly give it our best shot.) The thing is, the Democrats’ majority in the Senate would be as tenuous as it gets, meaning they may only have two years in which they control the White House and both houses of Congress, so their first priority has to be making sure Democracy is restored and the power of the Republican party to chip away chunks of it is diminished as much as possible if not eliminated altogether.

Then, once power has been restored to the people who actually care about America, the party can begin to address those other issues that liberals support…and they can do it knowing that the voters are behind them and want to be given back the government they deserve.