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Category Archives: History

The Insurrection Was Only One Step in the Attempted Coup

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The radical reactionaries on the Supreme Court didn’t get a chance to overturn the 2020 election, although given how five Republican justices handed the presidency to George Bush in 2000, they might have been willing. 

It’s important to distinguish between the attempted coup and the January 6th insurrection. Sidney Blumenthal, a former Clinton advisor, explained the distinction on January 6, 2022, for The Guardian:

The insurrection was not the coup itself. It was staged as the coup was failing. The insurrection and the coup were distinct, but the insurrection emerged from the coup. It has been a common conceptual error to consider the insurrection alone to be the coup. The coup, however, was an elaborate plot developed over months to claim that the votes in the key swing states were fraudulent, for Mike Pence as the presiding officer of the joint session of the Congress to declare on that basis that the certification of the presidential election on the constitutionally mandated date could not be done, to force that day to pass into a twilight zone of irresolution, for House Republicans to hold the floor brandishing the endless claims of fraud, to move the decision to the safe harbor of the House of Representatives, voting by states, with a majority of 26 controlled by the Republican party, to deny both the popular vote and the electoral college vote to retain T____ in office, for protests to breakout at federal buildings, and for the president to invoke the Insurrection Act to impose law and order.

Presumably, any gesture to forestall the coup by the joint chiefs would be communicated at once to T____ from his agent, Kash Patel, a former aide to far-right representative Devin Nunes), sworn enemy of the “Deep State”, embedded as chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, and presidential orders would be issued to countermand. The rally on 6 January – “will be wild”, T____ promised – was a last-ditch attempt to intimidate the vice-president with the threat of violence into fulfilling his indispensable role in the coup, to lend support to the Republicans objecting to certification, and to delay the proceedings into a constitutional no man’s land. …

The insurrection may also have been intended to provide a pretext for precipitating clashes with anti-T____ demonstrators, following the example of the street violence and multiple knife stabbings perpetrated in Washington by the neo-Nazi Proud Boys chanting “1776” on 12 December, and which would then be an excuse for invoking the Insurrection Act. In the criminal contempt citation of Meadows for his refusal to testify before the select committee investigating the US Capitol attack, the committee noted that Meadows sent an email the day before the assault to an unnamed individual “that the national guard would be present to ‘protect pro-T____ people’ and that many more would be available on standby”. From whom would “pro-T____ people” be protected?

In the midst of the attack, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, managed to reach a preoccupied T____, who was riveted viewing the unfolding chaos on television at the White House, closely monitoring whether the coup would finally succeed, taking phone calls from Jim Jordan and a host of collaborators, and fending off urgent pleas to call it off … T____’s first reply to McCarthy was to repeat “the falsehood that it was antifa that had breached the Capitol”, according to the Republican representative Jaime Herrera Beutler.

McCarthy argued: “It’s not Antifa, it’s Maga. I know. I was there.” “Well, Kevin,” said T____, “I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” “Who the fuck do you think you are talking to?” McCarthy inquired in an uncharacteristic display of testosterone that soon was replaced with his regular order of servility …. The absence of antifa, and McCarthy’s refusal in the heat of the moment to lend credence to the phantom menace, may have condemned any false-flag thought of invoking the Insurrection Act. Meanwhile, the bayonet-ready national guard idly awaited orders for hours to quell the actual insurrection. …

The coup was hardly T____’s full-blown brainchild. It was packaged for him. It was adapted, enhanced and intensified from longstanding Republican strategies for voter suppression. The coup was a variation on the theme from a well-worn playbook. T____ eagerly grasped for the plan handed to him.

More than a year before the election of 2020, in August 2019, conservative operatives in closely connected rightwing organizations began preparing a strategy for disputing election results. A “Political Process Working Group” focused on “election law and ballot integrity” was launched by Lisa Nelson, the CEO of the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), heavily funded by the Koch brothers’ dark money syndicate, the Donors Trust. …

The investigative reporter Anne Nelson, in her book Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right, describes the CNP as a nexus of “the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of western plutocrats and the strategy of rightwing Republican political operatives”.

