Saturday, May 30, 2020

TAKE TRUMP OUT

The beginning of the Rule of Law was when a lot of subordinate officials got tired of their king acting like a tyrant and changing his mind at will.  After all, he wasn’t God writing on stone with unchanging Commandments.  And by this time a lot of people could read and write, so the idea was to nail down the laws in writing so they didn’t change and everyone agreed on what they were.  This was an overwhelmingly good idea.  In fact, it was the basis of forming a new country that could have its own laws, starting with the Constitution and then expanding it with the Bill of Rights about things that should have been obvious but wasn’t.


The hard thing about the Rule of Law is that even written down at a time when everyone can read, the actual situations that the laws were meant to address and resolve kept exceeding what was written.  Obviously, black people, indigenous people, and women are an example of having to work on the law to make it fit the situation better.  It was much easier when the government was all white men who owned land and had been mostly English.  They already had a shared idea of what life should be like and a Code of Conduct that wasn’t written because it was so deeply believed that it didn’t seem necessary.

But now our President has exceeded every safeguard and has no Code of Conduct except greed.  He has a criminal background and has cleverly wired all the governmental bodies who could just join to throw him out: his political party, his cabinet, his Supreme Court, his Vice President.  They are all HIS and find his behavior a convenient cover for their own criminality.  

We need more laws or rewritten laws.  What can we say that will legitimize just walking that bastard right on out of there?  Otherwise he is likely to end up like Mussolini, dead and hanging upside down from a lamppost.

This is a first proposal for coping with a berzerkly violent and organically damaged president, worse than Article 25.  We need to stop being vague and do the hard work of defining a person who has become a reeking knot of criminality, pretension, viciousness, madness, and faux glamour with the aid of a foreign rival country and the stated goal of destroying the nation.  All proven over and over, even by his own statements.

First: definition. 


“The US Constitution provides instructions for how to remove a president from office if they are unfit to do their job—gravely wounded, for example, or mentally unstable. The instructions were ratified as an amendment in 1967, after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Until that point, the Constitution just vaguely referred to the fact that a president could be removed for “Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of said Office.” . . .

“. . . the 25th amendment is a part of the constitution that gives explicit instructions for how to remove a president who is unfit to serve.

“It does not say when a president is unfit to serve, though. It doesn’t call out specific illnesses, mental or otherwise, or suggest tests of any sort. It just says this, under section 4:
“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

Trump so exceeds the kind of inability that is described in the amendment, that we need to describe it as a new offense. Some have suggested new terms with Latinate bases, like “nationcide”.  It’s beyond treason which might be a reasonable place to start.  He is not just destroying our country but the whole international community.

Second: identifying intervenors.

Already identified are the heads of the executive departments, or whomever Congress may identify by law BOTH the Senate and the House presenting a written declaration. These are already bought and paid for except for the Dems and the House.  The same with the Supreme Court.   Some have suggested a panel composed of all living former presidents — that seems promising.  There is no Pope, alas.  The United Nation was never designed for this.

Third: identifying and disarming collaborators.

This is a tricky one since so many are either inside the government or fired or members of foreign countries.  Since Putin has been part of the problem, perhaps one of the international bodies could be used, even if Trump has tried to pull us out of relationship with them.  If the heads of the former British government were to define Trump as too crazy and criminal to be tolerated, that might work as a beginning.  The criminal armament is money and it is international, so other countries might be interested. If the illegal money of this international crime system were identified and seized, that would sweeten the deal.
  
Fourth: defining public support markers.

If demonstrations in every major city, the bungled pandemic that is killing hundreds of thousands, lengthy professional recommendations, even the craven and guarded stories on media — if those don’t define public support for removing Trump, it’s hard to think of more.  I don’t trust all the surveys.  Voting is the gold standard, but we don’t seem to be able to guarantee its fairness.
  
Fifth: quiet physical action since reason is useless. Simply escorting to confinement.

We are going to want something dramatic and the majority of collaborators are likely to simply disappear except for having blackmail material that invites murder to silence them.  Trials and lawsuits will go on for as long as a decade, but there is no other good place to start than to take Trump away to confinement, as quietly and efficiently as his protectors have demonstrated they physically move a president to a safe place when war is threatened.  He will die of dementia in a few years, without anyone killing him.

War IS threatened.  Use this, add to it, correct it, rethink it.

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