“Constitutionalism”
Democratic Despotism:
“We find latent in their conception of law— and some have been publicly preaching this view— that law emanates solely from the will of the majority of the people, and can, therefore, be modified at any time to meet majority wishes. This doctrine is absolutely totalitarian, and is contrary to our basic conceptions of the source of law. We have seen that our political system is predicated on the doctrine that there are some immutable laws of nature and certain other divinely sanctioned rights, which the Constitution and our tradition recognized as being above and beyond the power of the majority, or of any other group of individuals or officials of the Government. There are, also, other rights, which because of man’s historic experience, that are specifically protected by the Constitution, and which can only be modified under the prescribed method set forth in the Constitution; and, consequently the majority- will is not free to modify them as it pleases, but only in the circumscribed manner prescribed by the Constitution. That is why our system has been characterized as a government of laws, not of men. That is the distinction between impersonal law and personal law. Americanism is the system of government by impersonal law: totalitarianism is the system of government by personal law.” (emphasis added) — Raoul E. Desvernine, vice-president of the American Liberty League, Democratic Despotism. 1936 (cited in “Business Organized as Powerr: The New Imperium in Imperio” see also “Constitutionalism: Political Defense of the Business Community during the New Deal Period.”)
“As stated in its constitution, the [American Liberty] League’s purposes were, among others, “to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States,” “to teach the necessity of respect for rights of persons and property,” “to encourage and protect individual and group initiative and enterprise, to foster the right to work, earn, save and acquire property, and to preserve the ownership and lawful use of property when acquired.” To win these goals the League went further than any previous liberty-loving, liberty-saving organization in our history. Crucial to its functioning was the National Lawyer’s Committee, a group of some 58 prominent attorneys, which issued reports or opinions in advance of Supreme Court decisions, opinions setting aside with solemnity and erudition one after another of the entire New Deal legislative mélange. The League went still further: this private court having, for example, formally declared the Wagner Labor Relations Act unconstitutional, openly advised employers to ignore its provisions.”
So let me get this straight: a democratically-elected Congress doesn’t have the authority to pass legislation that a self-appointed group of 58 elite lawyers doesn’t think is in accord with “some immutable laws of nature and certain other divinely sanctioned rights”? And this is what is meant by “a government of laws, not of [58] men”? Need I add “wealthy, white, conservative” men?
“Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”
The above is the core of what is commonly referred to as John Locke’s “labour theory of property.” It is a extraordinarily compelling narrative, resplendent with “self-evident truth” (“We hold these truths to be self evident…) and nearly indiscernible ambiguity (what does “labour” mean? what’s “mixing” got to do with it?).
It is widely acknowledged by Locke scholars that his economic views were essentially mercantilist. Keynes suggested that Locke stood with “one foot in the mercantilist world and one foot in the classical world.” However that may be, chapter five of Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government, “Of Property”, is relentlessly, incorrigibly, two-footedly mercantilist. And nobody seems to have noticed (except possibly John R. Commons [correction: C.B. MacPherson stressed Locke’s mercantilism in chapter 5]).
Why would this even matter?
Yeah, sure, we are told, ad nauseum, about how PROPERTY is the be all and end all of freedom, democracy and prosperity. A comic-book, social Darwinist pseudo-Locke lends the right-wing libertarian anti-tax mantra a veneer of moral righteousness and intellectual gravitas.And it’s crap.But there are bigger fish to fry: LABOUR. While socialists and even liberals may be inclined to circumscribe the sanctity of property, they are loath to gainsay the hallowed individualist framing of labour. Some folks even think it’s downright revolutionary to insist on the worker’s right to the whole product of labour. Labour, though, is only conventionally something an individual performs. Labour is social. Labour power is best understood as a common-pool resource.
The ideology of labour as an extension of the self is pervasive, persuasive and pernicious. From that perspective, solidarity is a voluntary act of magnanimity that can be “terminated at will” just like a redundant employee. As individuals, the relationship between workers is accidental; their relationships with the employer and with the state are what matters.