A board member of the CNP, Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer at the center of a host of rightwing groups, assumed control over the Alec-originated project and moved it forward. Mitchell was instrumental in devising the blueprint for the coup. On 10 December 2020, 65 leading members of the CNP signed a succinct step-by-step summary of the completely elaborated plot that went little noticed except on the coup-friendly rightwing website Gateway Pundit:

The evidence overwhelmingly shows officials in key battleground states – as the result of a coordinated pressure campaign by Democrats and allied groups – violated the constitution, state and federal law in changing mail-in voting rules that resulted in unlawful and invalid certifications of Biden victories. There is no doubt President D____ J T____ is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect. Accordingly, state legislatures in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada and Michigan should exercise their plenary power under the constitution and appoint clean slates of electors to the electoral college to support President T____. Similarly, both the House and Senate should accept only these clean electoral college slates and object to and reject any competing slates in favor of Vice-President Biden from these states. Conservative leaders and groups should begin mobilizing immediately to contact their state legislators, as well as their representatives in the House and Senate, to demand that clean slates of electors be appointed in the manner laid out in the US constitution.

Mitchell was by then a T____ campaign legal adviser, with direct access to T____ and working on the Georgia challenge to the results.

Why the Court Has Gone Rogue and Ideas on How to Fix It

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Five justices nominated by Republican presidents (and two nominated by Democrats) passed Roe v. Wade in 1973. Four justices nominated by Republicans (and one nominated by a Democrat) upheld Roe v. Wade with some revisions in 1992.

That didn’t happen this week. David Roberts (of the Volts newsletter) helps explain how the Supreme Court got filled up with right-wing fanatics:

If you read about the birth of the Federalist Society, there’s a kind of theme in the background that’s worth elevating. Conservatives’ problem over the years is that they would nominate judges & then be “betrayed” as judges drifted left (or just moderate). Souter, Kennedy, Blackmun etc.

Conservatives have lots of ways to explain this to themselves. Being exposed to liberals corrupts the bodily fluids! Etc. But the most most sensible & obvious explanation is that decent people, once they survey the evidence & arguments, come out in a decent/compassionate/liberal place.

Now, noticing that the smart, decent people they nominated kept coming to compassionate/moderate conclusions, they did NOT conclude, “gosh, maybe we should be more compassionate/moderate, since that’s where good-faith study of the evidence seems to lead!”

Instead, they decided they needed a cult-like organization where they could create hyper-ideological zealots, people so committed to reactionary conclusions that NO amount of exposure to evidence or simple humanity could ever change their minds: thus, Federalist Society.

Thus we have the striking situation we get today: liberals looking for judges can pull them from anywhere. But conservatives looking for judges can ONLY find them in this creepy billionaire-funded hothouse fringe cult full of ditto-brained mediocrities.

It’s really a great illustration that if you want someone truly, consistently reactionary, you need to find a particular dysfunctional personality type that can selectively ignore evidence, ignore nuance & context, ignore simple humanity & human need. You need a zealot.

That’s why the conservatives on SCOTUS are, in addition to being so horrible on the law, just kind of weird & creepy — intellectually mediocre but hyper-prickly & vain. They were forged in the Federalist Society laboratory. That does not produce normal, healthy people.

Unquote.

Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times has some ideas about fixing the Court:

The Supreme Court does not exist above the constitutional system.

It can shape the constitutional order, it can say what the Constitution means, but it cannot shield itself from the power of the other branches. The Supreme Court can be checked and the Supreme Court can be balanced.

It is tempting, in the immediate wake of the court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, to say that there’s nothing to be done about the reactionary majority on the court. But that’s just not true. The Constitution provides a number of paths by which Congress can restrain and discipline a rogue court.

