America At A Crossroads — Stop The Sedition

December 12, 2020

America is currently located at a twisted crossroads where our 250-year-old experiment in democracy has come to a threshhold of change, one way or another the future is storm-cloudy. The T-Rump and a hige chunk of Americans seem to think we can veer off into the weeds and be fine — the bad shit is about to hit the fan.

This afternoon DC carried the ugly stains of a gathering of assholes from the Proud Boys to jabber-mouths like Michael Flynn, Alex Jones, Sebastian Gorka, among a shitload of others, who are rallying the violent idiots into a violent spasm of revolt against the mechanics of this country. All because the T-Rump is a monster.
We need to snip this shit in the bud — throw-out the assholes who back the T-Rump and re-set our situation.

Today Ryan Cooper at The Week offered a reality of the way to go:

In short, material conditions in this country have not been this bad since 1932 at least, and the political situation has not been this bad since 1860.
The logical endgame of the rapidly-accelerating Republican attempt to destroy democracy while the country burns would be civil war — if it weren’t for the high probability that Democratic leaders would be too cowardly to fight.

But it’s worth thinking about what a party seriously committed to preserving democracy would do when faced with a seditious opposition party — namely, cut them out of power and force them to behave.
Democrats could declare all traitors ineligible to serve in national office, convene a Patriot Congress composed solely of people who have not committed insurrection against the American government, and use that power to re-entrench democracy.

In other words, this lawsuit, even though it didn’t succeed, is a flagrant attempt to overturn the constitutional system and impose through authoritarian means the rule of a corrupt criminal whose doltish incompetence has gotten hundreds of thousands of Americans killed.
It is a “seditious abuse of the judicial process,” as the states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin jointly wrote in their response to Texas trying to steal their elections.

The Constitution, as goofy and jerry-rigged as it is, stipulates that insurrectionists who violate their oath are not allowed to serve in Congress.
Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, written to exclude Confederate Civil War traitors, says that “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress … who … having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same[.]”
How the Supreme Court ruled, or whether Republicans actually believe their lunatic claims, is irrelevant.
It’s still insurrection even if it doesn’t work out.

It is virtually impossible to imagine the ancient, timid fossils that run the Democratic Party even considering this kind of thing (though remarkably, Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey has) because it would require courage, vision, and honestly reckoning with the parlous state of the nation.
It would not be illegal, but it would be a step beyond narrow legal proceduralism and into the uncharted waters of aggressive political innovation and raw will-to-power.
It could conceivably touch off armed unrest in several states.

Hopefully, that won’t happen. If the asshole GOPers who backed this shit get slapped in the face and have to see that maybe their own positions are fraudulent based on the same bullshit they cooked up over Joe Biden’s popular/Electoral Vote count — can one be without the other?

Roger, that…

In another twist, this a scene from “Seven Days in May,” though different in background, offers the end of a ‘coup,’ an attempt to carry out a seditious campaign against an established American democracy:

And yes, I was old enough to have seen it in a theater when it originally came out in 1964, and loved the slap-down to another arrogant, whiny pissant…

(Illustration by illustrator and portrait painter, Tim O’Brien, and can be found here).

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.