Canada Will Not Become The 51st State - Here's Why...

North America is atwitter! The new American President has variously commented on the possibility of Canada becoming the 51st state, or he has actually threatened to make Canada the 51st state through the use of economic pressure.

He is full of shit up to his eyeballs. Here is why...

By "51st state", what is clearly meant is that Canadians would become Americans in every sense of the word, especially when it comes to political rights. President Trump has never suggested something like territorial status for Canada, akin to the status of Puerto Rico. 

The prospect of 41 Million Canadians voting in elections for the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Presidency will cause Republicans to reject any notions of Canadians becoming Americans. The political implications for Republicans are so dire, that Canadians will not become Americans even if they were asking for the honour (Note - spelled "honour", not "honor".)

For starters, 41 million Canadians becoming Americans would work out to about 55 seats in the House of Representatives. Looking at the results of the last five congressional elections, the largest majority that was obtained by either the Republicans or Democrats was a 47 seat majority for the Republicans in 2016. Right now, the Republicans have a razor-thin 3 seat majority.

If former Canadians could vote in US elections, recent polling shows that they would vote between 42% and 62% for the Democrats, and only 14% to 21% for the Republicans. There were a large number of undecideds in these polls. Apportioning these undecided preferences across the given results, we get about 72% support for the Democrats, and about 28% for the Republicans. If this were to hold, the Democrats would see another 38 - 40 seats in the House of Representatives each election, and the Republicans would receive about 15 - 17 seats.

Conclusion - With Canadians voting in American elections, it may be virtually impossible for the Republicans to ever win a majority in the House of Representatives, absent a generations-long demographic shift in voting patterns.

If Canada went into the United States as one state, it would get two senators. But it would also be larger than the other fifty states combined. This makes no sense. To maintain some semblance of geographic balance, and to respect the substantial cultural, economic and political differences between Canadian provinces, it would make more sense for the ten Canadian provinces to go in as separate states, with the territories accorded something like territorial or commonwealth status. 

Doing this would net Canadians ten seats in the Senate. If present voting patterns held, Alberta and likely Saskatchewan would vote Republican; Quebec would vote for an independent senator who would easily identify with the Democrats - think in terms of a French Bernie Sanders - and the other six Canadian states would vote for the Democrats. The result would be 16 new Democratic senators to only four Republican senators.

Right now, the Republicans only have a three seat majority in the United States Senate.  

Given how close the election results normally are in the Senate, bringing Canadians into the American political fold would mean that the Republicans may not win the Senate ever again.

Finally, 41 million Canadians would get about 75 Electoral College votes in every United States presidential election (N.B. number of Senate seats plus number of seats in the House of Representatives.) If Canadian voting intentions held, and assuming that only Alberta and Saskatchewan went Republican, bringing Canadians into the United States political system would net the Democratic candidate about 60 out of a possible 75 Electoral College votes in every presidential election. 

In last year's presidential contest, Donald Trump won 312 Electoral College votes to Kamala Harris's 226. Adding likely Canadian voting results to this would have had Trump at 327, and Harris at 286, so the result would have been the same. Nonetheless, with former Canadians voting in American elections, Republican presidents would face a permanently hostile Congress.

Republicans can do math. They no doubt completely understand the implications of absorbing 41 million Canadians in to the United States political system, and that those implications would be dire for their collective political prospects. Because of this, it wouldn't happen even if Canadians were asking to join.

But that is not all....

Canadians have a different political culture and experience than that of Americans. They have a history of either voting for regional parties, or for voting for national parties with strong regional biases. This raises a delicious possibility...

What if Canadians, after having been forced to join the United States, refused to vote as either Republican or Democrats, and voted for a Canada Party instead?

A Canada Party would almost always hold the deciding vote on every single piece of legislation, and every single budget initiative in the House of Representatives and the Senate as neither the Republicans not the Democrats could normally obtain sufficient seats to constitute a majority and pass legislation without Canadian support. 

In short, to get any work done in the form of new laws or budgets, the Republicans and/or the Democrats would have to buy Canada's vote.

