Important Announcement: Between now and the next full posting on this blog, new items will continue to come up. Rather than wait for the blog's next full posting, they will be added ... with the date they are added shown ... at the tail end of this posting. Scroll down right now to read the ones already added to this particular posting, if any. (And see recent prior postings as well.) Come back and check out what's new on this blog every day!
How Mike Lee ditched Constitution for Trump
If Lee is genuinely concerned about the constitutional order, his highest priority should be the authoritarian turn that the Republican Party has taken under Trump.
Mona Charen
I didn’t watch much of this year’s CPAC. My digestion is sound, but there’s no point in taking unnecessary risks. Still, I did note the presence of Sen. Mike Lee, a legislator who styles himself a 'constitutional conservative.'
Lee is the son of a distinguished former solicitor general of the United States, a graduate of Brigham Young University and its law school, and the author of three books on the Founding era: 'Our Lost Constitution,' 'Our Lost Declaration' and 'Written Out of History: The Forgotten Founders Who Fought Big Government.' That’s a lot of losing and forgetting.
But it seems that Lee is the one who has forgotten what the founding was about.
Less than two months have elapsed since Donald Trump committed the most monstrous attack on the constitutional order in 150 years by siccing a violent mob on the Congress as it was attempting to certify the election of the man who defeated him. That came on the heels of attempts to strong-arm the secretary of state of Georgia to 'find' enough votes to alter the results, efforts to persuade state legislators to defy the voters and replace their states’ electoral college slates in his favor and a protracted effort to discredit the election process itself as fraudulent.
CPAC was the first gathering of Republicans and conservatives since those events. And yet, the 'constitutional conservative' Lee did not see fit to mention any of that in his address.
He spoke of 'leftists who hate the Bill of Rights' and he argued that 'faith in government is tyranny.' He denounced Democratic governors, who had imposed what he regarded as overly restrictive COVID-19 rules, as tyrants and stressed that 'we' (meaning Republicans) 'trust the people.'
Lee may be sincere in his desire to restore some equilibrium to the separation of powers. He has introduced several bills that would curtail executive authority, and when Trump usurped legislative powers and arguably broke the law by declaring a spurious border emergency, Lee was among a small number of senators who opposed him.
But that burst of independence must have exhausted the senator, because at the time of Trump’s first impeachment trial, less than a year later, Lee was among Trump’s firmest defenders.
'What he did was not impeachable,' Lee told Politico. 'It was not criminal. And I don’t think what he did was even wrong.'
CPAC was, according to The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, a festival of forgetting. If the Capitol insurrection was mentioned at all, it was only to blame it on judges who ruled against Trump’s risible lawsuits. Mostly though, the speakers stuck to antifa and imaginary late-night ballot dumps.
If Lee is genuinely concerned about the constitutional order, his highest priority should be the authoritarian turn that the Republican Party has taken under Trump.
He might begin with these facts: Nearly two-thirds of the Republican House caucus, along with eight senators, voted not to certify President Joe Biden’s election. Seventeen Republican state attorneys general signed onto Texas’s preposterous lawsuit challenging the results in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin. (The Supreme Court tossed it.)
The MAGA crowd stormed the Capitol and erected a gallows, but elected Republicans helped prepare the ground.
Any 'constitutional conservative' surveying the wreckage of the post-Trump GOP must be concerned about the state of the people they are so ready to 'trust.' Can self-government succeed when a plurality of one of the two major political parties no longer even believes in democracy?
A survey of Trump supporters, who number about half the Republican Party, found that not only do they nearly universally believe the fraudulent election lie, but 70% want Trump to serve another term and remain in office — after his second term is complete.
Among Republicans more broadly, 86% opposed conviction and disqualification in the second impeachment trial, and 83% thought the trial itself should never have happened.
In other words, not even attempting to subvert the election through improper influence, pressure and, eventually, violence was enough to break their cult-like devotion.
Lee waxed indignant about some regulations instituted legally by Democratic governors to deal with a 100-year emergency.