The inescapable mercantilism of Locke’s notion of natural law puts that individualist ideology in a different light. In his Essays on the Law of Nature (VIII), Locke was adamant that “the rightness of an action does not depend on its utility; on the contrary, its utility is a result of its rightness.” “It is impossible,” Locke wrote, “that the primary law of nature is such that its violation is unavoidable. Yet, if the private interest of each person is the basis of that law, the law will inevitably be broken…”
Here is where the mercantilism comes in: “when any man snatches for himself as much as he can, he takes away from another man’s heap the amount he adds to his own, and it is impossible for anyone to grow rich except at the expense of someone else.” To avoid any mistake, Locke reiterates his objection to positing “every man’s self interest the basis of natural law”:
“For in such a case each person is required to procure for himself and to retain in his possession the greatest possible number of useful things; and when this happens it is inevitable that the smallest possible number is left to some other person, because surely no gain falls to you which does not involve somebody else’s loss.”
An unequivocal zero-sum game. “No gain falls to you which does not involve somebody else’s loss.” “It is impossible for anyone to grow rich except at the expense of someone else.”
Now there are those who will object that Locke modified his views between the earlier Essays on the Law of Nature and his later Second Treatise on Civil Government. Not so. In the latter, and especially in the chapter “Of Property,” Money plays a pivotal role in repealing what has become known as the spoilage limitation:
“He that gathered a hundred bushels of acorns or apples, had thereby a property in them… He was only to look, that he used them before they spoiled, else he took more than his share, and robbed others. And indeed it was a foolish thing, as well as dishonest, to hoard up more than he could make use of.”
Someone who took so much that it spoiled before he could use it did a foolish, dishonest thing and robbed others. In short, if you take so much that it rots, it was never yours to take.
How does Money nullify that limitation? The person who gathers more perishable goods than he can use can exchange it for durable Gold or Silver. Problem solved.
Locke was a staunch metallist who insisted on the intrinsic value of Money as represented by its weight and fineness. This is not some incidental biographical trivia. Locke’s well documented views on Money were decisive in the monetary reform and re-minting of British coinage in the 1690s.
According to Locke, it was not the absolute quantity of Gold and Silver a nation held that determined its wealth but the proportion of Gold and Silver it held relative to the holdings of the rest of the world:
“Riches do not consist in having more Gold and Silver, but in having more in proportion, than the rest of the World, or than our Neighbours, whereby we are enabled to procure to our selves a greater Plenty of the Conveniencies of Life than comes within the reach of Neighbouring kingdoms and States, who, sharing the Gold and Silver of the World in a less proportion, want the means of Plenty and Power, and so are Poorer.”
A zero-sum game. What was “one man’s gain is another’s loss” in useful things is mitigated by its transmutation into metal Money where one man’s gain is still another’s loss but is at least not a net loss (through waste). This later proviso, though, only holds good for Money with an intrinsic value of specified weight and fineness.
Postscript
Some readers may have wondered at the parenthetical reference to John R. Commons back in the second paragraph. Commons didn’t specifically address the passages I cited from the Essays on the Law of Nature. In fact, it wasn’t published until 20 years later. Nor did he discuss Locke’s influential writings on Money. But he did make a point in a reply to a critic that is germane to my argument here.
The context of Commons’s observations is crucial to the significance of his remark, so I will reproduce a substantial excerpt here:
My point of view is indeed personal, as was said by Professor Homan of all institutional economists. It is simply my own experience in collective action from which I drew a theory of the part played by collective action on individual action. It may or may not fit other people’s ideas of institutionalism. It started, indeed, with my trade-union membership and my later participation in labor arbitration; then turned to drafting a public utility law designed to ascertain and maintain reasonable values and reasonable practices; then to drafting and participating in administration of an industrial commission law with the similar purpose of reasonable practices applied to employers and employees; then to representing the western states before the Federal Trade Commission on the Pittsburgh Plus case of discrimination; then to aiding the House Committee on Congressman Strong’s bill for stabilization of prices; meanwhile administering and developing a plan for unemployment insurance finally enacted into law.
