A Wretched Situation

In a lengthy jeremiad in the Washington Post Robert Kagan identifies an incipient constitutional crisis, as grave in his view as the one that Lincoln faced or that was faced in the nullification crisis:

The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves. The warning signs may be obscured by the distractions of politics, the pandemic, the economy and global crises, and by wishful thinking and denial. But about these things there should be no doubt:

First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. The hope and expectation that he would fade in visibility and influence have been delusional. He enjoys mammoth leads in the polls; he is building a massive campaign war chest; and at this moment the Democratic ticket looks vulnerable. Barring health problems, he is running.

Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way. Some Republican candidates have already begun preparing to declare fraud in 2022, just as Larry Elder tried meekly to do in the California recall contest.

How grave is the danger?

The stage is thus being set for chaos. Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.

Today’s arguments over the filibuster will seem quaint in three years if the American political system enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy.

I don’t disagree with him about the gravity of the situation but I don’t believe he truly understands the sources of the problem and I would set the clock all the way back to 2016. Trump was elected to the presidency legitimately. After his election the Clinton campaign, the Congress, the media, the political appointees in the executive branch, and the permanent civil service employees, particularly those in State, Justice, and Defense, did not precisely cover themselves in glory. For four years there was an if not concerted at least unison effort to frustrate President Trump and his supporters which went well beyond ordinary politics. I think that the nomenklatura‘s rejection of a duly-elected president is a crisis as dire as the one to which Mr. Kagan calls attention.

To clarify:

  1. I did not vote for Donald Trump either in 2016 or 2020.
  2. I think he was elected legitimately in 2016.
  3. I don’t think he was a good president.
  4. He pursued some of the correct policies. I don’t much care why.
  5. I think that Joe Biden was elected legitimately in 2020.
  6. I condemned the events of January 6 of this year unconditionally.
  7. I think it was better described as disorderly conduct, a demonstration that had gotten completely out of hand, rather than as an insurrection.
  8. All of the actual homicides of the day appear to have perpetrated by the Capitol Police.
  9. The deaths of several Capitol Police officers, as far as I can tell sick old men, are as much the fault of the Congress which is directly responsible for the governance of the Capitol Police as it is of those who breached the Capitol
  10. I have no reservations in declaring that the actions of President Trump on that day were reprehensible.

I agree with Mr. Kagan that we are already in the midst of a constitutional crisis but I think its scope is significantly broader than he appears to.

12 comments… add one
  • Andy Link

    Elite panic. Like your following post suggests, repetitive.

  • steve Link

    This an effort to avoid writing about the results of the FIRST GOP instigated “investigation” of the Arizona election? Maybe best to wait for the final results but preliminary is what was expected. The only question is how many more “investigations” will occur? The GOP is really good at keeping these going to keep the donations rolling in and the base angry. Its helping to convince the conservatives that those claims over the last 30 years that there are millions of illegal Des votes every election are true. Every GOP lead effort showing there was no fraud will just convince them even more that fraud is real.

    In case you weren’t then I disagree. Trump had lots of negative press, the huge majority of which he instigated. Pretty clear he did a lot of that to distract from what he was actually doing. Other than that I would say that Democrats cooperated with Trump just as much as Republicans did with Obama. Impeachment? In the modern era the GOP started that with Clinton, over sex. Trump solicited illegal foreign help in an election and didnt even get censored. The best you can do here is to clam that it started well before 2016 also.

    Steve

  • Grey Shambler Link

    Sounds to me like Kagan and his clique are afraid of normal, working class Americans….
    Good.

  • I’m surprised you should draw such conclusions from this post, steve. I don’t write about Arizona because I don’t live in Arizona and because I thought the conclusions was an anticlimax because I believed that Biden carried Arizona—as I said in the post I thought that Biden won the election.

  • bob sykes Link

    I voted for Trump twice, because the Democrat candidate was and is evil. I think he was a weak President, easily manipulated and thwarted by the Deep State and its minions. His presidency did, however, reveal the scope and depth of the Deep State, and that the Deep State will not permit elections to change policies. I also think that the 2020 election may have been stolen. Trump drew crowds in the tens of thousands, usually overflow. Biden drew small groups of people, usually a few dozen.

    Trump will not run in 2024, because he is too old. But if he does, I will vote for him again, because the Democrat candidate will be evil. And the Deep State will thwart and manipulate him again.

    Robert Kagan is one of the true monsters of the Deep State, he and his monster wife, Amb Nuland. Nuland engineered the Ukrainian coup d’etat, which removed Ukraine’s only democratically elected and legitimate President, Viktor Yanukovych. The result was the destruction of the Ukrainian economy, the immiseration of tens of millions of Ukrainians, millions of Ukrainians displaced from their homes, civil war, and the rise of actual 1930’s Nazis to prominence in the Ukrainian government.

    Kagan is one of the neocons who continually pushes for war against just about anyone, but especially against Iran and Venezuela. He is incensed that Biden left Afghanistan, since he wants a military base in Central Asia to menace Russia and China.

    If there is any evidence that American democracy is threatened, it is that Kagan and Nuland are not in cages in Gitmo.

