And, The CRA-zy will surely continue to ramp up.
Right.
As students of the United States Constitution for many decades—one of us as a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, the other as a professor of constitutional law, and both as constitutional advocates, scholars, and practitioners—we long ago came to the conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment, the amendment ratified in 1868 that represents our nation’s second founding and a new birth of freedom, contains within it a protection against the dissolution of the republic by a treasonous president.
This protection, embodied in the amendment’s often-overlooked Section 3, automatically excludes from future office and position of power in the United States government—and also from any equivalent office and position of power in the sovereign states and their subdivisions—any person who has taken an oath to support and defend our Constitution and thereafter rebels against that sacred charter, either through overt insurrection or by giving aid or comfort to the Constitution’s enemies…
Click the photo for the link. I'd love for them to be right, but I have some reservations. This will surely be SCOTUS-bound should it be invoked by Trump opponents.
ERRATUM
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| Release date Aug 22 |
APA resource on "Misinformation and Disinformation."
MORE STUFF
Nice podcast.
Ahhh... those "Norms."
Trump Discovers That Some Things Are Actually Illegal
The cases against the former president aren’t criminalizing politics. They’re criminalizing, well, crimes.
The Trump presidency generated an enormous amount of discussion about “norms”—the unwritten rules of American political life that everyone tacitly agrees to and that keep democracy functioning. Many of these norms had been somewhat invisible until Trump began shattering them, by doing things like profiting from his business during his time in office or demanding that the Justice Department investigate his political enemies…
But what makes a norm a norm is, at least in part, the fact that it’s not necessarily a legal obligation. When Trump bulldozed through these collective agreements about how politicians and particularly presidents should behave, in many cases there was no obvious means by which to punish him, legally speaking, or hold him back. Much of the public learned for the first time that many things they believed had been required by law—such as the expectation that presidential candidates release their tax returns—were essentially just gentlemen’s agreements. Trump’s actions raised this question so frequently that The Washington Post launched a podcast titled, simply, Can He Do That? Often, the Post’s reporters discovered, the answer was “yes.”
The power of the presidency is far-reaching, and Trump proved uniquely skilled at exploiting his authority in the areas where controls were weakest. In many instances, the reach of that power was precisely what had made normative constraints so crucial: For example, because the Constitution places few limits on presidential authority over the Justice Department, it’s all the more important that presidents restrain themselves from demanding that the attorney general investigate their enemies. (Trump, as the Mueller report revealed, did not abide by this tradition.)
In addition, the Justice Department’s internal guidance advises against indictment of a sitting president, reasoning that criminal charges would make it impossible for the chief executive to carry out his constitutional role. That policy helped Trump escape charges of obstruction of justice in the Mueller investigation. Instead of the threat of prosecution, the only real constraint on a president’s actions—other than impeachment, which Trump survived twice—is that of political norms. This taste of presidential power may have given Trump a sense of invincibility—perhaps a misguided one.
Among the many norms that have long held up American democracy is the shared belief that political candidates should accept the outcome of a free and fair election. And if, after the 2020 election, Trump had confined his discontent to grousing on Twitter about supposed fraud, that would have violated this norm but, in all likelihood, not have been illegal. Yet according to both Jack Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, Trump’s actions moved from destructively poor sportsmanship to outright illegality when he began actively scheming to hold on to power. “The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won,” the Smith indictment states. But Trump “also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results.”…
The Trump cases help us understand how America’s democracy can be both strong and weak at the same time
Democracy is, at the very highest level, a system for turning the idea of human equality into practical political reality. When leaders can get away with whatever they want, there is no real political equality: We are electing kings, not fellow citizens. If powerful actors try to act above the law, independent institutions need to check their misbehavior…
Where American democracy works
In political science, healthy democracies are often referred to as “consolidated democracies.” It’s a typically bloodless academic term, but it refers to an important idea: that democracy becomes truly stable when it is understood as “the only game in town,” meaning that basically all relevant political players accept that free and fair elections should determine who gets to wield power.
In a completely consolidated democracy, this most fundamental rule of the political game is accepted by all. Challenging it would be as absurd as a football player demanding 20 points after scoring a touchdown.
Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election threw America’s status as a consolidated democracy into question — as did, in a less obvious way, his habit of ignoring laws and political norms whenever he felt like it.
In a 1996 article, leading political scientists Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan wrote that democracies check such potential threats from elected strongmen through the rule of law — enforced, primarily, through countervailing political institutions that can prevent leaders from going out of control. Achieving full democratic consolidation, they write, means “that the government and the state apparatus would be subject to the law, that areas of discretionary power would be defined and increasingly limited, and that citizens could turn to courts to defend themselves against the state and its officials.”
In 2020, Trump’s absurd legal arguments against the election results failed over and over again in court, often in front of Republican-appointed judges. His supporters’ effort to overturn the election by force on January 6 didn’t work either. The new Congress passed a bipartisan bill reforming the Electoral Count Act, one explicitly designed to block any future presidential candidate from using the same (dubiously) legal tactics Trump employed to try to overturn the election.
In the 2022 midterms, election deniers running for governor and secretary of state in swing states lost every single time they were on the ballot. Earlier this year, the Republican-controlled Supreme Court repudiated a key Trumpian legal argument — the so-called “independent state legislature” theory — that would have given a green light for state legislatures to rig future elections in Trump’s favor.
Put together, this looks like a striking display of democratic resilience. Faced with a serious challenge, all sorts of independent power centers inside the American system reacted in exactly the way they should — by using their authority to defend the integrity of the country’s elections.
Young and weak democracies are not always capable of such a response. In such countries, institutions are often corrupt or heavily politicized; the people who staff them have little interest in neutral defenses of democratic principle when said principle clashes with their bottom line or political party’s hold on power…
444 days until the U.S. 2024 national elections. Democracy: will it survive?
OTHER STUFF GOING ON...
Wildfires are burning largely out of control across Washington State and western Canadian provinces. Hurricane Hilary roams up the Baja (peaking at a Cat 4) and into SoCal, AZ, and Nevada (some areas are predicting a year's worth of rain in just one day). And, as of Sunday evening a 5.1 earthquake is reported just west of L.A. The Maui catastrophe aftermath remains gut-wrenching. Abroad, fighting continues to rage across Ukraine and other Eurasian / African hotspots.
A surreal year in one week.
AUG 21ST, CODA
Book review in the new Science Magazine:
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| Aug 22 release |
Looking forward to it.
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