I do not see how anyone going through these 45 years of participation could fail to arrive at two inferences, conflict of interest and collective action. Even the state itself turned out to be merely collective action of those in possession of sovereignty.
Meanwhile I was necessarily studying hundreds of decisions, mainly of the United States Supreme Court, endeavoring to discover on what principles they decided disputes of conflicting interests under the clauses of the Constitution relating to due process, to taking property and liberty, and to equal treatment. I found that none of the economists had taken this point of view, and none of them except Professor Ely, had made any contributions that would make it possible to fit legal institutions into economics or into this constitutional scheme of American judicial sovereignty.
Drumroll… Now here’s his point:
Going back over the economists from John Locke to the orthodox school of the present day, I found they always had a conflicting meaning of wealth, namely a material thing and the ownership of that thing. But ownership, at least in its modern meaning of intangible property, means power to restrict production on account of abundance while the material things arise from power to increase the abundance of things by production, even overproduction.
A simple point but a profound and subtle one. Ownership is not the same as the material thing owned. But beyond that, the restrictive implication of ownership is contrary to the abundance implication of the material things owned.
Not that complicated.
We have the Bill of Rights precisely because we are not a democracy. The Bill was designed to protect the majority from the rules of non-proportionality in the states and senate.
The confusion arises from our misconception that this is a democracy. It is specifically stated in the Constitutional structure, we are basically a republic.
Probably most of the problems we have with government arise from this misconception. Who promulgates this misconception? Why do prominent pundits act as if they never read the Constitution? What is the mental block? Mass mental illness? Mass illiteracy? Or is it just plain fraud?
Republic: “a state in which the supreme power resides in the people.”
Democracy: “government by the people.”
Not that complicated. Totally different things.
not that complicated… the subtitle of the second article I cite, “imperium in imperio” actually alludes to the distinction anonymous thinks is so significant. What that Latin (“republic” is from the Latin res publica) phrase refers to is “a group of people who owe utmost fealty to their leader(s), subordinating the interests of the larger group to the authority of the internal group’s leader(s). 2. A “fifth column” organization operating against the organization within which they seemingly reside.”
Obviously, a democracy and a republic are not identical because each refers respectively to a different model, Greek or Roman. Confounding the “not that complicated” argument is the fact that Thomas Jefferson ran for President as a “Democratic Republican.” Jefferson, incidentally, didn’t attend the Constitutional Convention as he was ambassador to France at the time.
Stretching the notion of imperium in imperio to cover crackpot ideas, the notion that this catch phrase or that TRUMPS conscientious deliberation is hogwash. “A republic, not a democracy” is puerile drivel. The right to ownership of private property is not “divinely sanctioned” any more than the Pope is infallible or monarchs rule by divine right.
“Let us not hedge about one thing,” @bartongellman writes. “Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede.” Who will stop him from throwing the election into chaos?
What If Trump Refuses to Concede?
The Election That Could Break America
The Atlantic – November 2020
If the vote is close, Donald Trump could
easily throw the election into chaos and
subvert the result. Who will stop him?
There is a cohort of close observers of our presidential elections, scholars and lawyers and political strategists, who find themselves in the uneasy position of intelligence analysts in the months before 9/11. As November 3 approaches, their screens are blinking red, alight with warnings that the political system does not know how to absorb. They see the obvious signs that we all see, but they also know subtle things that most of us do not. Something dangerous has hove into view, and the nation is lurching into its path.
The danger is not merely that the 2020 election will bring discord. Those who fear something worse take turbulence and controversy for granted. The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery.
Something has to give, and many things will, when the time comes for casting, canvassing, and certifying the ballots. Anything is possible, including a landslide that leaves no doubt on Election Night. But even if one side takes a commanding early lead, tabulation and litigation of the “overtime count”—millions of mail-in and provisional ballots—could keep the outcome unsettled for days or weeks.
If we are lucky, this fraught and dysfunctional election cycle will reach a conventional stopping point in time to meet crucial deadlines in December and January. The contest will be decided with sufficient authority that the losing candidate will be forced to yield. Collectively we will have made our choice—a messy one, no doubt, but clear enough to arm the president-elect with a mandate to govern.