Did some go overboard? Maybe. Is that a threat to the Republic? Good God, no.
On the other hand, a significant portion of the electorate is slavishly loyal to a person rather than a party, philosophy or country. A huge number of Americans have had their faith in democracy significantly eroded. A large minority of the population believes pernicious falsehoods and cannot be disabused.
And leaders who hold advanced degrees and write books about the founding cannot bring themselves to confront that reality. That seems like a bigger challenge.
And speaking of challenges ...... (scroll down if necessary)
The two massive challenges the nation faces, voter suppression and the existence of armed militias, both originate in the States, rather than the Federal Government. Voting laws are State laws. Law banning private armed militias are State laws. Local Republicans control enough State legislatures to make a mockery of democracy in both of these areas, permitting militias to exist and voter suppression to continue. Nevertheless, these remain national problems, seeking national solutions. (Please scroll down here if necessary.)
 |
|
Our 19th President, Rutherford B. Hayes |
In 1877, during the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes, the last Federal
troops were withdrawn from the States which had seceded, forming the
Confederacy. At that point, the North in effect conceded victory in
the Civil War to the South. Although slavery had been abolished and
voting rights granted to the former slaves, the reconstituted Southern State
governments saw to it that nothing really was changed. The newly
established Department of Justice was impotent. The KKK was not. Attempts
to remedy this by the 1964 Civil Rights bill have since been watered down and
passage of H.R. 1 by the Senate is unlikely in view of the existence of the
filibuster.
Whatever legislation and administrative acts
permitted this to happen after the Civil War must somehow be
reversed. (Hayes was elected in 1876 only with the electoral votes
of Southern States which were bought with the unspoken promise that the troops
would be withdrawn.) Somehow, the post-Civil War failed ‘Reconstruction’
must be redone and done right this time. H.R. 1, if passed, would
correct some existing wrongs dating back to the failed ‘Reconstruction.’
Not permanently leaving military force in the
South after the Civil War was a mistake proven when the Armed Forces had to be
brought into Alabama to enforce the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision in
Brown vs. Board of Education. Voting suppression cannot be similarly
enforced at gunpoint, but appropriate legislation can do the job.
Slavery is a stain on American history, just
as it is on purportedly enlightened 'Western' civilization. That it
existed in Biblical times and in ancient civilizations is no
excuse. The new nation was established to bring about freedoms not
present in Europe and the rest of the world. But eliminating human
bondage was not one of these freedoms. We belatedly made it illegal
in 1865, but the job remains unfinished.
Item Added - March 10, 2021
Remember that the Repubican-controlled State legislatures which are busy passing laws to suppress voting were legitimately elected through democratic processes.
Their actual mission seems to be "to exploit the methods of democracy to destroy democracy." (That quote, referring to Germany in 1934, is from Isabel Wilkerson's book, "Caste.")
Item Added - March 12, 2021
Here's the text of a letter I sent to the Palm Beach Post yesterday. Although, editorially, they agree with me, they probably won't print it.
I see where Florida’s Republican legislative majority is now going after ballot drop boxes as well as getting rid of signing up to vote by mail for more than one year at a time (Senate Bill 90). Such voter suppression tactics are only further evidence that the GOP does not believe that government of the people, by the people and for the people apply to the Sunshine State. Even though this didn’t happen in Florida in 2020, they know that ultimately, when more people vote, Republicans lose ... and they are fearful about losing a Senate seat and the Governorship in 2022.
I am pretty much fed up with the State government in Florida. Putting it mildly, it sucks. Retirees who choose to come here because of the climate, the low taxes and the recreational, cultural and social opportunities must be willing to live in a State where the shots are called by a Republican legislature and Governor elected by Neanderthals. That won't change. Too bad that most State governments are no better, except in the Northeast, or Illinois, places which aren't very attractive to retirees. (California is too expensive.) Those about to retire should consider Virginia and New Mexico. If I had it to do over, that is where I would look and consider, rather than the political cesspool known as Floriduh, which won't be changing.
JL
No comments:
Post a Comment