RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/08/ashamed-of-what/

People ask me if I feel “ashamed” about what Miranda Devine describes as “the clueless insurrection” in the Capitol on Wednesday. My response? I am about as ashamed as Joe Biden, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Juan Williams of Fox News were about the riots and shootings that the Democratic Party subsidized and even justified last summer.

Unlike those violent riots, which the Democrats and national media attributed to white racism, and which came from Democratic voters, the turmoil in the Capitol on Wednesday did not result in burning and looting. There were no white or black policemen shot and the only shooting victim (which the media don’t seem to care about since white Republican lives don’t matter) was a female protestor, Air Force veteran Ashli Babbitt, by a Capitol police officer.

I also heard our Democratic constitutional expert on Fox News, Jonathan Turley, telling us Wednesday evening that pro-Trump thugs had “lost their faith” in our constitutional system. It was for this reason that they “desecrated” our sacred space. I don’t recall similar talk about desecration when the “peaceful protesters” tried to burn down St. John’s Episcopal Church across from the White House last summer. 

Of course, there was a storm of media abuse afterwards when President Trump spoke before the historical site that had been saved from “peaceful protestors.” Nor do I remember anything more than whispered protest, even on Fox News, when the Democratic Party got howling banshees to invade the Senate chamber to protest the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice and to hassle his supporters. It seems that there are big-time desecrations, for example, when people with MAGA hats commit them, and then there are the entirely excusable ones that transpire when feminist Democrats invade the sacred precinct. 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-mob-on-the-hill-was-far-from-a-coup-11610061914?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

Insurrections are common but Wednesday’s aborted insurrection on Capitol Hill was unique. The usual purpose of mobilizing a mass of people and deploying their sheer momentum against the edifices of power, a royal or presidential palace, or a parliament is to seize power—through the act of seizing that iconic building. But that is logically impossible when the ruler is not the enemy to be replaced but rather the intended beneficiary of the insurrection.

What happened was certainly not an attempted coup d’état, either. Coups must be subterranean, silent conspiracies that emerge only when the executors move into the seats of power to start issuing orders as the new government. A very large, very noisy and colorful gathering cannot attempt a coup.

There have been quite a few cases around the world of what is best described as mass intimidation directed against parliaments. But in all such cases it was some specific law that was wanted or not wanted, which legislators under the gun might then vote for or against. For that to happen, the legislators have to be all gathered in the legislature and kept there to be coerced. Most recently in Beirut last August, Lebanon’s Parliament was besieged by a crowd demanding and forcing the government’s resignation. This conspicuously did not happen in Washington on Wednesday because it was a crowd that invaded the building, not snatch teams sent to seize individual legislators to be cajoled or forced into their seats.

Given all these exclusions, only one description remains: a venting of accumulated resentments. Those who voted for President Trump saw his electoral victory denied in 2016 by numerous loud voices calling for “resistance” as if the president-elect were an invading foreign army. These voices were eagerly relayed and magnified by mass media, emphatically including pro-Trump media.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/republicans-fight-isnt-in-congress-11610061953?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

On Wednesday the Capitol of the most powerful nation the world has ever known was stormed by an angry mob. Americans surely never thought they’d see such a scene: members of Congress barricaded inside the House chamber, Capitol Police trampled, and four Americans dead. A woman was shot near the elevator I use every day to enter the House floor. It was a display not of patriotism but of frenzy and anarchy. The actions of a few overshadowed the decent intentions of many.

Why?

Perhaps we should ask our Founders. They were not oracles, but they were borderline prophets. In Federalist No. 68, Alexander Hamilton lays out the purpose of the Electoral College, arguing that an independent and decentralized body of electors should elect the president. “The choice of several, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements.” According to Hamilton, the only people in America who should not be allowed to be named an elector would members of the House and Senate and any “other person holding a place of trust or profit under the United States.” Electors would “exclude from eligibility to this trust, all those who from situation might be suspected of too great devotion to the President in office.”

Our Founders thought it crucial to entrust a temporary body with electing the president for the simple reason that a standing body like Congress would face enormous pressure from voters, officeholders and interest groups. That could be, for example, pressure from a president or from 10,000 protesters outside the Capitol. For this reason, the Founders opted to diffuse responsibility to electors from each state.

They sought to avoid the exact situation we saw on Jan. 6. Millions of Americans were falsely led to believe that the final say in the election of our next president lay with a single body, Congress. And so it was no surprise that thousands showed up to make their voices heard. But the belief that Congress has any say whatever in the “certification” of electoral votes has never been true. It has always been unconstitutional and against our Founders’ intent, as it was when Democrats attempted the same stunt in 2005.