Hopefully before we end up collectively lobotomized:
Stranger
Donald Trump is but a single man. Every single person elected or appointed to government swears an oath to uphold the Constitution against all enemies, foreign or domestic. The Constitution can only become a dead letter if this oath is violated by the rank and file government officials, in practice.
In practice, when someone refuses to follow a court order the court can hold them in contempt. Courts show great deference to the federal government so this rarely happens to federal officers, but it has come close. In 1938 the U.S. Maritime Commission bailed out the Dollar Line corporation, a shipping company, taking control of the shares and reorganizing the company. After WWII and years of government control the corporation became solvent; the Dollar family sued to have its shares returned and won a court order to that effect. The government refused, and ultimately in 1951 the D.C. Court of Appeals threatened to have Commerce Secretary Sawyer imprisoned unless he returned the shares within 5 days. Only then did the Supreme Court step in and take the appeal.
If the Supreme Court had not stepped in, it would have fallen to the U.S. Marshals service to take physical custody of the Secretary. The Marshals are nominally under the Department of Justice, so the President could theoretically order them to violate the law - another full blown constitutional crisis. But as I wrote above, each individual takes an oath to uphold the Constitution, and refusing a lawful court order violates the core mission of the service.
For an analogy, in the early 1900s the Attorney General Young of Minnesota attempted to enforce a state law affecting railroad rates in blatant violation of a federal injunction. He thought since he was acting in his official capacity, he was immune from suit. The district court had the U.S. Marshals arrest him for contempt. In resolving his writ of habeus corpus, the Supreme Court created the legal fiction that when a state official acts contrary to the Constitution, his actions are no longer “official” and therefore he loses any immunity.
~Max
As an outsider to all this, feel free to take or leave anything I say. I feel like the US constitution was formulated to guard against the George III style of tyranny. As such, it’s a little underprepared for dealing with the Henry Tudor style.
Sorry, too late. And it wasn’t even a mic check.
The Supreme Court has just been outlawed forever and the bombing begins in five minutes.
I find it bizarre how liberals and leftists froth at the mouth about the Fourth Reich taking over and Auschwitz 2.0 being days away yet have an oxymoronic attitude of complete subservience (or ineffectual protest) and a pathological hatred towards firearms if said worst outcome becomes a reality. If the worst scenario becomes reality what is there left to do but fight back with actual weapons? Vote harder? If a right wing death squad is on the rampage in your neighborhood what are you going to fight them with? SNL sketches? Sassy Bluesky posts? Angry TikTok videos?
Actually, there have been a TON of threads where various “left” leaning members have talked about it here, as well as online. The issue isn’t nearly as simple as you make it out to be.
First, speaking as a “left” leaning gun owner with a CCW, is that someone who is scared, and never used a weapon in their life is the worst person I can imagine to be buying a firearm. Safety is about attitude, training (mental and physical), and a certain moral flexibility in willingness to use one. Note I don’t say evil, but there are plenty of people here and elsewhere that wouldn’t kill another person regardless of reason as being morally wrong.
Second, under those same stressors, and again especially without training and familiarity, the risks of accidental discharge and/or deliberate self-harm are probably a far greater risk in the short-to-medium term. And if we do go the Hot Civil War route, there’s likely little-to-no amount of personal firearms and ammunition that a person can privately afford and store that is going to make a difference.
In a current thread, I mentioned the above, and gave a very heavily qualified statement considering the above factors that buying a moderately priced, dependable firearm isn’t a bad idea, more to protect you from unorganized mobs and militias isn’t a bad idea, as long as you have/get the training, can safely store it, and DON’T treat it as a magic murder want that will protect you by virtue of having it.
I’d rather you blow half a grand or more on shelf-stable food and water, as well as other medical supplies if we have shipping and trade restrictions, which seem quite likely.
This is all that matters.
Precisely what a Constitution says doesn’t mean a thing.
What matters is whether a critical mass of the population agree the Constitution matters.
Which ties right back to @RickJay’s point:
Trump and the White House are openly declaring him King, Democracy is dead or dying, and people are celebrating the loss.
