“Don’t push me cause I’m close to the edge
I’m trying not to lose my head
It’s like a jungle sometimes
It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under”
“The Message” - Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five

One of the first true rap anthems that found its way to pop radio stations, “The Message” was released in 1982. It spoke of the struggle in the inner cities in the early 1980s when changes in policy in many of the nation’s largest cities changed inner cities into war zones between police and criminal elements who used impoverished neighborhoods as a cover for nefarious activities. Rap music at the time was a neighborhood or house party genre, seldom heard on the airwaves.

While being a new genre to the radio game didn’t allow for the song to chart against songs like “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John, “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor, or “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” by Joan Jett (the three top-charting songs of 1982), “The Message” has arguably had more staying power than any song of its era. It was the highest-ranked song from the 1980s in Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” article. In 2002, the Library of Congress added the song to the National Recording Registry, the first hip-hop song to ever receive that honor.

“The Message” is a hair short of six minutes long, and it addresses the struggles of the people to find hope in a world where they feel their future is being dictated to them by outside forces.

The song has stood the test of time because we often come back to that feeling - that our representative governments don’t exactly, well, represent us!

It gets tough to talk down the anti-government rhetoric or the comments that the government has gotten too “full of itself” when you have a week like this past week.

In less than a week in office, President Donald Trump has issued more pardons than all but 10 other Presidents did in their entire terms. Of course, that also includes his first term in office, when he issued nearly 2,000 pardons.

Now, presidential pardons have been a thing throughout our country’s legacy. George Washington issued 16 pardons, Abraham Lincoln issued 343 pardons, and until Sunday, the most pardons ever handed out by a President were 7,654 by Andrew Johnson, many of whom were Confederate military officers and soldiers.

That was until President Joe Biden ended his presidency with a flurry of pardons, including Leonard Peltier. Biden left office having issued more than 8,000 presidential pardons, the significant majority of which were non-violent drug offenders.

The pardon is a presidential power that has been in place throughout the country’s history, but it certainly has ebbed and flowed in its use over the years, with father and son George H.W. and George W. Bush totaling 277 pardons in their combined 12 years in office. While disagreements can be found with George W. Bush’s policies during his presidency, it’s hard to argue with the statement he made when asked about presidential pardons as he left office in 2008.

“I don’t like them, in general,” he said. “We have courts and judges and people much smarter than me who made a decision. I think it’s foolish to think that I know more than they do.”

Unfortunately, adherence to established Constitutional divisions of power doesn’t seem to ring true to everyone in our national or even our state government.

President Trump stepped out to address Tik Tok before he was even office, offering to sign an executive order (which he did) that would give more time to the app before it was shut down. However, his executive order should carry as much weight as me walking down Dakota and saying that I plan to keep Tik Tok going.

Congress passed a law that caused the shutdown of Tik Tok - with overwhelming bi-partisan support (something difficult to get in D.C. anymore). The Supreme Court upheld the law. We have checks and balances within our government set up for a reason - anyone who took Mrs. Scheel’s history and government classes at Wolsey learned this well!

The President is the executive, meaning he or she can influence lawmakers in crafting the law and, in the end, decides on whether or not to sign a law into place, but that’s where the power ends. Congress holds law-making powers. The Supreme Court interprets (and often re-interprets again and again) laws that have been made and their application.

The President cannot simply do an end-around because he doesn’t like something.

That’s not how our Constitutional republic is set up.

At home, our own legislature is taking up a bill to take the power out of the people’s hands to propose and pass constitutional amendments and/or initiated measures on our November ballots.

House Joint Resolution 5003 passed out of committee and passed the House floor on Wednesday with a 61-5 vote. The resolution would be put onto the November 2026 ballot if the Senate also votes to adopt the resolution.

Voters have already twice rejected the concept of a higher percentage than a simple majority to pass ballot measures - defeating the proposal to make the minimum 55% approval for a ballot measure to pass in 2018 and defeating a proposal in 2022 to make the minimum 60%.

The voters have spoken, but legislators, including both District 22 House members, who voted for the resolution, have not heeded the voters.

South Dakota Senator John Thune, now the Senate Majority Leader, stood on the floor of the Senate this week and attempted to “strong-arm” those who would dare vote against the bills Republicans would be proposing with a majority in both houses of Congress or voting against the cabinet nominees President Trump is proposing.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Thune’s email to his constituents explained that he stated on the Senate floor, with Thune relating that the comments were directed to his Democrat colleagues (though any members of his own party who may vote against his wishes would also fall under his statement). Not only was Thune encouraging his fellow legislators to vote his way - or else face potential ramifications - but he was talking about it in an email sent to supporters and news media alike as if this sort of political back-and-forth was a good thing.

The S.D. Legislature, the U.S. Congress, and, yes, even the President get their power from us, the voters. If they’re willing to spur the Constitution they are meant to uphold, the voters who put them into office, and actively propose silencing dissidence, then we’re headed for a hopeless world to hand to the next generation.

We have the power as voters. Contact your state legislators and your Congress members. Show up at the polls and vote out the incumbents who are ignoring voters. Otherwise, the world that continues to marginalize the already marginalized will only continue down that path.