As a nation, we have never failed to clear that bar. But in this election year of plague and recession and catastrophized politics, the mechanisms of decision are at meaningful risk of breaking down. Close students of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a constitutional crisis that would leave the nation without an authoritative result. We have no fail-safe against that calamity. Thus the blinking red lights.
“We could well see a protracted postelection struggle in the courts and the streets if the results are close,” says Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the UC Irvine School of Law and the author of a recent book called Election Meltdown. “The kind of election meltdown we could see would be much worse than 2000’s Bush v. Gore case.”
A lot of people, including Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, have misconceived the nature of the threat. They frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. They generally conclude, as Biden has, that in that event the proper authorities “will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”
The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that uncertainty to hold on to power.
Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.
“We are not prepared for this at all,” Julian Zelizer, a Princeton professor of history and public affairs, told me. “We talk about it, some worry about it, and we imagine what it would be. But few people have actual answers to what happens if the machinery of democracy is used to prevent a legitimate resolution to the election.”
Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede.
Nineteen summers ago, when counterterrorism analysts warned of a coming attack by al‑Qaeda, they could only guess at a date. This year, if election analysts are right, we know when the trouble is likely to come. Call it the Interregnum: the interval from Election Day to the next president’s swearing-in. It is a temporal no-man’s-land between the presidency of Donald Trump and an uncertain successor—a second term for Trump or a first for Biden. The transfer of power we usually take for granted has several intermediate steps, and they are fragile.
The Interregnum comprises 79 days, carefully bounded by law. Among them are “the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December,” this year December 14, when the electors meet in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots for president; “the 3d day of January,” when the newly elected Congress is seated; and “the sixth day of January,” when the House and Senate meet jointly for a formal count of the electoral vote. In most modern elections these have been pro forma milestones, irrelevant to the outcome. This year, they may not be.
“Our Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it,” the legal scholar Lawrence Douglas wrote in a recent book titled simply Will He Go? The Interregnum we are about to enter will be accompanied by what Douglas, who teaches at Amherst, calls a “perfect storm” of adverse conditions. We cannot turn away from that storm. On November 3 we sail toward its center mass. If we emerge without trauma, it will not be an unbreakable ship that has saved us.
Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede. Not under any circumstance. Not during the Interregnum and not afterward. If compelled in the end to vacate his office, Trump will insist from exile, as long as he draws breath, that the contest was rigged.
Trump’s invincible commitment to this stance will be the most important fact about the coming Interregnum. It will deform the proceedings from beginning to end. We have not experienced anything like it before. …
Naturally, the “strict constructionist” “Constitutionalists” will be the last ones to have misgivings about the violent seizure of power by a gangster. Because “natural law” and “divine sanction.” Democrats, meanwhile, will hope a magical good Republican will appear to come to the aid of the
partyrepublic.The Atlantic: … the Interregnum: the interval from Election Day to the next president’s swearing-in. It is a temporal no-man’s-land between the presidency of Donald Trump and an uncertain successor—a second term for Trump or a first for Biden. The transfer of power we usually take for granted has several intermediate steps, and they are fragile.
The Interregnum comprises 79 days, carefully bounded by law. Among them are “the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December,” this year December 14, when the electors meet in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots for president; “the 3d day of January,” when the newly elected Congress is seated; and “the sixth day of January,” when the House and Senate meet jointly for a formal count of the electoral vote. In most modern elections these have been pro forma milestones, irrelevant to the outcome. This year, they may not be.
“Our Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it,” the legal scholar Lawrence Douglas wrote in a recent book titled simply Will He Go? The Interregnum we are about to enter will be accompanied by what Douglas, who teaches at Amherst, calls a “perfect storm” of adverse conditions. We cannot turn away from that storm. On November 3 we sail toward its center mass. If we emerge without trauma, it will not be an unbreakable ship that has saved us.
Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede. Not under any circumstance. Not during the Interregnum and not afterward. If compelled in the end to vacate his office, Trump will insist from exile, as long as he draws breath, that the contest was rigged.
