The Coup Already Underway
BY PAUL STREET
This might be a good time for Americans to stop masochistically worshipping at the feet of their nation’s authoritarian Constitution. A proto-fascistic genocidal racist maniac and anti-science eco-exterminist determined to kill two million more Americans with COVID-19 sits in the White House thanks in no small part due to the absurdly venerated 1788 United States Constitution.
How the Founders Put Trump In
For the fifth time in American history, a candidate who lost the national popular vote became president. Thank the holy charter’s Electoral College, which selects the president on the basis an archaic formula that vastly over-represents the nation’s most rural, white, statewide is entitled to the vote of all the state’s electors. If President Donald Trump receives 47.5 % of the vote in Ohio, and that former Vice President Joe Biden receives 47.4% of the vote there, all of Ohio’s 18 electoral votes would be allocated to Trump.
Americans do not elect “their” president – absurdly described as “our commander-in-chief” by talking heads liberal and conservative – on the basis of one person, one vote.
Simon, I mean “our” holy 18th century charter says.
(Try to explain the Electoral College to someone from another country, some day. It’s an entertaining exercise.)
The Democratic Party might have run a candidate who would have won enough votes in 2016’s contested states to get past the Electoral College hurdle to keep the child-separating, climate-denying, pandemic-spreading lunatic Trump out of the White House. But they didn’t, thanks largely to the shockingly unlimited role that concentrated wealth plays in the Americans candidate selection process. That plutocratic role has been as the law of the certified in two key U.S. Supreme Court decisions – Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and Citizens United (2010).
Public office is up for private sale, the Supreme Court says. Most of the populace hates this, naturally, but the high court has the final say. Simon, I mean Holy Charter, Says.
The Founders’ Absurd High Court
On campaign finance and on numerous other matters, the U.S. Supreme Court stands well to the starboard side of the majority progressive populace. It’s about to get even more extremely to the right of public opinion with the highly unpopular Trump’s soon-to-be-successful appointment of a deeply reactionary jurist, Amy Coney Barrett, a near certain candidate to cast highly unpopular votes to abrogate women’s abortion rights, to push millions of Americans off the health insurance rolls in the middle or wake of a great pandemic, and to validate the privatization of Social Security.
Ms. Coney-Barrett couldn’t tell her Senate confirmation committee last Tuesday that she will oppose Trump refusing to leave office if he loses the 2020 election (Electoral College count). She couldn’t express an opinion for or against the president suspending the election. She could not declare that the president doesn’t have the power to deny voting rights to women or to minorities. She could not express an opinion on the reality of climate change.
All of this and more in Barrett’s record and world view stand far to the extreme right of the U.S. citizenry. But so what if the nation’s reactionary high court is dangerously out of stop with the views of the citizenry and about to get more that way? The Constitution mandates that Supreme Court justice are appointed for life by presidents and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
Holy Charter says.
The Founders’ Absurd Senate
The president and the Supreme Court are far to the right of the people but his absurd and dangerous presence in the White House is fully constitutional.
The same goes for the U.S. Senate, the body that is about (as I write on Thursday, October 15th) to approve the Christian fascist Coney-Barrett. It stands well to the starboard side of the populace because the Constitution allots two U.S. Senators to each state regardless of each state’s total population. Giant, liberal, diverse, and progressive California has more than 39 million people and two U.S. Senators. Small, disproportionately white, rural, and conservative Wyoming has just over half a million people and two U.S. Senators. How pathetic.
This is a blatant violation of the core democratic principle of one person, one vote.
But “that’s the way it is” (to use longtime beloved U.S news anchor Walter Cronkite’s famous sign-off) under the sacred 18th Century parchment, adopted when Louis XVI still reigned over France and members of the U.S. Constitutional Convention rode in horse-drawn buggies
It’s absurd from a democratic perspective, but Holy Charter Says.
The Absurd Difficulty of Removing “The Most Dangerous Criminal in Human History”
At least eight months into the first year of Trump’s presidency, around the time of Charlottesville, a decent and functioning democracy would have gotten rid of the sick fascistic ogre Trump through new elections or legal proceedings for removal. Nothing doing under the Holy Charter. The absurdly venerated 18th Century Constitution mandates savagely and strictly time-staggered presidential elections once every four years. The bar for removal through the impeachment clause is so extremely high that is has been properly deployed only once in American presidential history chock full of sociopathic criminality (Richard Nixon only avoided full removal by impeachment because he resigned before the votes could be cast). A two-thirds vote in the Senate is required for removal, an almost hopelessly unattainable benchmark.
