Constitutional Crises
Is the summer of '75, repeating?
Here is history repeating:
"He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.
…
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences."
Here is what is coming next:
”He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.”
Should the Judicial fail to remedy the disobedience of the Executive in short order, that will indicate the former constitutional order is beyond being restored. The former constitutional order is what they mean when people talk of a “return to normalcy.” To the extent that Biden diverted the constitutional crisis Trump caused by refusing to concede having lost the 2020 election, normalcy was returned.
Biden’s Justice Department appointees failed to bring Trump to justice. In a Republic worth its banana, failed coup leaders are handed swift and decisive justice; Trump and his top conspirators would have been hanging by June of that year. Merrick Garland had evidence of at least ten counts of obstruction of justice by Trump, sitting on his desk on Day 1 courtesy of Robert Mueller. But the Biden “normalcy” called for avoiding any appearance of political prosecution—an impossibility, given Trump’s crimes were political.
We now suffer something akin to the “Paradox of Tolerance” which holds that tolerance must also tolerate the intolerance of itself. We are in the Paradox of Due Process—that those who subscribe to a judicial system with due process must also extend due process to those who would ignore and invalidate such a system. These paradoxes are logical fallacies, if one understands both to be more like contractual relationships than philosophically-ideal practices. We agree to tolerate each other, but should you breach the contract, I suffer no obligation to continue observing it. Those who would deny another due process do not get it in return. It’s not morally complex.
Now we have Salvadoran President Bukakke, running interference on the stupid U.S. media, who will proceed to transfer moral (and ignore legal) responsibility for the kidnapping and other crimes committed against Kilmar Abrego-Garcia from Trump to him. By this logic, should I steal something of yours and give it to someone else, if that person refuses to return that stolen item to you, the media are expected to report that it’s not my fault.
NBC:
USA Today:
Trump cannot return Abrego Garcia because the President of El Salvador himself cannot do it. Oops. Pay no attention to the lack of due process, the federal government’s (false, I suspect) claim his kidnapping was due to “administrative error,” and the absence of any evidence of having committed a crime.
Donald Trump is making John Roberts his bitch, for all the world to see. What will Roberts dare to do? My read is they will dance for a short while and Roberts will cave. When it comes down to it, powerful men raised in an atmosphere of privilege are cowardly and soft; that’s why they’ve easily succumbed to Trump’s bullying. Wealth cripples character development, and when time later comes to put up or shut up, their life lessons have always been to rely on the power structure to keep them on top.
I know Trump is an experiential learner, we can see it from the tariff debacle—not an iota of attention was paid to potential responses by nations, other than compliance, because they were not real yet.
Canada and Japan started unloading T-bills at 11 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, April 8, exacerbating U.S. debt and weakening the dollar. On Wednesday morning Trump signaled to his insiders to buy stock because they were going to make a lot of money when he suspended the tariffs in a few hours.
The United States is just about officially done. We have the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride coming up this Saturday—it, and the Battle of Lexington & Concord marked the start of the armed conflict between the Colonialists and the Crown.
Less than fifteen months later, leaders of the insurrection signed their names to the original “Bye, Felicia” letter—the Declaration of Independence—listing grievances against the king (see above for a partial listing).
The American bi-sesquicentennial is here, but this one will be nothing like the celebration in 1975 & 1976—which was about recreating a patriotism that seemed to have been lost in the politics of the Vietnam era and having had a president recently disgrace the office. The structural weaknesses of the constitution have been laid bare over the past several months (after having been discovered in the hypothetical close to sixty years ago), and they cannot be repaired by “simple” amendments. Checks and balances have to be instituted in a way that cannot be willfully ignored (or violated) by a co-conspiratorial Congress or Supreme Court. We should probably do something to control for party dominance, too—perhaps a parliamentary system where non-corporate representation carries some weight.
We need a new constitution, because the country that was founded with the last one has failed to keep the People safe from tyranny, and all the 2A True Believers went MAGA.
#BankruptElon