OPINION: President Trump’s electoral reaction mirrors that of  Guyana’s own post March 2

Last Updated on Thursday, 5 November 2020, 12:10 by Denis Chabrol

by GHK Lall

I am writing this very early, but I think that Senator Joseph Biden has won the race for President of the United States.  I did not vote, but I recognize him as my president.  Anything else, or anyone else, would be the highest injustice, the exemplification of wrongdoing and for the worst possible purposes.

My first recommendation is for Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to recommend to his president to stand aside and step down and bow out gracefully.  Just like he did here with the obstinate and tricky PNC coalition.  Unlike here, Secretary Pompeo is not restrained by such banalities as internal affairs, or sovereign rights, or those other things that once meant so much, but not anymore.  Well, at least, not here, when American priorities are involved and could be diminished, which renders noninterference not a point for negotiation.

In the confines of the Oval Office or whichever wing or whatever moment he can lean on his party and country leader, Mr. Pompeo must rise to the occasion and do so assertively, fearlessly, and honorably.  I am not meddling, as I am American, too; well, at least the last time I checked.  This is my business and my future and my dignity at stake.  And, for these reasons and more, I respectfully convey to Her Excellency, Ms. Sarah Ann Lynch, United Ambassador to Guyana, that she shares the gist of this message to our president.

After we have been lectured and influenced (rightly) and coerced and commanded (wrongly) into bowing to the dictates  of electoral democracy, then I believe that it is only appropriate that the same standards apply at home, in America, in the very bastion of democracy.  I think it would be a gross insult and profanity for the Republican candidate, the loser, to not concede, to resist, to challenge, to misuse and abuse the U.S. Supreme Court with what amounts to a patent barbarity.  For when the Chef Executive does those things, his thinking and position, in essence, is this: unless declared the winner, all else is unacceptable, found resistible.  He said so much and on more than one occasion before during, and now after the election.  On power and abuse of it, he is proving true, the only times and only things for which this can be said.  As to how much more unhinged he will prove to be remains to be seen.  I am not optimistic.  He is not Al Gore, not by a long shot.

Further, I am not optimistic about the chances of candidate Biden prevailing before the U. S Supreme Court, though the preponderance of evidence is in his favor.  Mail-in votes in 2020 are the hanging chads of 2000.  Unlike Florida and a few tens of thousands of minority votes neutralized in 2000, there are over 100 million votes that feature this time around.  And this is whether Michigan or Wisconsin or Pennsylvania (or all of them) is targeted to be the proving ground before the august accumulated wisdom and singular legal prowess of the justices of the United Supreme Court.

Chief Justice Roberts, though an unpredictable wildcard, could be expected to rise to the occasion and deliver for something so vast in reach and implications.  By that I mean the incumbent.  This is where the confidence placed is repaid a hundred-fold.  Justice Clarence Thomas will follow the conservative flag to hell and back, regardless of how judicially frivolous and pathetic he appears.  Justices Samuel Alito, Jr., Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett can be counted upon in this crunch and clutch.  This is where the rubber meets the road with all the marbles in play.  It is as rank and as routine as that; or could be made that way, should these honorable Americans jettison reality, be about the party line, and make a mockery of democracy and things American.

I have lost faith in the president.  By their judgment(s), the Justices of the United States Supreme Court can make America dignified again.  I hope that I am not prompted by developments to lose trust in the blindness and rightness of justice.  For those are the two things that come before them, as a still revered institution, and as men and women, who should be of that rarest of breeds: immaculately resplendent in judicial sagacity and fully clothed in the unimpeachable authority of individual and collective integrity.  Why, even lowly Guyanese jurists did just so when tested.