The power of the president is enormous – and may be even more so with presidential emergency action documents (PEADs), classified orders granting vast presidential authority in response to extraordinary situations. PEADs are so secret even Congress cannot see them – and that troubles constitutional scholars. "Sunday Morning" special contributor Ted Koppel reports.
If you watch it, you'll see that the only person who is not troubled by the vast powers claimed by the 48-odd PEADs (or up to 60) is John Woo, the Torturers' Lawyer, a man who, if the US was not so powerful, would have been tried in The Hague a long time ago for crimes against humanity.
So what happens if Trump uses those powers to suspend habeus corpus, to postpone or cancel the election, to round up his enemies? Short answer: Nobody knows.
During the 1970s, when military officers engaged in informal discussions in the wake of the Nixon Administration, it was the majority consensus that, if Nixon had done such things, that the military would have obeyed their oath of fealty to the Constitution and moved against Nixon.
I don't have that confidence today.
If Trump does those things, I am certain that the majority of those self-styled Constitution-loving patriots will all fall in line behind Trump. They will rationalize Trump's trashing of the Constitution as "pwning the libtards" or some other bit of nonsense.
Will Trump go quietly, assuming that he loses? We can only hope, especially if we can promise him that he'll have more time to play golf.
But if he doesn't, the question will be whether or not those who swore an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, are loyal to their oath or to Trump.
Either way, you may want to have supplies on hand.
And keep your powder dry.
60/40 is my thinking, I just don’t know.
ReplyDeleteUnrelated, but if you don’t mind the question. The revolver in the picture associated with this story...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/15/golden-state-killer-investigation-carol-daly-detective
...not being a wheel gun type, it looks a bit “different”. What am I missing?
Smith & Wesson revolver with a custom bull barrel for service pistol matches. The picture further down in the article shows her holding the gun in an office; the photo is reserved (look at her shirt placket and the dial on the telephone).
ReplyDeleteParallels with the Roman Empire from a piece by Eric Schnurer
ReplyDeletehttps://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2020/08/another-lesson-roman-empire/615076/
… the approaching decline of the Roman Republic, a half-millennium earlier. As I wrote last year, “the increasing economic inequality, the increasing political polarization, the total eclipse of ‘the greater good’ by what we’d call ‘special interests,’ the turn toward political violence” all looked “a lot like the present moment to me.” I was thinking of the period dominated by the attempted reforms of the Gracchi brothers—a tag-team somewhat analogous to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren —roughly a century before the Republic’s ultimate fall into dictatorship.
I hardly expected then that within about half a year, Donald Trump would manage to fast-forward the country through half a century of Roman history, to the doorstep of the Civil Wars that destroyed what little was left of Republican Rome.
...
Many have expressed concerns for some time that Trump would attempt to remain in office if he were defeated, and might rally armed militias to his cause (I’ve raised this concern myself since the night Trump was elected) … But even if he does leave, the likely Trump post-presidency that fits best with his personality and history—not to mention that of the Romans—may be even more troubling and dangerous.
Trump, if he were to lose, might well leave the White House—he never liked the building to begin with, and doesn’t like the actual work of the presidency—but never concede that he lost. He might not be the real President anymore … but he could play one on TV. If he continued to insist that he were the actual, legitimate President of the United States, there can be little doubt that tens of millions of Americans would believe him. And unlike your average crank, Trump has the resources and ability to turn this into a 24/7 TV reality program through his own television network, even further to the right and more reliably sycophantic than Fox—which he reportedly was considering launching had he not, unexpectedly, won the 2016 election.
Imagine an alternative President, with at least as much media reach as the one actually in the White House, with an unshakably devoted following of perhaps as much as one-third of the country, and perhaps even his own private armed forces—Sulla with a TV station funded by his fellow reactionary patricians, with his own camo-clad stormtroopers picking up and disappearing populare protestors in unmarked vans—and the present looks even more like the late Republic than when I wrote about this less than a year ago. If this occurs, the country would descend into dueling polities, dueling realities, and dueling war zones.
Worth a read.
This is the sort of thing I was concerned about way back in the Cheney Administration: a president dissolving congress as obstructionist, declaring Martial Law and "postpone" the election.
ReplyDeleteI was mocked.
Now that is an interesting take stew. I've long figured that something like that could happen. Especially having his own army.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting idea, but one which I doubt would work...but the Romans may have thought the same.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Comrade. The bull barrel threw me...I had figured that it seemed a Smith based upon a comment by Gun Jesus and the location of the barrel lug, but that chunky barrel (with different sights) made identification tough using any comparison pictures..
I think that at the very least the lame duck is gonna be a wild ride.
ReplyDelete-Doug in Sugar Pine
...and to think, all this insanity, corruption and idiocy, all this collateral damage could have been avoided if someone had beat the ever loving crap out DJT when he was a kid, so he understood that real life misbehaving has real life consequences.
ReplyDeleteDamn Stewart, thanks for that nightmare scenario, but interesting theory. I only hope I’m in country come January to defend home and hearth if need be. As an amateur student of Roman history, even yesterday I might have discarded your post.......but not today.
ReplyDeleteCI, yet another reason to vote for Biden, while holding your nose, and work on moderate D & R friends to help establish a genuine third party going forward. Let the Trumpenburg crash the R’s and split the party on recovery, and leverage that into your dream.
ReplyDeleteSort of how thw Whigs burned out?
DeletePlease....would someone hit fast forward on the remote? I want to fast forward through this part of the movie.
ReplyDelete