A tyrant is an absolute ruler unrestrained by law or person, or one who has usurped legitimate sovereignty.
I’m 62 years old and have lived through Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Newt Gingrich, Tom Delay, Dick Cheney, and the American glorification of torture. Yet things keep getting worse. It’s hard to know where to begin, but just this year alone we’ve seen the sabotaging of health care, the firing of the FBI director to obstruct justice, the pardon of Arpaio, withdrawl from the Paris climate agreement, nuclear saber rattling, more voter suppression, the EPA approving dangerous chemicals and silencing of scientists, the undermining of the energy, education, and most of the other governmental departments, and more. And this is all just off the top of my head. Those who are aware and possess a moral compass should either cry or revolt.
And for what? Mostly for a little bit of money. For tax cuts that won’t even make the rich happier. But now I think we are at a crucial moment, and here’s what I think will happen—although I hope that countervailing forces of which I am unaware will prevent this.
As Mueller’s investigation of Trump closes in, I believe Trump will fire Mueller and the Republicans will not object. This depends on how close Mueller gets, but if he uncovers enough of Trump’s crimes then I think the firing is almost inevitable. I hope I’m wrong.
And the Republicans won’t object because their position has been staked out—party over country. We have seen this over and over, most recently with the revelation by PBS Frontline that when the Obama administration and intelligence officials informed Ryan and McConnell in a closed-door meeting that the election was being compromised by Russia, the Republican leaders said they would not join a statement informing the American public of this fact. Here’s one reporter’s commentary on that meeting:
“It’s a moment when politics and partisan positioning appears to take precedence over national security,” Greg Miller of The Washington Post tells FRONTLINE. “In other words, they are so worried about each other, the Democrats and Republicans as adversaries, that they can’t get around the idea that there is a bigger adversary.”
So if Trump fires Mueller and the Republicans don’t object, then the thin reed upon which an already fragile rule of law rests will collapse. If there is no accountability of the executive branch, then nothing prevents it from shutting down opposition media, jailing political opponents, completely looting the treasury, and all the rest.
And McConnell and Ryan aren’t protected from the onslaught either. Like other conservative Republicans—Cantor, Boehner, Flake, Corker, McCain—they too won’t seem sufficiently loyal to Trump, Bannon, the Mercers, the Koch brothers, and all the rest of the suit wearing gangsters. In the end no one is safe from arbitrary power, even the mafia godfather Trump himself must look over his shoulder. Perhaps they will prefer Pence. But even the oligarchs themselves aren’t secure. By unraveling the social stability upon which their fortunes rest, they too become susceptible to the chaos. It is hard to see how undermining the stability of the country is in their long-term interest.
Aristotle said long ago that when human passion rather than reason provides the basis for law, we are all at the mercy of the changing, irrational passions of men. Aristotle was right.
What all this implies is that white Americans might actually experience what African and Native Americans have experienced for centuries—law based on power alone, with considerations of justice being irrelevant. At that point we live under tyranny, as most people have in human history. Perhaps it is our turn?
I have generally been a bit of a Pollyanna when it comes to political predictions. When I’m wrong, I’m always wrong in being too optimistic. With that warning, herewith some thoughts:
Let’s suppose that Mr. Trump fires Mr. Mueller. I think that this will constitute final proof that he is covering up some serious crimes. Let’s say, then, that Republicans respond to the firing with a whitewash investigation in Congress. I suggest (hope?) that Americans would be so disgusted with such blatant criminal behavior that they would punish the Republicans in the 2018 elections. It is likely, in such a scenario, that the Republicans would lose control of both houses of Congress. At which point the Democrats would impeach and convict Mr. Trump.
…which would give the White House to Mr. Pence. Oh, joy.
assuming the truth permeates the right wing media bubble, gerrymandering is overcome, and 2/3 house (or is it senate) convict.
No, the truth will not get through to those who read right wing media. But about two-thirds of the American public are NOT Republicans, and those people do read mainstream media and are getting the truth.
The Republicans have certainly mastered the art of gerrymandering to squeeze the absolute maximum number of seats out of the electorate, but there is hope that the Supreme Court will put an end to that. For years, the Court has refused to intercede against gerrymandering because there was no objective standard for determining whether a state was gerrymandered. However, an interesting new algorithm has emerged that calculates the seat counts that would arise with billions of different district shapes. The histogram resulting from this can then be used to show the probability that a random districting scheme would produce the seat counts that the actual districting scheme produces. They have shown that the Wisconsin map, if I recall correctly, was somewhere around 0.5% probability. To put it another way, they have rigorously shown that there is a 99.5% probability that the Wisconsin map is distorted. This may be the development that the court needs to intercede.
The other fact here is that even extreme gerrymandering cannot completely reverse the voting situation. The current counts of members of the House is 242 Republicans to 192 Democrats. That looks like a big lead, but remember that all seats are up for election and if the Republicans lose just 26 seats out of 400, the Democrats get a majority.
It will take only 3 more Senate seats to give the Democrats an absolute majority in the Senate. That’s well short of the 2/3 majority required to convict Mr. Trump, and I consider it unlikely that that the Democrats will do much better than getting a majority in the Senate.
Yes, it seems improbable that the Democrats could get such a stupendous victory, but the Republicans have angered their base by failing to deliver on their promises, and the country as a whole is very angry about the situation. Throw in Mr. Mueller’s results and the Republican refusal to do anything about those results, and we have the makings for a reversal in Congress every bit as big as we have seen in past elections.
I so hope you’re right Chris. The news about the gerrymandering is good and I’ve followed it. The bad news is that some of the judges, Roberts I believe, have suggested that that is all mathematical goobledegook. Hopefully Kennedy will save us on that. I also think that the stealing of elections is in play, assuming it hasn’t happened recently in Georgia. I really think the batttle for power is reaching a crescendo.
Here’s an area where I am not a Pollyanna: I seriously believe that vote counts have been altered by Republicans in a limited number of locations since 2000. There was a case from Cincinnati in 2000 where independent researchers were able to demonstrate that the vote counts were extremely suspicious.
Moreover, voting machines have NEVER been secure. The voting machines in common use in the 2000 election were discovered to have a back door written into the software. Nothing was done about it. Over the years, the vendors have tightened up their security, but researchers have been able to hack their way into voting machines in less than an hour.
And this doesn’t begin to address the possibility of hacking county and state elections computers. We know that Russian hackers penetrated more than a dozen state-level elections computers. That’s only what we know — it is a near-certainty that there were many more penetrations that were never discovered.
Add to this the continuing refusal of many election bureaucracies to keep a paper trail of the votes. They instead destroy everything as quickly as possible. This is far and away a Republican phenomenon.
We have tons and tons of evidence of Republican officials lavishing lots of voting machines on Republican precincts, and installing a few voting machines in Democratic districts. Somebody did some research in a midwestern city and discovered that waiting times to vote in Democratic precincts were much longer than in Republican precincts.
…and have a NICE day, John! 😉
My oldest who is a world class programmer at google agrees with everything you say. She believes you must have a paper trail.