Bad Takes: Donald Trump isn’t the only threat U.S. democracy is facing from within
Wikipedia Commons / Gage Skidmore
Dare we imagine the damage that Trump might have wrought had he actually been charismatic?
Editor’s Note: Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
Without much fanfare, save for a briefly trending Twitter hashtag, the Jan. 6 Committee met for the final time on Dec. 19 to recommend that the Justice Department charge former President Donald Trump with obstructing the certification of votes, conspiring to concoct a false slate of electors and providing aid and comfort to the insurrectionary riot at the Capitol two years ago.
That last criminal offense would bar Trump, under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, from ever again seeking any public office in the United States. Whether the referral for prosecution finally sticks to the Teflon Don, the act itself is unprecedented.
“Never before in history has any former president been referred to the Department of Justice for prosecution for criminal behavior,” presidential historian Michael Beschloss tweeted shortly after the end of the proceedings. “Not Andrew Johnson, not Richard Nixon.”
Lucky for us, Trump is not only an attempted rapist of democracy, he’s also a moron. December kept him busy selling $99 online baseball cards of himself and calling for “the termination of the Constitution” — both of which even many of his most cringeworthy supporters found cringeworthy.
But for the grace of stupidity, our institutions held. Dare we imagine the damage that Trump might have wrought had he actually been charismatic? As German playwright Bertolt Brecht reminded us, however, in the epilogue to ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’:
Don’t yet rejoice in his defeat!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.
“The bitch,” in Brecht’s allegory, is fascism. If a deranged political party wanted to, say, send a bogus vote tally to Congress, awarding whomever a Republican-controlled state legislature saw fit to crown as president in 2024, how would they manage to slip that by the state courts, which could well put the kibosh on such a blatant scheme to void the will of voters?
Cue up the Independent State Legislature (ISL) theory that was just argued before the Supreme Court last month in Moore v Harper. The idea here is, since administering elections is a federally bequeathed duty, state legislatures can go rogue and ignore their own state constitutions and the judicial review of state courts to do whatever the hell they damn well please — from egregiously gerrymandering districts to declaring any election won by a Satan-worshipping Democrat to be a fraud.
This lays the groundwork for a repeat of Trump legal adviser John Eastman’s failed plan to overturn the 2020 election — or to at least kick up enough constitutional crises and civil unrest to justify a Strong Man-slash-Very Stable Genius stepping in like Caesar to save the day.
Although even conservative justices on the bench seemed uniquely unmoved by the advocates of ISL theory during oral argument on Dec. 7, an official ruling isn’t expected before the summer of next year, and continuing to count on the gross incompetence of election deniers is risky business. Add to this that our Founding Fathers in their infinite wisdom left one tiny small insignificant detail out of our hallowed national user-agreement: technically, there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to vote. Whoops!
If you had to pick an Achilles heel in our republican system of government, ISL theory might be the one. But if you had to pick one more, what’s another weak spot that might usher authoritarian right-wing mobs into quasi-legitimate authority?
The Constitutional Sheriffs Movement (CSM). It rests on a novel theory dating back to the 1970s which holds that sovereignty begins at the county level and local sheriffs are therefore free to enforce or not enforce any laws they wish. From CSM organization’s own website: “The law enforcement powers held by the sheriff supersede those of any agent, officer, elected official or employee from any level of government when in the jurisdiction of the county.”
How widespread is this kooky project? As of 2021, 300 of the some 3,000 sheriffs around the country were self-avowed members. Should we classify them as proponents of “law and order” or of lawlessness? Same difference, it appears, when steering our nation over the cliff of a permanent state of emergency.
So if you’re searching for a scary story to tell before the holidays come to a close, skip the ghosts of Christmas past and watch a YouTube video that an outfit called Some More News dedicated to CSM titled “Maybe We Don’t Need Sheriffs.”
And a Vigilant New Year, fellow Antifa!
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