Voters face an agonizing choice Tuesday in the presidential race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Can they in good conscience vote for either of the major parties’ nominees?
Trump is a non-starter.
The Republican former president deserves to be in jail, not returned to the White House, for inciting the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and for absconding from office with classified documents and then allegedly conspiring with others to keep federal officials from recovering them.
His motivation for running again appears, at least in part, to avoid prosecution on these federal indictments plus a state prosecution in Georgia that accuses him of election interference in the 2020 contest.
Should he reclaim the presidency, Trump is certain to fire the special counsel who pursued the federal indictments. This could, depending on the majority in the next House of Representatives, put in motion an unprecedented third impeachment. Impeachment is also a probability should he follow through on his threat to sic the U.S. Justice Department on his perceived enemies, a clear abuse of power.
In other words, a second term of Trump will be a term of even more chaos than his first.
Besides that, Trump lowers appreciably the dignity of the office with his nastiness, his pathological lying and his insufferable preening. It is notable that several of those who knew him best and worked in his administration have either not endorsed him or, worse, warned the country against returning him to office. Their warnings should be heeded.
Harris, the Democratic nominee, does not have these character disqualifiers. She conducts herself in a dignified, respectful manner, which is what the nation should expect from the person who holds the highest office in the land. Rather than run a campaign based on grievance and division, she has offered an optimistic vision that calls for Americans to find common ground and try to work through their differences.
The problem with Harris is policy, most troubling her position on abortion. The Democratic Party has for decades been the party of the pro-choice movement, but Harris would take it even further to the left.
She has pledged to try to restore abortion on demand nationwide and reverse the Dobbs decision that returned abortion policy to the states. If she is in favor of any limits on terminating a pregnancy, it is unclear what those would be. She has said that health-care providers should not be able to refuse to perform an abortion because of their faith or ethics. To Harris, removing a fetus from a woman’s body seems no different than removing an inflamed appendix. It’s just another appendage, and no medical provider should be able to refuse to provide such care, according of Harris’ way of thinking.
There are some other issues on which we disagree with Harris, such as grocery price controls and other ways she would interfere with the free market, but those are disagreements we could tolerate. To completely discount, however, the rights of an unborn child is intolerable.
It is shameful that the Republicans, with four years to work on it, couldn’t do better than Trump. And if the Democrats are going to tie their wagon so inflexibly to abortion, they must accept that they are writing off those who believe there is no higher moral obligation than to defend the sacredness of human life, including life in the womb.
Thus, come Tuesday, we recommend that voters go to the polls, vote in other important contests, such as the school bond issue and circuit clerk’s race in Leflore County, but leave the presidential race blank. Use the power of the non-vote to tell the parties that they need to do better next time.