Removal is close to impossible under the Constitution’s 25th Amendment, which any decent Vice President and cabinet would have activated by now against the demented fascist oligarch Donald Trump, who richly deserves Noam Chomsky’s description of him as “the most dangerous criminal in human history.” [1]
Holy Charter Simon Says removing a sitting president between elections is damn-near legally impossible.
The All-Too Constitutional Rolling Coup Already Underway
Which brings us to the current election. The Trump administration and the Republican Party’s multi-level assault on the American electoral process is already underway. It is being carried out because the Trump-Pence-Miller-Barr regime is an arch-authoritarian far-right formation that seeks unchallenged dominance, lacks support from a majority of voters, and has a long list of declared enemies and groups in its crosshairs.
“The President of the United States is Actively Subverting Our Electoral System”
The principle mechanisms of this developing anti-election strategy are at least five-fold: racist and partisan voter suppression in key battleground states, replete with the sending of armed “poll-watchers” into minority precincts; attacking the legitimacy of the mail-in ballots that are required by the pandemic Trump spread across the nation; preparing an army of lawyers to contest the election in states that go for Biden, with the expectation that a 6-3 right-wing Supreme Court will side with Trump; preparing violent fascist and white supremacist mobs to go into the streets to intimidate voters, protesters, and policymakers; preparing to declare martial law and putting in the streets paramilitary forces (from the Department of Homeland Security, especially ICE and Border Patrol), accountable only to the president.
Don’t take it from a “radical Left” Marxist like me, An open letter to the country’s highest ranking military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley, from two esteemed and retired military commanders, Lt. Colonels John Nagl and Paul Yingling warns: “The president of the United States is actively subverting our electoral system, threatening to remain in office in defiance of our Constitution. In a few months’ time, you may have to choose between defying a lawless president or betraying your Constitutional oath” to defend the republic “against all enemies foreign and domestic.”
The enemy today is domestic: a “lawless president,” Nagl and Yingling continue, who “is assembling a private army capable of thwarting not only the will of the electorate but also the capacities of ordinary law enforcement. When these forces collide on January 20, 2021, the U.S. military will be the only institution capable of upholding our Constitutional order.”
With the Republican Party “reduced to supplicant status,” totally subordinate to Dear Leader Trump, Chairman Milley should be ready to send Pentagon forces to scatter Trump’s “little green men…Should you remain silent, Nagl and Yingling write, “you will be complicit in a coup d’état.”
Truth is stranger than dystopian political science fiction.
BY PAUL STREET
This might be a good time for Americans to stop masochistically worshipping at the feet of their nation’s authoritarian Constitution. A proto-fascistic genocidal racist maniac and anti-science eco-exterminist determined to kill two million more Americans with COVID-19 sits in the White House thanks in no small part due to the absurdly venerated 1788 United States Constitution.
How the Founders Put Trump In
For the fifth time in American history, a candidate who lost the national popular vote became president. Thank the holy charter’s Electoral College, which selects the president on the basis an archaic formula that vastly over-represents the nation’s most rural, white, statewide is entitled to the vote of all the state’s electors. If President Donald Trump receives 47.5 % of the vote in Ohio, and that former Vice President Joe Biden receives 47.4% of the vote there, all of Ohio’s 18 electoral votes would be allocated to Trump.
Americans do not elect “their” president – absurdly described as “our commander-in-chief” by talking heads liberal and conservative – on the basis of one person, one vote.
Simon, I mean “our” holy 18th century charter says.
(Try to explain the Electoral College to someone from another country, some day. It’s an entertaining exercise.)
The Democratic Party might have run a candidate who would have won enough votes in 2016’s contested states to get past the Electoral College hurdle to keep the child-separating, climate-denying, pandemic-spreading lunatic Trump out of the White House. But they didn’t, thanks largely to the shockingly unlimited role that concentrated wealth plays in the Americans candidate selection process. That plutocratic role has been as the law of the certified in two key U.S. Supreme Court decisions – Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and Citizens United (2010).
Public office is up for private sale, the Supreme Court says. Most of the populace hates this, naturally, but the high court has the final say. Simon, I mean Holy Charter, Says.
The Founders’ Absurd High Court
On campaign finance and on numerous other matters, the U.S. Supreme Court stands well to the starboard side of the majority progressive populace. It’s about to get even more extremely to the right of public opinion with the highly unpopular Trump’s soon-to-be-successful appointment of a deeply reactionary jurist, Amy Coney Barrett, a near certain candidate to cast highly unpopular votes to abrogate women’s abortion rights, to push millions of Americans off the health insurance rolls in the middle or wake of a great pandemic, and to validate the privatization of Social Security.
