Thankfully, the incessant nonsense coming from Maga Land about Trump’s “Mandate,” is beginning to wane.  I guess enough people are pushing back that getting elected with LESS THAN 50% of the popular vote, winning by only a percentage and a half and having every single person not of his republican entourage outraged at the idiotic antics his administration is playing at is finally sinking in with intellectually challenged republicans:  Trump does NOT have a mandate and never will.

But I can’t help but be discouraged that almost 90 million Americans didn’t even bother to vote this past November.  For every 1.5 people who did vote last November, one more didn’t.  How can we EVER again claim that any winner of any political election has a mandate with such abysmal voting numbers?

And I also can’t figure out why no one seems to understand that this problem is fixable.  Instead of begging people to exercise their option of voting, we need to make voting mandatory.  That’s right; MANDATORY – by law.  Make voting a clear responsibility of every person, not merely an optional exercise in futility.  And back it up in the only way people will pay attention.  Make a law that says failure to vote is a civil offense that carries a fine.

It wouldn’t be all that hard to enforce:  Issue a receipt to every person who votes – one that has a bar code or QR code.  When people file their taxes in April, they append the code from their voting receipt and they receive an automatic $250 (or $500 or whatever amount will actually get people’s attention) tax exemption.  Fail to append that receipt?  Lose that $250 as a fine for not voting.  Does anyone doubt that something like this will result in a higher voter turnout?

Granted, we need to fix a few obvious issues:  Like the current republican obsession with “voter fraud,” an almost non-existent issue that all the over-reactive GOP laws are solutions in search of problems, the very real voter suppression that continually goes on in places like Georgia and Alabama, and the ever present gerrymandering that’s essentially accepted cheating that both current political parties engage in.

And it wouldn’t hurt to go ahead and term-limit both the House and the Senate.  Four 2-year terms in the house and two 6-year terms in the Senate and you are done; time for new blood to actually begin to fix the fossilized lack of anything positive that results from the current myopic goal of re-election above actually governing.

What might actually happen?  The sky may well be the limit!  But?  Will our current crop of entitled “leaders” ever actually “LEAD” like this?  While I’d like to think so?  Don’t hold your breath.