It can impeach and remove justices. It can increase or decrease the size of the court itself (at its inception, the Supreme Court had only six members). It can strip the court of its jurisdiction over certain issues or it can weaken its power of judicial review by requiring a supermajority of justices to sign off on any decision that overturns a law. Congress can also rebuke the court with legislation that simply cancels the decision in question.

In the face of a reckless, reactionary and power-hungry court, Congress has options. The problem is politics. Despite the arrogance of the current Supreme Court — despite its almost total lack of democratic legitimacy — there is little to no appetite within the Democratic Party for a fight over the nature of the court and its place in our constitutional system. For many Democrats, President Roosevelt’s attempt to expand the size of the court is less a triumph than a cautionary tale — a testament to the limits of presidential leadership and presidential power.

But Roosevelt did eventually get a Supreme Court that allowed most of the New Deal to stand. The threat worked. The court was humbled.

It will take time to build the kind of power and consensus needed to make significant changes to the court. But even the work of amassing that power and putting that consensus together can stand as a credible threat to a Supreme Court that has acted, under conservative control, as if it stands above the constitutional system, unaccountable to anyone other than itself.

The power to check the Supreme Court is there, in the Constitution. The task now is to seize it.

Unquote.

One way to begin is for anybody who had trouble voting for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden in a general election to recognize that the Democratic Party, lame as it often is, is the only institution that stands between us and living in an anti-democratic, Christianity-centered, climate crisis-denying, anti-woman, anti-gay, reactionary dystopia.

We also need to exert pressure on the aged leaders of the party to face reality. This isn’t 1991 anymore.

Use what’s left of our democracy or lose it.

They’re Not Even Trying To Be Consistent. Or Honest. Or Historically Accurate.

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Texas can regulate abortion but New Jersey can’t regulate guns.

And lying to Congress is a crime:

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By the way (from historian J. M. Opal):

The 2nd Amendment, ratified in 1791, reads: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Responsible readings of this sentence note that it locates gun rights within the framework of militia service, not as an individual entitlement. By contrast, the 5th Amendment, ratified the same year, says that “No person” shall be denied due process.

Militias aside, there is also the “keep and bear” part of the 2nd Amendment to consider. In the founders’ era, to “keep” meant to own and possess something inside one’s home, while “bear arms” referred specifically to shouldering a musket or rifle in an army or militia.

Nowhere does the amendment declare or suggest a right to “go armed,” the term used in that era for carrying a weapon such as a pistol or dagger, either openly or in secret.

According to a Majority of the Supreme Court, the Earps and Doc Holliday Were the Bad Guys at the O.K. Corral

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The Smithsonian Magazine offers a brief history lesson regarding gun control:

Marshall Virgil Earp, having deputized his brothers Wyatt and Morgan and his pal Doc Holliday, is having a gun control problem. Long-running tensions between the lawmen and a faction of cowboys … will come to a head over Tombstone’s gun law.

The laws of Tombstone at the time required visitors, upon entering town to disarm, either at a hotel or a lawman’s office. Residents of many famed cattle towns, such as Dodge City, Abilene, and Deadwood, had similar restrictions. But these cowboys had no intention of doing so as they strolled around town with Colt revolvers and Winchester rifles in plain sight…

When the Earps and Holliday met the cowboys on Fremont Street in the early afternoon, Virgil once again called on them to disarm. Nobody knows who fired first….

The “Old West” conjures up all sorts of imagery, but broadly, the term is used to evoke life … in small frontier towns – such as Tombstone, Deadwood, Dodge City, or Abilene, to name a few. One thing these cities had in common: strict gun control laws.

… Frontier towns by and large prohibited the “carrying of dangerous weapons of any type, concealed or otherwise, by persons other than law enforcement officers.” Most established towns that restricted weapons had few, if any, killings in a given year.

