February 12, 2020
As children, we all began our school days reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. We mindlessly mouthed the oath, pledging our fealty “to the flag and the republic for which it stands.” A republic is defined as “a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers responsible to them and governing according to law,” (Source; Merriam-Webster, emphasis added).
By that definition, we ceased to be a republic some time ago. After all, widespread voter suppression ensures that a significant percentage of Americans are not entitled to vote. Certainly, though, when a majority of Republican senators voted to acquit Trump after a sham trial without witnesses, defying the wishes of 75% of the American people, it is arguable that we ceased to be a republic.
But any shred of doubt that the craven acquiescence of Republican senators had transformed us from a republic into a full blown autocracy was detonated in the last twenty-four hours. On Monday, federal prosecutors filed their sentencing recommendations in the trial of Roger Stone on charges of witness tampering and obstruction of Congress.
Given the serious and flagrant nature of Stone’s offenses, the prosecutors recommended a sentence of seven to nine years. This led to a cascade of angry Trump tweets, decrying the harshness of the recommendation. Within hours, a senior Justice Department official was contradicting the career prosecutors, stating that “the Department finds the recommendation extreme and excessive and disproportionate to Stone’s offenses,” (Source: “Prosecutors quit amid escalating Justice Department fight over Roger Stone’s prison term,” by Matt Zapotosky, Devlin Barrett, Ann E. Marino’s and Spencer S. Hsu, The Washington Post, 2/11/20). In response, the four prosecutors on the case withdrew, with one resigning from the Department altogether.
There aren’t words adequate to describe how unprecedented and deeply dangerous this is. Coming on the heels of the vindictive retribution visited upon Colonel Alexander Vindman (and his twin brother!), no one can harbor any illusion about what the United States has become.
The sobering truth, though, is that this country’s entire existence has been a tug of war between rhetoric and reality. While our founding documents are full of lofty ideals about equality, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the Rule of Law, our reality has been the purchase of those benefits for the few with a currency of genocide, stolen labor and subjugation. Throughout our history, the cynical have tried to reconcile the contradiction by invoking religion, pseudo-science or ahistorical sociology to justify excluding entire groups of people from the American Dream. From Manifest Destiny to Social Darwinism to Moynihan’s recommendation that Black Americans would benefit from a period of “benign neglect”, there have always been those who cloak their racism in fancy labels to distract us from the fact that they are determined to hoard all resources for a minority and persecute the majority.
The difference now is that there is no fancy rhetoric to disguise the ugliness. After fifty years of de jure, (if not de facto), legal equality, the doctrinal foundations of white supremacy have been exposed as the calumny they have always been. In response, fully 35% of this country has decided that it is willing to jettison everything that America has professed to stand for, in order to maintain their unearned position. There are only two paths now. To whom do you pledge allegiance?
#RuleofLaw
#Nooneisabovethelaw