It occurs to me as I sit here listening to the battle between West Taylor Street and West Jackson Street as to which can more loudly celebrate the 248^th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence, that when the 249^th anniversary rolls around, while the explosives may be similar, the realities underlying the pyrotechnics may be much different – perhaps forever.

I refer, of course, to the fact that that there is a presidential election in November.

On the one hand, we have a guy who’s done not badly over the last three and a half years in the Oval Office, especially given an evenly split Senate and an openly adversarial House.

Lest we forget, after a lifetime of public service, he had an unmitigatedly disastrous 90 minutes of a debate a couple of weeks ago.

In fairness, the content of his remarks wasn’t all that bad, but the optics of their delivery were terrible.

And, oh yeah, he’s an old man.

On the other hand, we have a man who did visually better in the debate, even if some of his remarks were non-responsive, bordered on the incomprehensible, or were outright lies.

And, oh yeah, he’s another old man.

I know what follows is going to anger many of my fellow citizens, especially here in Kokomo, but if you wanted to be alliterative, an argument can be made that he is also a fraud, a felon, and a fascist.

The so-called university bearing his name was shut down as a fraudulent con. After going through the American criminal justice system, with all the presumptions of innocence that entails, he was unanimously found guilty as a felon. If you listen to his pronouncements on how he will proceed should he be re-elected, fascist is an apt description.

Harsh, but it is what it is.

I don’t expect to change any minds with this recitation of flaws in the candidates. But there is another recent development that means we should be making decisions with our eyes wide open.

Our Supreme Court has fallen into the trap its most honored jurist, John Marshall, feared the most, it has become political, bending over backwards to advance one political agenda at the expense of another.

In its most recent decision involving presidential immunity, a majority of the court has wandered far down the trail towards what is called, in the political science business, a “unitary presidency.”

Essentially, this means the idea of three co-equal branches of government, as set out in the Constitution, is consigned to the scrapheap of history. In its stead is established an imperial presidency wherein the actions of that branch are beyond challenge assuming the president is acting within their “official” duties – of which they are the “decider-in-chief” as to what is official, or unofficial.

The most contentious of the debates during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 involved the office of the chief executive officer, i.e. the president.

The question: How to give that officer enough power to effectively lead the new-born nation – but not so much power as to become, in all but name, a king.

And in the back of their minds, especially in that of James Madison, how to provide enough restraint on the office, for example, through the creation of a system of checks and balances, for the nation to survive a less than virtuous occupant at the head of the executive branch.

Such restraint is antithetical to the idea of a unitary president.

There “we the people” have it – a contest between a candidate who, while old, has done nothing to indicate a desire to upend the Constitution and 248 years of a government with three co-equal branches, and another, also old, who appears to desire to reimagine the office to his own personal benefit and has a Supreme Court apparently willing to run interference to allow such re-imaginings to become reality.

Think well about the choices. If current trends are carried to their likely conclusion, the people’s ability to make free choices in the future may be seriously circumscribed.