But Justice Clarence Thomas and his reactionary colleagues have their own view of history. From Talking Points Memo:

Thomas, writing for the majority, slapped down New York’s 100-year-old concealed carry licensing scheme Thursday on the grounds that it has no historical analogue. [Wait, doesn’t a law that’s 100 years old have some history on its side?]

Government interest — like protecting the safety of its citizens — is not enough to get around the all-expansive Second Amendment, he writes. To be legitimate, a gun regulation must have a historical cousin….

The notion is farcical on its face: there must be some 18th or 19th century law mirroring any modern-day gun regulation, even for weapons that the people of that time could not have imagined existing?

Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, focuses his dissent on the patent ludicrousness of determining constitutional rights solely through historical precedents.

“Will the Court’s approach permit judges to reach the outcomes they prefer and then cloak those outcomes in the language of history?” he ponders, before sketching out his argument that his conservative colleagues have done just that.

Breyer lays out his own list of cases ranging from English precursors to early American laws all the way up through U.S. law in the 20th century. He lists cases that he argues support New York’s licensing scheme, many of which the conservative majority found some reason to reject: “too old,” “too recent,” “did not last long enough,” “applied to too few people,” “enacted for the wrong reasons,” “based on a constitutional rationale that is now impossible to identify,” “not sufficiently analogous,” Breyer reels off.

“At best, the numerous justifications that the Court finds for rejecting historical evidence give judges ample tools to pick their friends out of history’s crowd,” he writes….

[This decision] rings similar to Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion overturning abortion rights, which roots much of its argument in cases where abortion access was not protected in the country’s earliest days, and before. He asks [Americans] to unflinchingly accept that a constitutional right for women is only valid if it existed in a time when women were considered much less than full citizens.

To sum up, David Roberts on Twitter:

[The Supreme Court] is just going to keep doing stuff like this, worse & worse & worse….A tiny group of hyper-ideologues, forcing the rest of us to live medievally. That’s the current status quo trajectory….

“Neither the broad American public nor the center-left Democratic & media establishment understands or appreciates how [fucking] lunatic the right has gotten” is something I’ve been saying for two decades now. Was always true & still is.

Our Interesting Times

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Millions of Democrats and millions of Republicans think our democracy, or what’s left of it, is fading away. But they don’t agree on what that means. From Paul Waldman of The Washington Post:

A new Yahoo News-YouGov poll asked people whether America is becoming a more or less democratic country, and 58 percent — including 60 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of Republicans — said it is becoming less democratic.

Even more alarming, 55 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Republicans said it was likely that “America will cease to be a democracy in the future.”

Underneath that agreement, Democrats and Republicans think about both the threat and the solution in opposite ways. And in the near term at least, Republicans — who want to actively accelerate the destruction of American democracy (even if they describe what they’re doing as just the opposite) — have the upper hand.

… We don’t know what every respondent thinks when they hear the word “democracy,” and there will always be people ready to say everything is going to hell. But at the very least, the results suggest a deep well of pessimism about our political future.

I’ve seen it lately among my liberal friends, and perhaps you have, too. Even the ones whose work involves trying to improve the world are feeling something close to despair. What they see is a system that was already undemocratic, built on structures and practices such as the appalling inequality of the U.S. Senate (where 600,000 Wyoming residents have the same two votes as 40 million Californians), the filibuster, and gerrymandering, and is now under siege by a party that is eagerly nominating deranged conspiracy theorists and radical extremists to run that very system.

When liberals say they fear democracy will cease to exist, they’re responding to overwhelming evidence that the Republican Party, the beneficiary of all those advantages that enable its minority rule, has utterly abandoned any commitment to democracy, if Republicans ever had one to begin with.

Under the leadership of possibly [possibly ???] the most corrupt president in American history — still their god-king no matter how high his misdeeds pile up — Republicans justify a violent attempt to overturn a presidential election, spin insane fictions of voter fraud conspiracies, pass law after law to make voting harder, and cheer the use of state power to target their enemies.

Worst of all from the perspective of liberals, it seems to be working. A strategy of chaos, it turns out, is easier to implement than a strategy meant to shore up vulnerable institutions.

