2019 Election Season finished in Maricopa County; Tumultuous 2020 season BEGINS

Maricopa County Arizona citizens, in numerous jurisdictions (municipalities and school districts) voted last week to invest tax dollars in improvements to public education and local infrastructure. In a small minority of the school districts, they declined to do so.

One city's voters chose, overwhelmingly, to refuse to give members of its city council a pay raise.

To explain each decision would take reams of (virtual) paper. So I won't.

Looking ahead, over the course of the next year, Arizona, Maricopa County, and the optimistically named United States will surely see a tumultuous political time.

On Wednesday, November 13, public hearings in Congress will commence into the question of whether the country's 45th president is to be impeached.

Republicans in Congress are acting as if their hair is on fire. They believe that Trump WILL be impeached. Whether he's convicted and evicted from the White House is an open question. If he is not evicted, his political life will still be morally wounded. I believe he will not serve a second term in the White House.

When I was out on Sunday collecting petition signatures for Outlaw Dirty Money, a friend from my time working at the Arizona Department of Economic Security in the 1990s came along. While we conversed for a few minutes, he shot me a very concerned look and told me he's a bit scared for the future of the Republic (not the newspaper).

Given the rhetoric that echos from the Trump administration on social and on corporate media (trying desperately to hold onto power), I can't blame him.

However, this weekend I began reading Brenda Wineapple's rendering of the reconstruction years following the American Civil War. If there ever have been tumultuous times in America, it was then.

The Impeachers breathes life into the cursory declaration that the first president to be impeached was Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson. Those of us of a certain age have lived through the Nixon, Clinton and now Trump administrations. We've all known that Andrew Johnson was the first president impeached. We've also known that he was not convicted.

But how many of us had any understanding of what he did or didn't do -- or what challenges the United States endured in the years following Robert E. Lee's surrender to Ulysses Grant?

Not only will you be able to imagine the political, economic and civil environment from that time, but you'll be able to put in context the unresolved strife that caused a full one hundred years to pass before southern states were dragged kicking and screaming into the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. Despite the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, white supremacist culture in the Deep South still vehemently resists giving full rights of citizenship to anyone other than white Americans.

The Impeachers will illuminate your imagination regarding the tribulations our country has already endured. When you can picture the light at the end of the dark tunnel of political unrest in the 19th Century, you may be more optimistic about the ability of the Republic to endure now.

Nevertheless, the struggle will never end.

*****

In other news, this morning, the planet Mercury's path crossed between the Sun and Earth, an event that NASA scientists report takes place only 13 times each hundred years.

Video of the Mercury transit can be seen on NASA.gov.