True. The President has no actual physical power of his own. He relies on the collective will of the government to support and enforce his orders.
While that is a lovely sentiment, what exactly are these people to do when their boss directs them not to take action, fires them, or orders others to arrest them for obstructing?
And what happens when the Supreme Court rolls over? I mean it sounds unthinkable, but that’s what people said about them granting Presidential immunity, and we see how that played out.
I mean we could have the entire Marshal’s service resign in protest to illegal orders, and I’m sure plenty of MAGA hardcores will step up.
The USA’s status as a democratic republic is pretty much over. Half the population doesn’t want it to be a republic anymore, so it’s not.
That looks like a pretty ill-fitting crown. I know it’s a Photoshop but looks like a Burger King paper hat.
This must mean the invite to see KCIII is not gonna happen. I think the King has to fly off to the southern hemisphere for an indefinite period. One (or both) of those countries with the Southern Cross on their flag.
Elections are our recourse.
The problem is that we voted for someone who, in 2016, told us what kind of president he would be.
And we chose not to believe him.
In the last 2 1/2 months of his term, he showed us his strong-man tendencies.
And we chose to forget those.
Voters may get a chance to collectively shit the bed at the polls once, maybe twice, quite possibly thrice? But eventually, luck runs out.
We’ve voted for Bush (twice), for the Tea Party, and now for MAGA twice.
We’re out of mulligans, I’m afraid.
No more horseshoes to pull out of our asses.
Guns don’t help against tyranny; that’s why the Right pushes guns so hard. Because they know guns are useless against the government. And because guns are useful for massacring civilians.
Why would the pro-tyranny people give good advice on how to fight tyrants?
Countless rebellions, insurgencies, revolutions and assassinations show otherwise. Governments are made of flesh and blood human beings that can be killed through conventional means such as firearms or coerced by the threat of the same.
No, they don’t. They show that bombs work well. IEDs are what you want, not rifles and pistols.
Using guns just gets you killed, probably without taking any of the enemy with you. Unless your goal is massacring civilians, then guns work fine.
There are a number of instances in history where a democracy surrendered without a fight to a totalitarian leader. The two most famous, I feel, are when the Roman Senate recognized Julius Caesar as emperor and the German Reichstag willingly gave Hitler supreme power. Our case is worse because the American people themselves ignored 8 years of clear signals and warnings.
You could go back even further when Congress decided de facto to give up its sole power to declare war with the War Powers Act
I think you might have some history confused here.
If unlawfully directed to not enforce a court order, the right thing to do is to enforce the court order anyways. Courts can hold U.S. Marshals in contempt just like any other government official that refuses to comply with a court order. In theory, the courts can deputize the N
If unlawfully fired, the right thing to do is to go home and file a suit later (as we are seeing other federal government employees do now).
If unlawfully arrested, the prudent thing to do is demand a lawyer and petition a court for a writ of habeas corpus.
The premise is that Trump ignores judges, not judges ignore the constitution. But even if the Supreme Court “rolls over”, that doesn’t necessarily make the whole constitution a dead letter. There are numerous occasions where the courts have refused to resolve a constitutional dispute because the proper remedy lies with another branch of government.
For example, the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment says that if a state denies male citizens the right to vote, their representation in the House is reduced proportionally. In the '40s, a guy named Henry Saunders figured that Virginia’s poll taxes denied so many people the right to vote that there should only be four representatives, fewer than the number apportioned by Congress. (The Supreme Court had previously ruled in 1932 that when Michigan failed to divide itself into the number of districts apportioned by Congress, it had to fall back to at-large districts.) Saunders attempted to file as a candidate to represent Virginia at-large, then sued when his application was rejected. The Fourth Circuit ruled that despite the unambiguous command of the Fourteenth Amendment, apportionment is a legislative power so it was exclusively up to Congress - not the courts - to enforce that provision. Saunders v. Wilkins, 152 F.2d 235 (4th Cir. 1945).
I bring up this particular case because the decision, combined with Congress’s inaction, did in fact render a provision of the constitution a dead letter, for all practical purposes.
~Max