Canadians are very familiar with the brokerage style of politics in the USA - "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours." One can just imagine the number of bridges to nowhere and hockey museums that Canadians' ability to blackmail the American legislative and budgetary process could buy!

And there's more!

If Canadians were forced into the American political system with full political rights, presumably they would be able to run for the office of the President of the United States! 

What would happen if a Canadian candidate for the presidency offered stronger labour protections (Note - spelled "labour" not "labor"); a "free" single-payor health care system; and the taxation of the wealthy in favour of income transfers to the poor and middle class to an American citizenry that has been duped into thinking that their subservience to the wealthy; diminishing economic well-being; and scant access to health care is "freedom"? 

These people have been betrayed by political sell-outs across the American political spectrum - both Left and Right. Would something like this coming from a Canadian presidential candidate shake up the "swamp"? 

Yup, and that's why the Democrats, who offered none of this in the last election cycle, would also not want Canadians in the American political system. 

The Democrats are sell-outs?

Here is Bernie Sanders' response to President Trump's inaugural address. It covers everything Sanders thought Trump should have addressed in his speech if he actually cared about Americans. What he didn't say was that it was also everything that Harris wouldn't or couldn't promise either. 

The Democrats know who gave her $1 Billion for her campaign, and what they are expected to not do for the American people in return. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHH-KI2yk8s

 

 

 

Trump's Executive Orders and What May Be Coming Next

Trump is leading the anti-woke reaction and is reworking America. Trump and the Republicans obviously think they are involved in a culture war for the heart and mind of America. 

Please keep the concept of culture war in mind as you read on.

The list of what Trump has done to date has no precedent in the history of the United States of America. Here is a short list of the executive orders that he has signed to date...

• Biden Reversal - passed many executive orders to reverse Biden's orders on Climate Change, gender issues, reuniting immigrant families, etc;
• Civil Service - offered buy-outs to 2.3 million government workers, ordered federal workers back to their offices full-time, froze hiring, made firing workers easier to fire;
• Spending - froze government spending;
• USAID - essentially closed USAID, telling workers across the world that they had 30 days to get back to America;
• Oversight - fired 17 inspectors general who oversaw federal ethics and accountability within the federal government;
• Federal Lawyers - fired lawyers who led January 6th and Trump prosecutions, reassigned senior counsel to support the crack-down on illegal immigrants, and froze new federal civil rights and environmental protection litigation;
• FEMA - will review the Federal Emergency Management Agency to assess whether it should be closed;
• Firings - fired Biden nominees, and certain high-profile persons, including the first woman to lead the Coast Guard;
• DEI - ended Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies in the federal government, including putting all DEI staff on leave, and revoking the Equal Employment Opportunity Order of President Johnson from 1965;
• Labour - fired two board members of the National Labour Relations Board and two commissioners of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, essentially halting the protection of working people from illegal labour practices and discrimination at the federal level;
• Pardons - gave pardons to 1,500 people convicted of crimes reflated to January 6th, including those convicted of violent crimes and sedition;
• Birth Rights - ended automatic citizenship for children of illegal immigrants born in the USA;
• Immigration - commenced rounding up and deporting illegal immigrants;
• Tariffs - invoked new 10% tariffs against China, and 25% tariffs against Canada and Mexico, which have been delayed for 30 days;
• Trans Rights - banned biological males from competing in women's collegiate sports, stopped gender care for children;
• Gender - declared that the policy of the government is that there are only two genders;
• Energy - declared a national energy emergency to facilitate "Drill, baby drill!", and opened Alaska to drilling;
• DOGE - established the Department of Government Efficiency, and give Musk and his minions unprecedented access to the personal and financial information of millions of people without first obtaining security clearances;
• Climate Change - withdrew from the Paris Accords, eliminated Biden-era supports for electric vehicles;
• Geographic Names - renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, and restored the name of Mount McKinley;
• Death Penalty - instructed the Attorney General to seek the death penalty in the case of the murder of a police officer (presumably, unless the officer was murdered on January 6th);
• Wall - signed an order to keep building the wall;
• Health - withdrew the USA from the WHO;
• JFK - declassified records related to the assassination of JFK;
• Bitcoin - supports the use of Bitcoin, and explores a national reserve of the "currency" similar to the Gold reserve;
• Iron Dome - calls for a national air defence system for the USA similar to Israel's Iron Dome;
• Education - ends federal gender and equity-related education programming;
• Deregulation - requires that 10 regulations be repealed for every new one introduced;
• Sovereign Wealth - established a US sovereign wealth fund; and,
• War - establish Homeland Security Task Forces in every state to secure the USA from invasion.