  • steve Link

    But Arizona is why Kagan’s article is even remotely of interest. Granted I am not a Kagan fan and dont read him unless someone cites him, but the following is the important part…

    “Second, Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results”

    This is just the first of many investigations we will see across the country. I predict we will see more in Arizona. It doesnt matter that you think Biden won, conservatives, ask Drew or jan, really believe Trump won. They think there are millions of fraudulent votes every year. They are laying the groundwork to not accept any results other than a GOP victory. With the groundwork laid will they go ahead? Dont know yet do we? We certainly got lucky this time that so many, essentially all of the GOP election officials supported the last election but there is an ongoing effort to remove those people.

    Steve

  • Jan Link

    I reluctantly voted for Trump in 2016, and did so again in 2020, this time with no hesitancy. IMO, he served the working and middle class demographic well, enacting policies that cut across racial/gender/class lines, giving higher household incomes to ordinary people, decreased regulations strangling business growth, and activated many out of their malaise to vote and be participatory in seeking the type of government they desired.

    While Trump’s 2016 win was totally unexpected, I believe his 2020 loss was totally contrived by the democrat hierarchy. However, in the aftermath of his manipulated defeat Trump has become almost legendary in the power his endorsements have, giving him a kingmaker status in the shaping of future elections. I hope, then, he abstains from running for president in 2024, being happy with his ability to influence the outcome of the election rather than vying to be the nominee.

    As for Joe Biden, he may have unceremoniously and undeservingly waltzed into the WH, but his image and legacy as a public servant, and now POTUS, is withering by the day. His lies and incompetence are monumental in the ruin they are bestowing on the country. He’s dumped on the Afghan people, their military, and those serving American interests by his rushed, not thought out departure from that country. The refugees shuttled across from there to here were unvetted (only 3% having credentials), carrying diseases like measles, COVID etc. going unsupervised, while Biden demands masks and mandated vaccines from American citizens. The same lack of medical scrutiny has been exhibited in dealing with the scourge of people crossing the southern border, that are being quietly bussed and flown all over the country. In the meantime the slim majority in Congress is focusing their might on a lopsided inquisition of 1/6, keeping political prisoners incarcerated for ungodly amounts of time, and formulating budgetary demands that meet their whimsical ideological fantasies, while on track to bankrupt the country.

    My most fervent hope, however, is that we will be able to survive the demented, demoralizing presidency of Joe Biden, picking up the pieces of what still remains of our Republic, after he is gone.

  • steve Link

    “I believe his 2020 loss was totally contrived by the democrat hierarchy.”

    Then why cant you find any evidence? Even when you handpick the auditors you cant find any.

    Steve

  • Jan Link

    “In the 2020 presidential election, the margin of victory was only 10,457 votes, a small fraction of the 57,734 ballots with known issues. Again, this is almost 6 times the margin of victory in the Presidential race and is multiples of the margin of victory in other races. Based on these factual findings, the election should not be certified, and the reported results are not reliable.”

    The above was taken from the audit findings. What Steve and the MSM
    are citing is from a preliminary draft referring to a recounting of the ballots, not the actual audit.

    It would be like having 100 $100 dollar bills, some which are fake, the others real. If you simply counted the bills, one by one, you would just get a rerun of the initial count. If you did a forensic audit of the bills, the fake ones could be discerned, by a closer investigation, and separated from the real ones.

  • Jan Link

    More from the Arizona forensic audit:

    ”The executive summary highlights numerous issues with ballot integrity, including

    *10,000 double votes across county lines,
    *tens of thousands from voters who had moved and could not legally have received the ballots they purportedly cast,
    *files missing from the Election Management System (“EMS”) server,
    *corrupt or missing ballots on the EMS,
    *computer logs that were deliberately overwritten,
    *duplicated ballots without serial numbers, missing chain-of-custody documentation,
    *statistical anomalies in the way ballots were folded compared to the claimed number of mail-in ballots, and
    a statistically significant increase in the number of provisional ballot rejections because mail-in ballots were cast (suggesting that people’s votes were stolen).”

  • Grey Shambler Link

    Even if true and verifiable, these are now considered Extremist views.
    Dangerous territory. Better to focus one’s mind on the full blossoming of Diversity and Inclusion and the withering away of distasteful Eurocentric culture. Merciless professional witch hunters scan the internet day and night with one finger on the DOX button.
    https://www.splcenter.org/about/staff/heidi-beirich

  • steve Link

    First, they didnt find any fraud. After recounting Biden had more votes and Trump fewer. Then let’s look at those problems. The election board has already responded to them and lets remember the officials are largely Republican. Thousands of instances of multiple photos of ballots. Yes, true. If someone forgets to sign an envelope they take a picture. If the voter comes in and signs they take another picture. So they always have multiple photos of some ballots. Are they counted multiple times? No. Next, some ballots are sent to one address but the voter votes from another. Yes, some military use ballots so this will always happen.

    One could keep going down the list but my favorite follows. They, Cyber Ninjas, used a site to enter names and birth years so see if people with the same names and birth years voted in more than one county. It happened 5,000 times. As the board pointed out it is common in a state of 7 million for people to have the same names and some of those will have the same birth years. Heck, I just pulled up my hospital network and found multiple instances of people with common names who also share a birth year.

    So why choose both year only, why not add in the month and day? Were they really too stupid to know this wouldn’t happen? Dont think so. I think they knew that if they put in the full dates they would find a tiny number. Instead of 5000 “problems” they find 50.

    Anyway, jan is proving my thesis. The results truly dont matter. No matter what they find there will be calls for another investigation. The only question is do we reach 8 like we had with Benghazi or do they stop sooner?

    Steve

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