Trump’s invincible commitment to this stance will be the most important fact about the coming Interregnum. It will deform the proceedings from beginning to end. We have not experienced anything like it before.
Trump’s behavior and declared intent leave no room to suppose that he will accept the public’s verdict if the vote is going against him. He lies prodigiously—to manipulate events, to secure advantage, to dodge accountability, and to ward off injury to his pride. An election produces the perfect distillate of all those motives.
Pathology may exert the strongest influence on Trump’s choices during the Interregnum. Well-supported arguments, some of them in this magazine, have made the case that Trump fits the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy and narcissism. Either disorder, by its medical definition, would render him all but incapable of accepting defeat. …
How will he decide when the time comes? Trump has answered that, actually. At a rally in Delaware, Ohio, in the closing days of the 2016 campaign, he began his performance with a signal of breaking news. “Ladies and gentlemen, I want to make a major announcement today. I would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supporters, and to all the people of the United States, that I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election.” He paused, then made three sharp thrusts of his forefinger to punctuate the next words: “If … I … win!” Only then did he stretch his lips in a simulacrum of a smile.
The question is not strictly hypothetical. Trump’s respect for the ballot box has already been tested. In 2016, with the presidency in hand, having won the Electoral College, Trump baldly rejected the certified tallies that showed he had lost the popular vote by a margin of 2,868,692. He claimed, baselessly but not coincidentally, that at least 3 million undocumented immigrants had cast fraudulent votes for Hillary Clinton.
All of which is to say that there is no version of the Interregnum in which Trump congratulates Biden on his victory. He has told us so. “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention on August 24. Unless he wins a bona fide victory in the Electoral College, Trump’s refusal to concede—his mere denial of defeat—will have cascading effects. …
@Sandwichman,
In history their have been lots of republics, but no democracies since an apparent few in prehistoric tribal times. Notable were the lake dwellers because their remains reveal absolutely no evidence of violent death. Republics are about the control given by the use of sex, money, and guns, except for the few republics that existed before guns. Republics provide power beyond the scope conceived by birth alone. Power remains unchanged as does the need for some sort of deception that allows the few to rule the many.
When the US Constitution was ratified there was great public interest, but no so much public concern. The majority of the public lived subsistence lives away from the reach of state intervention, which was mostly about keeping the US free from hungry foreign sovereigns and regulating the terms of trade, i.e., protectionist tariffs. George Washington’s Whiskey Tax to pay off the war debt had been enough to insight rebellion.
@Ron,
“… but no so much public concern…”
[OK, there was a lot of public concern about excessive government power in hands of the few. Even then people knew that “Power corrupts.” What we have today they would have never signed off on.]
@Ron,
P.S., and the few hands in which power would be concentrated were terribly concerned about “the tyranny of the majority,” which would not be so kind to the men who would be kings of finance and industry, or even slavery.
IOW, property rights and republicanism live in wedded bliss. Socialization requires more democratization.
[Look out, it is sprinkling all day and I wanted to cut the grass or at least the acre and a half surrounding our house.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republicanism
Republicanism is a political ideology centered on citizenship in a state organized as a republic. Historically, it ranges from the rule of a representative minority or oligarchy to popular sovereignty. It has had different definitions and interpretations which vary significantly based on historical context and methodological approach.
Republicanism may also refer to the non-ideological scientific approach to politics and governance. As the republican thinker and second president of the United States John Adams stated in the introduction to his famous Defense of the Constitution,[1] the “science of politics is the science of social happiness” and a republic is the form of government arrived at when the science of politics is appropriately applied to the creation of a rationally designed government. Rather than being ideological, this approach focuses on applying a scientific methodology to the problems of governance through the rigorous study and application of past experience and experimentation in governance. This is the approach that may best be described to apply to republican thinkers such as Niccolò Machiavelli (as evident in his Discourses on Livy), John Adams, and James Madison.
