Manetho wrote: ↑Wed Sep 25, 2024 5:29 pm
ceeboo wrote: ↑Wed Sep 25, 2024 4:25 pm
Perhaps the limitation that we all face (only written words on a screen) is to blame, but that seemed like you were making a demand of me. Did that come across the way it seemed?
Yes.
Got it.
In recent years, I've developed a fascination with moments in history where authority is up for grabs. Laws are fiction. Authority is fiction. There is no mind control that says a sergeant must obey a general, a general must obey the president, or an entire massive legal system must obey Supreme Court rulings. But by and large, we all behave as if there is no other way to function except according to the laws. We may think a particular law or authority figure is stupid, but we still treat those laws and those figures as if their words matter, because the alternative is chaos. But sometimes societies lose all confidence in the laws and authority figures. The rules disappear.
Some of those moments in history can even be uplifting. When Soviet hard-liners launched a coup against President Gorbachev in August 1991, the coup was defeated, but it was obvious that Gorbachev could no longer control the country, and for the next few months he was largely irrelevant. People stopped believing in the fiction that Gorbachev must be listened to. The rules ceased to exist, and three subordinate leaders decided to make up their own rules. The leader of the seceding state of Belarus (Stanislav Shushkevich), the leader of the Russian SFSR (Boris Yeltsin), and the leader of the Ukrainian SSR (Leonid Kravchuk) all got together at a hunting lodge and threw together a document called the "Belovezha Accords" announcing that the Soviet Union no longer existed. They didn't have any legal authority to do that, but hardly anyone cared, and the Soviet Union dissolved peacefully by the end of the year.
But most of the time, the people who take power in moments of crisis end up being the people with the guns. Two years after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin illegally tried to dissolve the Duma. In response, the Duma impeached Yeltsin and declared the vice-president, Alexander Rutskoy, was now the acting president. Yeltsin ignored the law, and for ten days there was street fighting in Moscow between supporters of Yeltsin and the parliament, which ended when the army came in on Yeltsin's side. Similar situations in other countries can escalate into outright civil war.
The United States has never experienced a moment quite like this. Even when slave states seceded during the Civil War in response to the election of Abraham Lincoln, they never argued that Lincoln was not the legal president, only that they had the right to secede, a question that the Constitution never addresses. For the past 236 years, the president has always been the person chosen by a majority of the Electoral College, or, if there is no majority, the person elected by a majority of the state delegations in the House of Representatives. (The latter situation has only happened twice, 224 and 200 years ago.) Moreover, our military, unlike most militaries in the world, is deeply acculturated not to get involved in the nation's internal politics. It follows the law and the elected civilian leaders. Because of this exceptional degree of stability, Americans often don't appreciate how fragile law and authority actually are. Under the right conditions, they can all go out the window.
In 2020, the Electoral College unambiguously chose Joe Biden as president of the United States. The formal tallying of the electoral votes, in the presence of Congress and the vice-president, has always been thought of as a mere formality, albeit one required by the Constitution. But it was the final chance for the "Stop the Steal" movement to derail the election process. One of the foremost members of that movement, John Eastman, had a legal scheme for the vice-president to throw out the electoral votes from states that Trump and his supporters claimed had voted fraudulently. The idea was that without these votes, there would be no Electoral College majority, throwing the election into the House of Representatives. Although the recently inaugurated 117th Congress had a Democratic majority in the House, most state delegations were majority Republican. In a presidential election, the House votes in state-by-state blocs, so if all House Republicans stuck by Trump, he would be reelected president.
A lot of the rioters in the January 6 attack were clueless and simply ended up wandering the halls of the Capitol, but several groups among them were much more organized. They wanted to reach the House and Senate chambers and make throw out the votes. This goal was made even more clear when Trump Tweeted that Vice-President Pence had betrayed him by refusing to throw out the votes. If they reached their destination, they would have either inflicted physical violence on Congress or, using the threat of such violence, force them to reject the votes.
What then? The House might have voted in Trump as Eastman and company wanted. But everyone knew the Electoral College chose Biden, and it was clear to most of the nation that those Electoral College delegations had been lawfully selected by their states, because Biden won a majority of the votes in those states. The Electoral Count Act didn't say Congress or the vice-president even has the authority to throw out electoral votes, and even if it had, would a congressional vote taken under duress be legally binding? Would the Supreme Court have to intervene? And if there was a split among the nation's civilian leaders, which way would the military have jumped?
There was no legal ambiguity about who should have been inaugurated as president on January 20, 2021. There was no moment when authority was up for grabs. But the January 6 attackers were trying to create such a moment in the hope that it would break their way.
That's a lot to consider.
You can post all the cutesy contrarian bulls*** you want, but January 6 was an attempt to create society-wide chaos. And you should damn well have to face what that actually means.
While I think J6 was an awful day for America, I do not think it was an insurrection - and I do believe those involved with violence should face balanced/fair justice (Meaning blindfolded woman on the scale justice - not someone who walked the halls spending 20 years in prison.) - Lastly, it is crystal clear to me that J6 (like almost everything else) has been politicized and continues to be politicized.
More "cutesy contrarian BS?" Obviously, you see it that way, but fortunately, in my opinion, you don't see for the entire country. We all get to use our own eyes.
