Does our federal government deserves our trust? In search of my own answer I asked myself the following six questions:
1. If our government tried to sell you a used car based on trust in the salesperson, would you buy it?
2. Does the structure of our federal government allow the will of the majority to prevail? Our presidential elections are decided by the Electoral College which does not necessarily reflect the overall popular vote. There are two senators from each state irrespective of the population of that state. Vermont has as many senators as California. Congressional districts can be gerrymandered every ten years if one party controls both the governor’s mansion and both houses of the state legislature. An analysis by Reuters concluded that only 43 of the 435 House seats up for election every two years are competitive.
3.Are elections fair? The 2000 presidential election was ultimately decided by a 5-4 decision of our Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore that stopped votes from being counted in Florida. The Court did not explain its decision. The fact that the Republican governor of Florida was the brother of the Republican presidential candidate may have had some impact on how and how quickly the votes were counted.
More recently, former President Trump stated that the 2020 presidential election was rigged unless he won it. Current President Joe Biden has declared that the 2022 congressional elections would not be legitimate unless his voting rights legislation passed : “The prospect of being illegitimate is in direct proportion to us not being able to get these reforms passed,” he said.
Can you trust the party in the White House if the president declares in advance that an election is illegitimate unless his party wins it?
4.Is the Supreme Court apolitical? John Marshall served as Chief Justice of our Supreme Court from 1801-1835 He said that justices should wear black robes because justice is blind. However, according to an ABC/Ipsos poll, a plurality ( 43%) of Americans believe that the Court decides cases “on the basis of their partisan political views” versus 38% who believe that cases are decided “on the basis of law”. Chief Justice John Roberts, a Republican appointee, said his job is to “call balls and strikes and not to bat”. However, Justice Sonia Sotomayor , a Democratic appointee, later quipped, that “different umpires have different strike zones.”
Two other points are worth noting: First, the Court does not look like the United States, to borrow a liberal expression. There are 203 American Bar Association -approved law schools in the US. Eight of the nine current justices graduated from just two of them, Harvard and Yale. Protestants , 49% of our population, are disproportionately underrepresented on the Court. Only Justice Gorsuch attends a Protestant church. Of the remaining eight Justices, six are Catholic and two are Jewish.
Second, then president Donald Trump nominated two of the current Supreme Court justices under the most outrageous of circumstances.
5. Are presidents honest? At the very least America’s war in Viet Nam and the invasion of Iraq were based on lies told by the President of the United States at that time.
Many readers are familiar with the Washington Post’s Pinocchio awards for false or misleading statements: Donald Trump holds the all time record , having made a total of 30,573 of false or misleading claims.
President Barack told some whoppers of his own. Many times he said of his landmark Affordable Care Act: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it”. Four million Americans received cancellation notices after the ACA passed. For this Obama was awarded the Lie of the Year Award by Politifact. The WP awarded President Biden 78 false or misleading statements in his first 100 days. CNN reported many more in Biden’s first year.
6.Should you trust information you receive from important regulatory agencies? Last month, Time magazine made this observation about fighting the Covid pandemic: “The heads of the CDC, National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration and the President’s COVID-19 task force have made conflicting statements on everything from boosters to quarantines, leaving the public befuddled and anxious. “I would argue that the American people have less trust in federal health officials now than a year ago,” says Dr. Leana Wen, a public health professor at George Washington University. “
My answer to the trust question is this: Trust in our government should never be absolute or unquestioning, but reflexive distrust isn’t warranted either. Let’s always be skeptical but never outright cynical. It is our obligation to hold our government accountable but it is also our obligation to try to fix what we think is broken. More often that not, our Constitution, elections and courts make that possible.