For All Their Faults and Shortcomings, the Founders Were a Prescient Bunch

We citizens of the US need to emulate the democracy activists of Latin America who have braved police, armed soldiers, and ousted dictators and defended their democracies.

Jan. 6 insurrectionists, acting on President Trumps call to ‘Fight like hell” to overturn the House confirmation of Biden’s re-election (ABC-TV screen grab)

Over the years, as a cynical Republican long-game campaign to load up the US Supreme Court with right-wing, pro-business justices drawn from the Federalist Society, which prides itself as basic its rulings on an “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution, has played out, there has been growing angst among those who prefer to view the patriarchal, slave-era Constitution as a living document that has to change with the times (as it has). 

The self-described “originalists” now number six out of the total nine justices. That means even if one of their number, instead of simply attempting to justify her or his bias by pulling a line out of the Constitution itself or from some hoary Federalist paper from the time of the Founders explaining the thinking behind some article of the document, were inclined to think creatively and vote with the court’s three more liberal justices, the right-wing view would still prevail. It would take two such illiberal defectors to achieve a rational majority instead of a dogmatic anachronistic one. 

And that brings us to the bizarre and frightening case of Donald Trump’s nearly certain winning of the Republican presidential nomination for the 2024 election, and also his increasingly likely re-election to the White House for a second term — this time as a full-blown fascist parody of Benito Mussolini.

What is astounding about this situation is the incredible sophistry and willful charlatanism of the current robed enablers of this travesty, given Trump’s history and character. 

Let’s lay out the true picture: In Donald Trump we have the ultimate spoiled brat, infantile narcissist, someone who skated through his private school education, including at Princeton University, seemingly learning nothing while relying on his father’s generous and strategic donations to get him past the post; someone who has the dubious distinction of being the first president to lose a re-election bid and then try to refuse to leave the White House; someone who even encouraged and goaded on an attempted armed insurrection or putsch in the halls of Congress. For those armed MAGA thugs,  many in combat gear and including among their number cops and active duty military, and complete with a working gallows, the goal was to obey Trump’s call to “fight like Hell!” to prevent the ceremonial acknowledgement of his opponent Joe Biden’s electoral and popular vote victory. 

That violent effort, endorsed and encouraged  by President Trump, was the definition of insurrection. It was also a gross violation of his oath of office taken during his inauguration as president, when he swore to “uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” 

And yet the Supreme Court will not even consider the urgent petition request from a special federal prosecutor for a ruling on whether Trump’s ludicrous claim of “blanket immunity as president from prosecution” is valid in relation to his having fomented and encouraged an act of insurrection.  The same court has refused a request to quickly, before the primary election season begins on Feb. 1, resolve the question of whether Trump’s fomenting of insurrection by his followers on Jan. 6, 2020 was a violation of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment and as such should bar him from running for federal office,  as the state Supreme Court of Colorado has already done and as the Secretary of State of Maine has likewise ruled.

At this point it seems to me the current right-wing cabal on the US Supreme Court (which includes three justices nominated by Trump and one whose wife actively supported the overturning of Biden’s election win in favor of loser Trump) should read what some of the Nation’s Founding Fathers and other great leaders in a later period had to say about the gravest of dangers to the new democratic government they had created was. The should then  explain publicly how they square that fear with their seeming willingness to allow Trump to seek a second term. 

Justice Thomas, a leading “originalist,” would still be three-fifths of a. person and not a member of the Supreme Court if the original Constitution were still as it was initially adopted.

           Let’s start with George Washington, the nation’s first president and national hero, who led the Continental Army that defeated the British forces to establish a new independent nation.  Only two weeks after the Constitutional Convention’s adoption of the Constitution as the document to govern the way the government would work, Washington wrote in a letter to his friend and war-time compatriot Marquis de Lafayette opining that the principal reason he had returned from retirement as president to participate in the finalizing of the Constitution was to protect against the rise of a “demagogue” who would resort to emotional appeals to prejudice, fear and distrust to attain absolute power. 

As the historian Eli Merritt wrote in an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, “Washington’s greatest fear that summer of decision in Philadelphia was that unwise, self-seeking politicians — even fairly elected to office — would tear down the central government and its constitutional laws for the sake of their own advancement and glorification.”  