The word “republic” derives from the Latin noun-phrase res publica (thing of the people), which referred to the system of government that emerged in the 6th century BCE following the expulsion of the kings from Rome by Lucius Junius Brutus and Collatinus.[2]
This form of government in the Roman state collapsed in the latter part of the 1st century BCE, giving way to what was a monarchy in form, if not in name. Republics recurred subsequently, with, for example, Renaissance Florence or early modern Britain. The concept of a republic became a powerful force in Britain’s North American colonies, where it contributed to the American Revolution. In Europe, it gained enormous influence through the French Revolution and through the First French Republic of 1792–1804….
[Yep, republicanism does not need to be ideological. It can as easily be pure materialism and lust for power like Machiavelli.]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_republics
This is a list of republics. For antiquity (or later in the case of societies that did not refer to modern terminology to qualify their form of government) the assessment of whether a state organisation is a republic is based on retrospective analysis by historians and political theorists. For more recent systems of government, worldwide organisations with a broad political acceptance (such as the United Nations), can provide information on whether or not a sovereign state is referred to as a republic.
Contents
1 List by period
1.1 Antiquity
1.2 Middle Ages
1.2.1 Maritime republics
1.2.2 Free imperial cities
1.3 Early modernity
1.3.1 Sister republics
1.4 Modernity
1.4.1 19th century
1.4.2 20th century
1.4.3 21st century and later
2 List by type
2.1 Arab republics
2.2 Confederal republics
2.3 Crowned republics
2.4 Democratic republics
2.5 Federal republics
2.6 Islamic republics
2.7 People’s republics
2.7.1 Current people’s republics
2.7.2 Former people’s republics
2.8 Socialist republics
2.9 Unitary republics…
****
[Holy ____ pot full, Batman.]
Apparently before POTUS Trump racism and poverty did not exist and everyone was equally well represented under the law despite their ability to pay, there were rainbows and lollipops every day, and happen children everywhere just watched kittens and puppies play.
What should be important now is Joe Biden, the Democratic Party, and their 2020 political platform. Let’s Dump Trump and move on rather than inadvertently canonize a stupid thug among his supporters.
IOW, let’s make a New New Deal.
Trump Doubles Down on Refusal to Commit to Peaceful Transition
For a second straight day, President Trump rejected a pledge to respect the election results, repeating baseless claims that the vote would be a “big scam.”
Republicans scrambled to make clear that their party would respect the Constitution, without directly rebuking him. Democrats were less restrained.
Trump Again Sows Doubt About Election as GOP Scrambles to Assure Voters
NY Times – September 24
WASHINGTON — President Trump declined for a second straight day to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he lost the election, repeating baseless assertions that the voting would be a “big scam,” even as leading Republicans scrambled to assure the public that their party would respect the Constitution.
“We want to make sure that the election is honest, and I’m not sure that it can be,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Thursday before leaving the White House for North Carolina.
The president doubled down on his stance just hours after prominent Republicans made it clear that they were committed to the orderly transfer of power, without directly rebuking him. “The winner of the November 3rd election will be inaugurated on January 20th,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, wrote on Twitter early Thursday. “There will be an orderly transition just as there has been every four years since 1792.”
Democrats were far less restrained, comparing Mr. Trump’s comments to those of an authoritarian leader and warning Americans to take his stance seriously. …
At Pentagon, Fears Grow That Trump Will Pull Military Into Election Unrest
NY Times – September 25
WASHINGTON — Senior Pentagon leaders have a lot to worry about — Afghanistan, Russia, Iraq, Syria, Iran, China, Somalia, the Korean Peninsula. But chief among those concerns is whether their commander in chief might order American troops into any chaos around the coming elections.
President Trump gave officials no solace on Wednesday and Thursday when he again refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power no matter who wins the election, and on Thursday, he doubled down by saying he was not sure the election could be “honest.” His hedging, along with his expressed desire in June to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to send active-duty troops onto American streets to quell protests over the killing of George Floyd, has incited deep anxiety among senior military and Defense Department leaders, who insist they will do all they can to keep the armed forces out of the elections.
