From a Google Image Search - Coup Team - Salon.com
I knew that the January 6 Hearings would be gripping and the first two have certainly offered up the goods. Judge Luttig’s oral delivery made me wonder if his stature as a Conservative Judge had turned him to speaking each word as if it was a gift to humanity or if his style was due to his age. However his written style is still fluid and shows his love of the Constitution and the republic. As a conservative he likes to refer to our government as a republic, but he is not afraid to use the term democracy. I found myself wanting to help him speak faster and more smoothly but it did not detract from the testimony being presented. Greg Jacob, who also testified, was eloquent. He classified the program offered up by John Eastman to get VP Pence to throw the election in Trump’s favor as illegal although he also testified that he will vote for a Republican in 2024 (even if it’s Trump?).
https://www.axios.com/2022/06/16/gregjacob-jmichaelluttig-jan6-hearings
“Pence "never budged" on view that he could not overturn election, aide testifies”
“Former federal judge J. Michael Luttig also said: "There was no support whatsoever in either the Constitution of the United States, nor the laws of the United States for the vice president, frankly, ever to count alternative electoral slates from the states that had not been officially certified."
"I would have laid my body across the road before I would have let the vice president overturn the 2020 election on the basis of that historical precedent," Luttig said.”
From the transcript of the Second Hearing on January 6 and events surrounding January 6:
Benny Thompson’s opening remarks at the Second January 6 hearing in part:
“There is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president, no idea more un-American. I agree with that, which is unusual because former Vice President Mike Pence and I don't agree on much.
Today, the Select Committee is going to reveal the details of that pressure campaign. But what does the vice president of the United States even have to do with a presidential election? The Constitution says that the vice president of the United States oversees the process of counting the Electoral College votes, the process that took place on January 6th, 2021. Donald Trump wanted Mike Pence to do something no other vice president has ever done.
The former president wanted Pence to reject the votes and either declare Trump the winner or send the votes back to the states to be counted again. Mike Pence said no. He resisted the pressure. He knew it was illegal. He knew it was wrong. We are fortunate for Mr. Pence's courage. On January 6th, our democracy came dangerously close to catastrophe.”
LIZ CHENEY:
“Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Let me take just a few minutes today to put the topic of our hearing in broader context. In our last hearing, we heard unequivocal testimony that President Trump was told his election fraud allegations were complete nonsense. We heard this from members of the Trump campaign.
We heard this from President Trump's campaign lawyers. We heard this from President Trump's former attorney general, Bill Barr. We heard this from President Trump's former acting attorney general, Jeff Rosen. And we heard this from President Trump's former acting deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue.
We heard from members of President Trump's White House staff as well. Today we're focusing on President Trump's relentless effort to pressure Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes on January 6th. Here again is how the former vice president phrased it in a speech before the Federalist Society, a group of conservative lawyers.”
[Begin videotape]
MIKE PENCE:
“This week President Trump said I had the right to overturn the election. But President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone. And frankly, there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”
Liz Cheney quotes Greg Jacobs:
“You say, had the Vice President of the United States obeyed the President of the United States America would immediately have been plunged into what would have been tantamount to a revolution within a paralyzing constitutional crisis.”
At question was the text of the Twelfth Amendment, the Electoral Count Act of 1887, and structural concerns about the reasons America did not choose a monarchy. The text of the 12 th Amendment is simple which should make it very clear, but given the new perusals by the Originalists, any ambiguity in the Constitution’s meaning can be exploited. The Constitution simply says that the VP opens the certificates, and the electoral votes are counted. Historically there have been a few attempts to reject the counts of states, most famously in 2000 when the Presidency hinged on hanging chads on ballots from Florida and Bob Dole accepted the decisions of the Supreme Court and accepted the electoral count. The Electoral Count Act of 1887 was intended to end the ambiguities in the Twelfth Amendment, but Originalists question this law which was not part of the original document. John Eastman may have received a few suggestions from someone in The Federalist Society, but we do not know his sources.
Mike Pence was seen as the last chance to replace Biden with Trump and Trump’s troops were present to intimidate Pence. When the VP refused to break his oath to the US Constitution the mob threatened to hang him if they could find him and ordered allies in Congress (I assume) or the Capitol police to “bring him out”. January 6 was a scary day to be a member of our Congress.
See, gripping!
