THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA

Today, the New York Times reports that leaders of the Republican Party — not just Trump — are planning to install a dictatorship if they regain the White House in 2025.

They will reengineer the executive branch of government so that administrative agencies are stripped of power and hollowed out. They will fire anyone not deemed loyal to Trump (or whoever gets nominated if Trump’s criminal problems get the better of him).

The Supreme Court has already been hard at work trying to neuter administrative agencies with its bogus “major questions doctrine — where the Court, using an unseen ruler and ignoring decades of SCOTUS precedent, decides that certain issues are “too important” for an agency to decide on its own, even if Congress has granted it authority.

So, here we are. The Supreme Court has gone rogue with a series of terrible opinions which ignore everything I was taught in law school about principles of common law — that judicial decisions are necessarily dependent upon precedent; otherwise, the “rule of law” is unknowable if every judicial panel, based on the whims of its members, can throw away what had been regarded as settled law.

I vividly and sorrowfully remember that Obama, during his first campaign for the White House, stated that the law was unequivocal: The Second Amendment provides a personal right for individuals to bear arms. There have been plenty of contrary opinions by equally qualified constitutional scholars, but Obama’s stance — apart from the political opportunism of trying to defang the rabid right — was an expression of adherence to the law since the Supreme Court had just held that such a right exists.

I remember, too, all of the justices nominated by Trump giving sworn testimony that Roe v. Wade was settled precedent which they would follow, no matter what their personal beliefs, because principles of stare decisis are critical to a functioning democracy. Then came Dobbs. And Christian web designers and affirmative action. When you have a stolen 6–3 supermajority, you don’t need to worry about no stinking precedent. Or judicial ethics, apparently.

Anyone looking for signs of a functioning democracy in Congress may as well be looking for unicorns. In the House, through Kevin McCarthy’s apparently fathomless well of vanity, we are left to the whims of the Christian Nationalist hard right wing as they continue their search for “foundational values” by beating up on trans kids, ensuring that women can’t control their reproductive rights, holding pep rallies for the Boys who stormed the Capitol and praising Putin’s democratic values.

The problem is not the 20-or-so fanatics in this gang. The problem is that 200 other House Republicans can’t find even momentary courage to say — even in the context of supporting the military — this is wrong.

The Senate is, in many ways, even worse. There are fewer overt idiots — although Senator Tuberville evens up that score pretty well on his own with his indifference to national security in pursuit of the right-wing social agenda. Also, honorary mention has to go to Josh (“I’m a regular guy with testicles”) Hawley, a Stanford and Yale Law graduate, who tweeted an alleged quote by Patrick Henry to support the idea that the founders intended the U.S. to be a fundamentalist Christian nation. The alleged Henry statement was actually written in 1956, in an anti-Semitic White Nationalist magazine article. Of course.

Worse than its personalities, the Senate is structurally broken by design. By allotting two senators to each state, voters in rural states like Idaho and Wyoming, have disproportionate influence compared to voters in California and New York. This overtly anti-democratic structure was borne of compromise when the nation was founded. In order to get the slave-owning states to ratify the constitution, they were guaranteed a voice in the senate by ensuring equal representation by state regardless of population.

The filibuster is not in the Constitution. It is a rule of accommodation — initially created by the Senate to protect minority rights. It has turned into a cudgel by the Right, stymieing progress on virtually anything of importance to a majority of Americans.

The net result is that we have a national population which is deeply committed to women’s right to choose, deeply committed to effective gun control, deeply concerned about climate change, while the Senate is literally out to (a three-martini) lunch with lobbyists.

If we somehow escape the intended Republican Christian Reich, structural reform of the Senate must be accomplished, first by eliminating the filibuster, then by biting the bullet to break up the most populous states into smaller ones (think Virginia-West Virginia) so that some semblance of democratic representation can be obtained. A constitutional amendment to allocate more senators by population could do the same thing, but no amendment can be ratified by two-thirds of the states in our current climate. By contrast, states can be created by a majority vote in Congress.

At this point, it should be apparent that the far Right is not even playing in the same stadium as the rest of us. People like Ron DeSantis are politically viable not because of his pleasing personality (that was sarcastic), but because right wing media has learned to tune voters in to the narrow-band 24-Hour Fear Channel. And because, like all Republicans (to be fair, Manchin and Sinema as well) corporate money rules the day.

Without Big Firearms and Big Oil funding campaigns under Citizens United, we would have a very different country than the one which keeps most of us up at night now. Many of us still value representative democracy. We march, we write our Congress people, we vote — thinking that our participation can matter. But Marjorie Taylor Greene is a “representative” in name only: The only constituents which matter to her are the corporate interests which fuel her propaganda machine.

We must remain focused. Trump may or may not get indicted for new things, maybe convicted, whatever. Third party candidates are a problem we need to address. They’re stalking horses for the Right. RFK, Jr.? Maybe a guy who was hooked on heroin for 12 years shouldn’t be guiding the rest of us on how scientists are trying to despoil our bodies with vaccines.

Joe Biden is old. And he is turning out to be one of our great presidents, having accomplished miracles against the headwinds of the current political environment. He deserves our support. And he needs to come around on unpacking the Supreme Court next term.

More to the immediate point, it must be recognized that the Republican scheme to install a dictatorship is a textbook example of an insurrection. Hopefully, Merrick Garland and Jack Smith are nearing the end of polite forbearance. Trump should be indicted for January 6 and more. But so should members of the Heritage Foundation and all others who are in on this Plot Against America.