            Wow! If that doesn’t sound like a certain contemporary figure to all nine members of SCOTUS  I don’t know what would.

But there’s more.  Merritt notes that in surviving records of the debates engaged in and speeches delivered by the Framers at and around the Constitutional Convention as  the wording of the final document so worshipped by the court’s “originalists” was hammered out, the word “demagogue” appears no less than 21 times. 

Here’s Benjamin Franklin: 

“I agree to this Constitution…and believe that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”

While Franklin was off in his prediction about how long the Constitution’s construct for running the country would endure, his prediction of disaster, like the prediction of a future mega storm along the Atlantic coastline, had a certain inevitability to it. 

Leave it to Thomas Jefferson to presciently point to the avenue that the destruction of the Constitutional carefully balanced house of cards with its multiple built-in system of interlocking checks and balancing wiped follow to its collapse. As he warned: 

 "Our government is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit, by consolidation first, and then corruption.... The engine of consolidation will be the federal judiciary.”

Ironically, it would be a cousin of Jefferson’s — Chief Justice John Marshall, who would enable the Supreme Court to bring everything down by establishing the subsequently unchallenged precedent that the Supreme Court would have the ultimate power to overturn the work of all federal departments and other branches of government. Anticipating that eventuality, Jefferson wrote;  

“The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting with noiseless foot and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the [state] governments into the jaws of that [federal government] which feeds them.”

I suspect here that those on the High Court bench will recognize themselves in that statement. 

I leave it to Abe Lincoln, no Founding Father but, by his defense of the US against violent dissolution by those states dead set on preserving the wretched institution of slavery, the figure most justifiably viewed as the founder of the modern US, to lay out how the cautious experiment in democratic government, never fully realized but at least partially demonstrated, would be brought to an end. As early as 1837, 13 years before the Civil War, Lincoln warned in an address at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, that it would be Americans themselves, not any foreign enemy, that would bring an end to the USA.  Decrying a :growing lawlessness of the public and  the ‘worse than savage mobs” that were increasingly dispensing their kind of justice instead of trusting to the courts, he said:  

"At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reaches us, it must spring up among us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

  Though the destruction Lincoln envisioned appeared in the form of the epically violent and bloody Civil War, the aftershocks of which still rumble through the nation, but he might just as well as been foreseeing the cataclysm headed our way should a demagogue like Trump, winning a majority of electoral votes, as well as gaining majorities in both the House and Senate, take over Washington a little more than a year from now on January 20, 2025. 

And here we come to the crux of the crisis that faces us all. Lincoln spoke  of “a nation of freemen” — a description he knew to be false both because it was a nation that at the time he spoke excluded millions of indigenous people, millions of enslaved people, and all women from the electorate — but leaving that glaring fault aside, his point remains relevant. Today all adult Americans 18 years or more of age have the right to vote, but we have been carefully trained and conditioned (“groomed” if you will), to treat that “right” as a passive activity, not something to assertively use throughout every day we live, to protect ourselves against charlatans, sociopaths, demagogues, frauds and crooks and to protect our freedoms and not to simply hand all power over our lives after one day’s casting of votes.

Watching the people of Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil, Chile  and other countries, especially our own neighbors in nations of  the Americas, confront and defy police and soldiers’ bullets and tear gas to against all odds oust dictators or would be dictators from power should be not just instructive but inspiring. 

It is not foreordained by any god or Founding Father that we must be limited to choosing between a mentally ill psychopath and a doddering tool of the military industrial complex and corporate America for our president, neither of whom really gives a rat’s ass about what we want and need. We must in 2024  make it clear by rising up in our tens of millions in primaries this spring to oust from both houses of Congress all the self-serving corrupt politicians spouting their rehearsed lines handed to them by Madison Avenue advisors. We must reject the fear-mongering attack adds on TV and the internet funded by dark money from wealthy and corporate interests. We need to reach out and talk with our neighbors, to think for ourselves, and to reclaim, or simply for the first time claim our right to control our own destiny. And once we’ve thrown out all the self-serving political trash currently passing for leaders in Congress and the White House, we need to stay active all summer and into November to make sure that we elect better candidates for all the open offices in Congress and the White House as well as in the various Statehouses and Legislatures.   

We can do this if we shrug off the hypnotic entropy that has been cast over us to keep us glued to our sofas and barcaloungers for far too long!