Pundits imply that the violence of January 6 was a coup against the US government, but I contend that the coup is still happening. I believe that a coup can be bloodless if it pursues a plan to complete the steps that lead to an authoritarian state. These steps have been described in a number of places but one such place is in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s book How Democracies Die, published in 2018. They talked about the guardrails that protect our democracy, they explored how these guardrails are being dismantled. One guardrail involves respecting the positions of the opposition. Another involves respecting the outcome of elections. Another involves observing the separation of powers, playing constitutional hardball with tactics like court packing, stonewalling nominations, or abusing the power of the purse. The threats to our stability include economic inequality and segregation of the political parties by race, religion, and geography.
Russia’s recent war on Ukraine has pointed out some of the other tactics that authoritarian leaders use to keep one person in power over millions. We watched Putin immediately squash any diversity of opinion that had entered the Russian media over the last decades of relative freedom until once again only one state message was available to all, and any protest would result in arrest and possible imprisonment. American enterprises left Russia in droves partly in protest, partly in fear which should have alerted his citizens to the restoration of old Iron Curtain realities, but fear of repercussions leaves them unwilling to speak about it. Leaving Russia was the right move for foreign businesses, but good moves often have unintended results. It actually took away an element of democratic modernity that might have distracted Putin from his genocide and from pounding Ukrainian cities into rubble. Putin had long ago taken control over the nation’s military, its legislature and its courts and found a clever way to look like a democracy, but to stay in power indefinitely by switching from being President to being Prime Minister whenever a term ended.
These same tendencies are showing up in America. The Republicans decided to use a states’ rights approach to grabbing total power over American politics. They set about winning over as many states as they could, to at least win Republican control of the governments of those states, despite the politics of the residents. This has been a very successful tactic to downsize the federal government and to therefore be able to live under the state laws that matched their ideological views.
Republicans also mounted a campaign to demonize liberals and Democrats on Talk Radio, Fox News, and various publications. They have concentrated on subverting elections to reliably produce minority majorities. And they used their professed stand as the “moral majority” to team up with Evangelicals who had some wishes that were a match to those of conservatives.
Then along came Trump. Trump pumped up the Republican agenda with his taste for dictators around the globe. His father may have inadvertently or purposely raised him to be a fascist, because he is also a puncher, although a figurative one. He fell in love with right-wing media, but he also messed with the minds of mainstream media. Stories that featured Trump, either good or bad, became the bread and butter of a print media starved by digital media which did not produce the same profits print media did.
While mainstream media publishers and journalists, who knew what was happening to our democracy/republic, should have been exposing the damages being incurred, most of the mainstream media tried to stick to a bipartisan approach and they are still doing that. Just look at how the media practically forced us to elect Joe Biden (who I like) because he was a moderate, and an old school bipartisan politician and then, once he was elected, began to publish every poll that shows Biden’s unpopularity, regardless of the validity of the poll. The mainstream media knows that it is facing an existential threat to its existence if it doesn’t offer up stories on both sides.
Trump again upped the ante by railing against the mainstream press, essentially forcing it closer to being a media voice for the state, which it will be in truth if Trump or a Trumpian figure is elected again in 2024. We could have a state media that did not dare to buck a President once Trump and Bill Barr have declared that an America President should have absolute “unchecked” executive authority. Trump hated the idea of checks and balances which is at the heart of our American republic, and Bill Barr facilitated him in his endeavors to sideline Congress. Having a supine legislature is another goose step towards authoritarianism.
Rigging votes is an area that began before Trump and continues without Trump. Republicans were already working on this but Trump’s “big lie” about how much fraud there was in the last election has given Republicans permission to expand on their adventures in subverting voting in America. They have turned their attention to the electoral college and to infiltrating polling places, using intimidation and partisan secretaries of state and boards of election to assure that election counts and electoral college certifications go their way. When voters lose their trust that elections will be free and fair another step will have been taken on the road to an authoritarian state. We are due to find out if the strategies work in 2022.
Another essential step on the authoritarian road to making sure the Justice apparatus will back the ideology of the authoritarian leader is to stuff the Supreme Court with justices who serve for life, who are relatively young, and who have the same ideological bent as the chosen dictator of the winning party. This was accomplished by the end of Trump’s presidency with the help of Republicans in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, and the Federalist Society. That’s the entire ball of wax. The only thing preventing us from being an authoritarian state already is Biden’s win in 2020 and the slim majorities that Democrats hold in Congress.
If Trump had been able to overturn the results of the 2020 election, we would already be an illiberal democracy, the modern euphemism for an authoritarian state. But the Republicans are holding his place hoping that the whole thing will be completed in 2024. That will be the true end of the Republican coup. Perhaps Americans have lost their taste for freedom, or they think that an absolutist leader will provide absolute freedom. Do you hear the wrong answer buzzer sounding? I do.
Subscribe for free to get this newsletter in your inbox.