Ms. Coney-Barrett couldn’t tell her Senate confirmation committee last Tuesday that she will oppose Trump refusing to leave office if he loses the 2020 election (Electoral College count). She couldn’t express an opinion for or against the president suspending the election. She could not declare that the president doesn’t have the power to deny voting rights to women or to minorities. She could not express an opinion on the reality of climate change.
All of this and more in Barrett’s record and world view stand far to the extreme right of the U.S. citizenry. But so what if the nation’s reactionary high court is dangerously out of stop with the views of the citizenry and about to get more that way? The Constitution mandates that Supreme Court justice are appointed for life by presidents and confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
Holy Charter says.
The Founders’ Absurd Senate
The president and the Supreme Court are far to the right of the people but his absurd and dangerous presence in the White House is fully constitutional.
The same goes for the U.S. Senate, the body that is about (as I write on Thursday, October 15th) to approve the Christian fascist Coney-Barrett. It stands well to the starboard side of the populace because the Constitution allots two U.S. Senators to each state regardless of each state’s total population. Giant, liberal, diverse, and progressive California has more than 39 million people and two U.S. Senators. Small, disproportionately white, rural, and conservative Wyoming has just over half a million people and two U.S. Senators. How pathetic.
This is a blatant violation of the core democratic principle of one person, one vote.
But “that’s the way it is” (to use longtime beloved U.S news anchor Walter Cronkite’s famous sign-off) under the sacred 18th Century parchment, adopted when Louis XVI still reigned over France and members of the U.S. Constitutional Convention rode in horse-drawn buggies
It’s absurd from a democratic perspective, but Holy Charter Says.
The Absurd Difficulty of Removing “The Most Dangerous Criminal in Human History”
At least eight months into the first year of Trump’s presidency, around the time of Charlottesville, a decent and functioning democracy would have gotten rid of the sick fascistic ogre Trump through new elections or legal proceedings for removal. Nothing doing under the Holy Charter. The absurdly venerated 18th Century Constitution mandates savagely and strictly time-staggered presidential elections once every four years. The bar for removal through the impeachment clause is so extremely high that is has been properly deployed only once in American presidential history chock full of sociopathic criminality (Richard Nixon only avoided full removal by impeachment because he resigned before the votes could be cast). A two-thirds vote in the Senate is required for removal, an almost hopelessly unattainable benchmark.
Removal is close to impossible under the Constitution’s 25th Amendment, which any decent Vice President and cabinet would have activated by now against the demented fascist oligarch Donald Trump, who richly deserves Noam Chomsky’s description of him as “the most dangerous criminal in human history.” [1]
Holy Charter Simon Says removing a sitting president between elections is damn-near legally impossible.
The All-Too Constitutional Rolling Coup Already Underway
Which brings us to the current election. The Trump administration and the Republican Party’s multi-level assault on the American electoral process is already underway. It is being carried out because the Trump-Pence-Miller-Barr regime is an arch-authoritarian far-right formation that seeks unchallenged dominance, lacks support from a majority of voters, and has a long list of declared enemies and groups in its crosshairs.
“The President of the United States is Actively Subverting Our Electoral System”
The principle mechanisms of this developing anti-election strategy are at least five-fold: racist and partisan voter suppression in key battleground states, replete with the sending of armed “poll-watchers” into minority precincts; attacking the legitimacy of the mail-in ballots that are required by the pandemic Trump spread across the nation; preparing an army of lawyers to contest the election in states that go for Biden, with the expectation that a 6-3 right-wing Supreme Court will side with Trump; preparing violent fascist and white supremacist mobs to go into the streets to intimidate voters, protesters, and policymakers; preparing to declare martial law and putting in the streets paramilitary forces (from the Department of Homeland Security, especially ICE and Border Patrol), accountable only to the president.
Don’t take it from a “radical Left” Marxist like me, An open letter to the country’s highest ranking military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Mark Milley, from two esteemed and retired military commanders, Lt. Colonels John Nagl and Paul Yingling warns: “The president of the United States is actively subverting our electoral system, threatening to remain in office in defiance of our Constitution. In a few months’ time, you may have to choose between defying a lawless president or betraying your Constitutional oath” to defend the republic “against all enemies foreign and domestic.”
The enemy today is domestic: a “lawless president,” Nagl and Yingling continue, who “is assembling a private army capable of thwarting not only the will of the electorate but also the capacities of ordinary law enforcement. When these forces collide on January 20, 2021, the U.S. military will be the only institution capable of upholding our Constitutional order.”
With the Republican Party “reduced to supplicant status,” totally subordinate to Dear Leader Trump, Chairman Milley should be ready to send Pentagon forces to scatter Trump’s “little green men…Should you remain silent, Nagl and Yingling write, “you will be complicit in a coup d’état.”
Truth is stranger than dystopian political science fiction.
