Presidential election not the end of the world

With only 26 days left to go before the Election Day, we’re seeing more and more excitement and tension mounting across the country. The vibe is a mix between a child anticipating Christmas and a condemned man marking off days until his execution. The candidates are in top gear flinging mud and the electorate is listening to every accusation and slur, growing more and more apprehensive in case the other side should win.

Nowhere is this more evident than the presidential race. The more acrimonious the two leading candidates become, the more tension voters feel about the aftermath. What will life be like under a Trump presidency or a Clinton presidency? What will the new president do? Will there be huge sweeping changes? Will America as we know it fall on the dust heap of history?

In a word, no.

Candidates love to talk big about what they intend to do once they’re in the White House. (Note that they never say “if I’m elected” but “when I’m the president” as though the conclusion were foregone.) They’re brimming with promises and even more with dire talk of all the evils their opponents plan to unleash on America if people are so foolish as to vote the wrong way. Many (we would even say most) of those things simply aren’t within a president’s authority.

Our Constitution very clearly spells out what the president can and can’t do, as well as what Congress and the Supreme Court can and can’t do. Sure, there have been times when one or another of those overstepped its boundaries. But on the whole, the three branches balance things out so that the excesses simply never happen. That’s the reason it’s set up that way. People often complain that the three branches of government don’t work together. That’s exactly why they’re set up that way. They work against each other like a brake.

Remember when Bill Clinton turned America over to the United Nations and sent U.N. troops to enforce martial law? Or when George Bush erased all environmental regulations? Or when Barack Obama implemented sharia law and set up concentration camps? (It gets even sillier if you consider the candidates who didn’t win. Four years ago Mitt Romney was supposedly going to outlaw tampons and back in 1928, Al Smith was going to dig a tunnel from America to the Vatican. Seriously, people thought that.)

Not only did those things not happen, none of them were ever in danger of happening. The president is in charge of the executive branch and the military. He (or she, this year) has a lot of latitude within those areas, but he can’t enforce laws that aren’t there and he can’t overturn existing ones. If he tries to, the Supreme Court smacks him down.

This, we suspect, is why so many presidents go into the White House with enthusiasm and come out old and tired. Knowing what you think is best for the country is one thing; convincing enough people in the other two branches of it is something else.

But... what about Hitler? We’re glad you brought that up. Every election season we’re reminded that Hitler was elected legally and we all know how that worked out. But Hitler was elected in a country that had been an empire until recently and many citizens thought of a republic as something foreign and dirty. The populace was accustomed to top-down government with the military to keep it that way. There are many things that can be said about Americans, but nobody has ever said that we were too obedient to authority. And our armed services are bound by both law and long tradition to stay out of domestic politics. In short, almost nothing that Hitler did is reproducible by an American president.

So are we saying that the presidential election doesn’t matter? Not at all. It matters a great deal. But so do the other races: Congress and Senate, of course, but also the local races; city councils, county courts and state legislators have as much? or more? effect on our day-to-day lives. Highfalutin fiscal policy sounds impressive, but road repairs and leash laws affect us here and now. Most of us are never going to go before the Supreme Court, but when we go to the courthouse in Ephrata or Ritzville, we want someone on the bench we trust to be fair and knowledgeable.? All politics may not be local, but local politics matters.

So when you watch debates and ?attack ads, take a deep breath and remind yourself that the fate of the world really doesn’t rest on your ballot. We encourage all our readers to vote as they think best, and then sit back and let democracy take its course. America will still be here on Nov. 9. We promise.

— Editorial Board