We here at mewetree.blogspot.com have highlighted above the two key executive orders that we think may be predictive of what Trump and the Republicans may do once Congress is back in session. 

To understand what may be coming, it is important to realize that what the Republicans learned in 2020 is that American democracy actually works. They may not want it to work, as elections after Trump took office in 2016 were resoundingly negative for the Republicans. In light of this, and in the years after Trump lost in 2020, the Republicans worked hard to water-down election laws country-wide. Wiki has a very good summary of voter suppression attempts here...

Republican efforts to restrict voting following the 2020 presidential election - Wikipedia'

The point of most of this was limiting the ability of Black people to vote, given that they vote very heavily for the Democrats. From the perspective of Trump and the Republicans, these people are the storm troopers of the culture war, enabling Democrats to get into power to wrought the culture changes that the Right hates, much of which Trump has attempted to reverse in the above-noted executive orders. 

Now please take note above that Trump has repealed the Equal Employment Opportunity Order of President Johnson from 1965. This was part of very significant changes brought about in the era of civil rights that set the stage for much of the rights-related progress that followed in the 1960's and 1970's. If Trump is willing to reverse something as sacrosanct as a civil-rights era executive order that has operated for 60 years, one has to ask the obvious question...

Do Trump and the Republicans also intend to repeal the cornerstone achievements in civil rights in the 1960's, the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, as well?? 

Doing this would be a natural extension of their efforts to limit voting by Black people since 2020, as noted above. It is what they would do if they thought that they needed to put a nail in the coffin of "woke" cultural change by making sure to permanently hamstring the national Democratic vote.

But this seems nuts at first glance! After all, Trump has said that he supports civil rights! Again, Wiki is helpful. Here is a very long article that catalogues Trump's political and other lies. The man tells the truth only when it serves his purposes.

False or misleading statements by Donald Trump - Wikipedia

So, what other evidence exists that points to Trump and the Republicans potentially doing something as outrageous as repealing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act? The board of mewetree.blogspot.com invites the reader to look at the other highlighted executive order noted above.

Homeland Security Task Forces are to be established in every single state, ostensibly to deal with an invasion of the United States! Literally no one thinks that such an invasion would or could happen.

So what is this about?

Repeal of the key national civil and political rights legislation would likely cause riots country-wide, and Trump and the Republicans no doubt remember Black Lives Matter. If a government wanted to have the ability to swiftly impose martial law on a population that was in the act of rebellion against the elimination of their civil and political rights, having Homeland Security Task Forces in place is precisely how they would go about doing that. In fact, the board of mewetree.blogspot.com believes that Trump is literally salivating at the prospect of invoking martial law in the USA at some point in his tenure.

So, having listed what Trump has done to date, and what may be coming next, what is motivating this man?  

It's obvious. The key concepts that come to mind are hate, fear, an almost insane lust for vengeance, and with those, an almost complete lack of empathy. This is a man at war with his enemies 110% of the time, with this war encompassing literally everything he thinks, says and does. 

From the perspective of his public life, he has now internalized America's culture war as his own personal war against his many enemies, with literally millions of utterly innocent people now in his sights.

Don't despair...

The board of mewetree.blogspot.com thinks that this is all too much. Every politician has a limited amount of political capital, and Trump's political career may soon go the same way as the careers of two other revolutionaries - John Paul 1 and Robespierre - which is to say, it may end rather sooner than he thinks, and not in the way he would want. While he is focussing exclusively on his endless enemies, he may have taken his eye off of his "friends", who, now that he can't run again and help them politically, may be about to "reset the table". (To be clear, we are only talking about the end of his political career.)

We shall see.