“I believe deeply in the principle of an apolitical U.S. military,” General Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in written answers to questions from House lawmakers released last month. “In the event of a dispute over some aspect of the elections, by law, U.S. courts and the U.S. Congress are required to resolve any disputes, not the U.S. military. I foresee no role for the U.S. armed forces in this process.” …
But senior leaders at the Pentagon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that they were talking among themselves about what to do if Mr. Trump, who will still be president from Election Day to Inauguration Day, invokes the Insurrection Act and tries to send troops into the streets, as he repeatedly threatened to do during the protests against police brutality and systemic racism. Both General Milley and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper opposed the move then, and Mr. Trump backed down.
The concerns are not unfounded. The Insurrection Act, a two-century-old law, enables a president to send in active-duty military troops to quell disturbances over the objections of governors. Mr. Trump, who refers to the armed forces as “my military” and “my generals,” has lumped them with other supporters like Bikers for Trump, who could offer backup in the face of opposition. …
Activating the Well Regulated Militia, here in Massachusetts
Baker activates Mass. National Guard to help ‘maintain public safety during large scale events’
via @BostonGlobe – September 24
Governor Charlie Baker on Thursday activated the Massachusetts National Guard to assist cities and towns if they need help maintaining public safety during “large scale events,” according to a copy of his order and the state Executive Office of Public Safety and Security.
“Governor Baker today signed an order activating up to 1,000 members of the Massachusetts National Guard in the event that municipal leaders require assistance to protect opportunities to exercise first amendment rights and to maintain public safety during large scale events,” said an EOPSS spokesperson in a statement. “National Guard personnel are deployed only at the request of, and in coordination with, the communities seeking support.” …
A spokesman for the state’s executive office of public safety declined further comment beyond its initial statement, including on whether any cities or towns had requested aid from the National Guard.
Baker said in the order that he was exercising his authority under state law to activate the guard to provide “emergency assistance for the preservation of life and property, preservation of order, and to afford protection to persons.”
“This activation includes up to 1,000 military personnel of the Massachusetts National Guard and may be increased by further order,” said the notice signed by the governor. …
Vaguely related?
‘Wrong Charlie!’ Trump takes issue
with Governor Charlie Baker’s stance on mail-in voting
… Charlie Baker said on Thursday he approves of mail-in voting and he voted by mail in the Sept. 1 primary, calling it “absentee balloting on steroids.”
Nearly 813,000, roughly 47 percent, of voters that cast ballots in the Massachusetts state primary did so by mail, the secretary of state’s office said.
“It worked just fine,” Baker said. “The same way it worked just fine across the rest of the country. . . . Mail-in balloting has been with us forever.” …
Republicans are distancing themselves from Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power
via @BostonGlobe – September 24
President Trump again refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power when asked about it during a press conference on Wednesday, sparking alarm from Democrats and prompting some top Republicans to reassure the public that a pillar of American democracy would not be shaken in November.
Repeating a refrain he made in 2016, Trump Wednesday would not commit to accepting the election results and suggested that if mail-in ballots were not allowed, he would win, and therefore there would be no need for a transfer of power.
“We’re going to have to see what happens,” Trump said at a news conference, responding to a question from a reporter about whether he’d commit to a peaceful transfer. “You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster.”
“You’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer frankly,” Trump said. “There’ll be a continuation. The ballots are out of control, you know it, and you know, who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else.”
It was a stunning comment from a commander-in-chief, and one that the New York Times reported Thursday no other president in modern history has made. Senator Bernie Sanders, in a speech Thursday in which he described the 2020 election as one between “Donald Trump and democracy,” said that the custom of a peaceful transition of power in the US has held up through war and depression, and called it a “miracle.” …
Republicans Thursday sought to downplay the president’s remarks, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tweeting his confidence that there would be a peaceful transition of power, though he did not denounce Trump’s remarks.
But some other Republicans were more direct in their criticism. Senator Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah, slammed Trump’s comments as “unthinkable and unacceptable.”
Republican Governor Charlie Baker also voiced his displeasure, telling reporters during a press conference on Thursday that it was “appalling and outrageous” for an elected official to suggest “even for a minute that if they lose an election they’re not going to leave. Period.”
