Is It Biden’s “Turn” To Be A Divider Or Lincoln Unifier?

Karl Rove recently wrote a WSJ op ed in which he noted President Biden’s flurry of executive orders is a “Race to the Left.” As if EOs have the same force & effect of the laws they are supposed to implement? Or, as if President Trump did not issue a flurry of EOs upon taking office in 2016? Or, ditto President “Pen & Telephone” Obama before him? As Mr. Biden satisfies his radical supporters, can’t we expect the GOP in Congress to throw another Tea Party or mimick the Dem’s 4-year attempt to discredit the Trump Administration with fake Russia collusion stories by also leaking those of China, Ukraine & any other foreign government that wants influence in Mr Biden’s Swamp?

Yet, common sense, decency & instinct for survival warns us this unbending partisanship doesn’t HAVE to happen…Lincoln of course rightly warned in quoting the Bible that a “House Divided cannot stand” and begged his countrymen to be “friends, not enemies.” Historian Shelby Foote noted in a Ken Burns interview that “compromise” is the genius behind the American Experiment in democracy but that its citizens’ & leaders’ refusal to compromise which resulted in the Civil War. Folks forget, but British obstinacy in “taxing the colonists without representation” in Parliament is arguably also the lightening rod for the Declaration of Independence…but for a lousy seat in the legislature a colony was lost & nation born.

Fortunately, it is that Declaration & follow up U.S. Constitution’s “checks & balances” on anyone’s power that may be the saving grace in all this apparent chaos. Ironically perhaps, Lincoln relied on it to save the Union with a flurry of EOs between 1861-1865. And, even tho rads at The Washingtonian published a cover mockingly declaring “It’s Our Turn” (To Do What?) we can trust in Ecclesiastes, “there’s nothing new under the sun.”

Davd Soul