Democrats work diligently to devise procedures to make partisan mischief less effective and assiduously fact-check every preposterous GOP claim. And they worry it all might be for naught.

As for Republicans, when they say “democracy” might cease to exist, what do they mean? It’s hard to discern much beyond the idea that if Democrats win an election and try to implement the policies they got elected on, then democracy has been destroyed.

Remember that when Barack Obama was president, Republicans cried endlessly that every policy decision he made was “tyranny,” driven by his secret desire to destroy the country. The fact that his eight years as an ordinary center-left Democratic president didn’t actually destroy the country did not change their minds. The “tyranny,” as far as they were concerned, came from the simple fact that Democrats were in charge.

When they say they fear for democracy’s survival, what they’re afraid of is the idea that we might continue to have a competitive system, in which elections are contested, Democrats sometimes win, and when they do, they get to implement their policies.

One struggles to discern how much of this is sincere and how much is just a useful fiction. But my guess is that for the Republican elite it’s an act, and for their base it’s genuinely felt.

The rhetorical legal scam of “originalism” taught Republicans an important lesson: The more radical you want to be, the more useful it is to pretend your agenda is the truest manifestation of the divine will of the Framers. Grab a quote from the Federalist Papers or a letter James Madison wrote to his tailor, then brandish it as proof that the only course faithful to the Constitution is to destroy collective bargaining, flood the streets with military-style weapons, allow billionaires to buy elections, or whatever else it is that conservatives want to do.

If your agenda is the only living expression of the country’s sainted Founders and sacred texts, then any political victory by your opponents must by definition be a blow against the country and democracy itself.

While Republican leaders know it’s a con, the rank and file bought into it. And today they’ve convinced themselves that “democracy” means having elections overseen not by nonpartisan, independent civil servants but by the most partisan, conspiracy-addled right-wing extremists. Only that will ensure that Republicans always win, and only a system where Republicans always win is truly democratic.

If Republicans get their way, the liberals who fear democracy’s end will turn out to be right.

Unquote.

Another view is that we’ll keep democracy of a sort but it will be unstable. This appraisal is apparently from an article in Foreign Affairs that I couldn’t get to. It’s called “America’s Coming Age of Instability: Why Constitutional Crises and Political Violence Might Soon Become the Norm”:

Rather than autocracy, the United States appears headed toward endemic regime instability. Such a scenario would be marked by frequent constitutional crises, including contested or stolen elections and severe conflict between presidents and Congress (such as impeachments and executive efforts to bypass Congress), the judiciary (such as efforts to purge or pack the courts), and state governments (such as intense battles over voting rights and the administration of elections). The United States would likely shift back and forth between dysfunctional democracy and periods of competitive authoritarian rule during which incumbents abuse state power, tolerate or encourage violent extremism, and tilt the electoral playing field against their rivals.

Peter Turchin, who trained as a biologist but has since been investigating cycles in human history, has argued that political instability is a recurring phenomenon, in books like Ages of Discord: A Structural-demographic Analysis of American History. From his website:

Historical analysis shows that long spells of equitable prosperity and internal peace are succeeded by protracted periods of inequity, increasing misery, and political instability. These crisis periods—“Ages of Discord”—tend to share characteristic features, identifiable in many societies throughout history. Modern Americans, for example, may be disconcerted to learn that the US right now has much in common with the Antebellum 1850s and, even more surprisingly, with ancien régime France on the eve of the French Revolution. Can it really be true that our troubled age is nothing new, and that it arises periodically for similar underlying reasons? It can. Ages of Discord marshals a cohesive theory and detailed historical data to show that this is, indeed, the case. The book takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through American history, from the Era of Good Feelings of the 1820s to our first Age of Discord, which culminated in the American Civil War, to post-WW2 prosperity and, finally, to our present, second Age of Discord.

Perhaps we today were destined to live in “interesting times”.