People do try these things sometimes, but they tend to have severe mental health and/or addiction problems, so they can’t pull it off. Sometimes they expose alarming breaches in security (like that guy who rushed through the open doors of the White House and had to be tackled by an off-duty counterterrorism assaulter). Said attacker wouldn’t have succeeded despite the security breaches, if only because the President was not in the White House at the time.
People who are sane and would consider doing these things are sane enough not to try, because they know they are very unlikely to succeed, and even less likely to get away with their life or freedom intact. Furthermore the impact would be muted, as the same party would still be in charge.
You can’t really draw a straight line between politics, militants, and assassinations. Think about the bland Gerald Ford, who survived two attempts in 17 days.
It was “just” ground castor seeds that still needed processing to extract the ricin. It was enough to trigger the ricin detection. The criminal charges are all related to making death threats not an attempt to kill.
Or look at the assassins who have no problem switching targets when circumstances change. John Hinckley, for example, originally planned on assassinating Carter. But when Reagan became President, he readily switched targets. His motivation wasn’t political; he just wanted to shoot a President.
Yes, as things are, domestic political radicals are aware that targeting the high officials for the sake of targeting them is high risk/low return, would not change their situation on the ground and to the contrary would crank up the heat. Thus they tend to go after lower-echelon government entities that embody the “tyranny”. Blow up some government facility, “liberate” some bank assets, wreck some Military-Industrial Complex property, stick it to The Man in your home town.
And these days hardly that, any more.
And notice in both cases it involved seccessionist movements in the last-ditch phase of the fight – the day Truman’s quarters were being attacked by Torresola and Collazo in DC, down home there was on an “it’s now or never” Nationalist insurrection that involved an attack on the Governor’s mansion, and the National Guard using air strafing and heavy weapons to clear two rural towns. Thing is, Booth and the Nacionalistas did not consider themselves *domestic *radicals, but as fighting an outsider opressor, and like those more recent outside plotters the value of the hit would be propagandistic, to prove they can still hurt the US leaders and use that to rally the forces.
Representative vacancies are all filled by special election. Senators usually by appointment but most often only until the next general election date. But an event like this would only motivate that party’s voters to show up en masse.
No need to read any more of this post or take it seriously in any way.
Attempts to change the balance of power via assassination must not be tolerated. I think any member of Congress who is assassinated should be replaced by a member of that same party to remove the incentive to use “(half of the) second amendment solutions” to politicians you oppose.
What I’m surprised has never been tried is to change the balance of power in the Supreme Court via assassination. One can imagine a fanatical Republican ordering a hit on say Sotomayor or Kagan or a fanatical Democrat ordering a hit on Kavanaugh or Thomas.
I also wonder if there might not be some attempts at the supreme court. With the president there is always the democratic option of voting them out. With the supreme court you don’t really have other options. Also given the politically charged controversy caused by the change of one member, imagine the lasting effect of having a one partisan president and compliant senate pick a full 9.
This could not have happened. Neither senator present was from a state with a Democrat (sic) governor, and in one of them only members of the same party are eligible for appointment. Most members present were from the House, in which case the governor has no ability to make an appointment.
Did you ever joke with a TSA person at an airport about having a bomb in your carry on? Well, compared to the Secret Service dealing with a potential threat to a protectee, the TSA have great senses of humor.
For one thing, VIPs have much better security than in the past. So a lot of attempts are stopped before they ever get off the ground.
Also despite all the rhetoric, we still live in a democracy. We aren’t a full blown dictatorship by any means. Most people realize violence is a last option to only do after protests, voting, contacting congresspeople, etc. fail. We still have democratic infrastructure to allow people to air grievances. However if the democrats win the popular vote in the house in 2018, but still lose the house due to gerrymandering, I could see people getting more and more angry.
Also life in the west is fairly good. It isn’t like you are giving up a life of starvation and destitution if you assassinate someone important. You are giving up a fairly comfortable middle class life if you do that.
Having said that there are assassination attempts. The guy who shot at republican politicians in DC with an assault rifle for example.
The reason there are no political assassinations anymore is because that used to be the way crazy people got notoriety. But assassinating famous people is hard. Shooting up a gun free zone, much easier.
Shooting up an actual gun free zone is logically impossible. Shooting up a place where meaningful effort has been made to make it gun free is possible, but very difficult. In fact, assassinating the President is just a special case of that.
I suspect those are the real reasons- for the vast majority of people who may hate a particular politician, party or judge, there’s just not enough payoff in it- it’s more sensible to work toward booting them through legal means, such as elections. And the downside is huge- our justice system provides pretty heavy penalties for such things.
So the choice for most everyone is basically to work within the system, keep your lifestyle, and endure whatever annoyances come up, or do something violent and virtually guarantee yourself a long term in prison.
However, there are always people who don’t care about life imprisonment or dying in the process. That said, one thing that could be acting as a deterrent could be the fact the political climate is now so tense, even an attempted assassination could cause things to quickly spiral out of control. Not even the most militant anti-Trump radical wants to be another Gavrilo Princip.