What Senate Republicans are saying after Trump refused to commit to an orderly transfer of power
Washington Post via @BostonGlobe – September 25
WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans insisted Thursday that there will be an orderly transition of power — though many failed to mention President Donald Trump’s refusal to commit to the hallmark of a democracy if he loses the election.
… Here is the reaction from Senate Republicans. Thirty responded via tweet or when questioned by reporters or both. Twenty-three have not responded to emails or calls from The Washington Post:
(Basically, ‘We are going to have a peaceful transition. It’s what we do.’)
Lamar Alexander of Tennessee
Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee
Roy Blunt of Missouri
John Boozman of Arkansas
Richard Burr of North Carolina
Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia
Susan Collins of Maine
Kevin Cramer of North Dakota
John Cornyn of Texas
Ted Cruz of Texas
Deb Fischer of Nebraska
Cory Gardner of Colorado
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina
Charles Grassley of Iowa
James Lankford of Oklahoma
Mike Lee of Utah
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky
Jerry Moran of Kansas
Rob Portman of Ohio
Pat Roberts of Kansas
Mitt Romney of Utah
Mike Rounds of South Dakota
Marco Rubio of Florida
Ben Sasse of Nebraska
Rick Scott of Florida
Richard Shelby of Alabama
Dan Sullivan of Alaska
John Thune of South Dakota
Thom Tillis of North Carolina
Sen. Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania
What Senate Republicans are saying after Trump refused to commit to an orderly transfer of power
Washington Post via @BostonGlobe – September 25
WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans insisted Thursday that there will be an orderly transition of power — though many failed to mention President Donald Trump’s refusal to commit to the hallmark of a democracy if he loses the election.
… Here is the reaction from Senate Republicans. Thirty responded via tweet or when questioned by reporters or both. Twenty-three have not responded to emails or calls from The Washington Post:
(Basically, ‘We are going to have a peaceful transition. It’s what we do.’)
,a href=”http://a.msn.com/01/en-us/BB19q3Vr”>Woodward: Trump rooting for ‘quadruple train wreck on Nov. 3’
Journalist Bob Woodward on Thursday said that President Trump declining to engage in a peaceful transition of power if he loses the election would be “putting a dagger in the Constitution,” adding that he thinks that the president is “almost wishing for a quadruple train wreck on Nov. 3” in regards to mail-in voting.
“We have a president who has forsaken his basic duty to protect the country, to tell the truth and organize and plan, have some theory of the case what is he going to do as president,” Woodward said in an appearance on MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House.”
“Time and time again we know, and I’ve got more endless examples of this, of him making decisions on impulse, tweeting, driving people crazy who work for him and then they leave or he fires them by tweet and he says the cruelest things.”
“I think the president in all of the things he’s doing here has forsaken a larger duty which is a moral duty to do what’s best for the country,” he added. “This is a moral failure and a leadership failure. This idea about the election he’s predicting and almost wishing for a quadruple train wreck on Nov. 3” …
Woodward: Trump rooting for ‘quadruple train wreck on Nov. 3’
@Fred,
Sometimes we forget what the rule of law really depends upon and fall upon some elite academic’s interpretation that is nice, neat pretty, and false. Liberals really hate to admit that laws can only rule if laws are enforced at the end of a gun barrel. Do you think that the oath of the Secret Service is declaring their fealty to a moronic sitting POTUS or to the citizens of the US?
https://trello.com/c/Fb9PFZ16/8-oath-of-office
“I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
*****************************
The Secret Service will protect POTUS with their very lives as long as he is POTUS, but if he stays beyond his welcome then he is committing treason right in front of God and everybody. Even if Donnie were wealthy enough to buy his Secret Service Detail, he cannot afford the entire US Marine Corps. Trump is a legend in his own mind, but we really need to get him out of our minds. If something needs to be done latter on then it will be. If Trump says that he will not surrender the office of POTUS peacefully then I say let him have it his own way. Head first or feet first are his only choices and I have no problem with that.