A bit of a stretch to call 'don’t set off nukes on the say-so of Trump’ a “coup.” Usually that term implies a positive acquisition of power, not a temporary pause or set of oversight-provisions on the power of another. (It’s debatable, I’ll grant.)
Yes, it does appear that Milley did NOT have Constitutional authority for saying ‘don’t let Trump push the button unless there’s confirmation’.
And yes, it’s clear that such eventualities need more codification.
But it’s also clear that no level of mental illness in that President was going to result in the 25th Amendment being deployed. At this point we might as well have a new amendment rescinding the 25th–no one will ever have the courage to use it, if they didn’t have the courage to use it in this situation.
So provisions for this kind of eventuality need to be made. “Presidents can do whatever they wish with our nuclear arsenal no matter how demonstrably irresponsible and destructive” does NOT seem to be a viable policy, going forward.
So much of the US system has been built on the assumption that the people elected to high office would act in good faith. Now we’ve had two mentally unstable presidents in the past 50 years, though Nixon was by far the less severe of the cases. We wanted the ability to quickly react in the event of a nuclear attack so we’ve given a nuclear football to the president in the trust that he’d use that power only when it was absolutely necessary. But nobody considered what would happen if we have a president who is criminally insane. We almost found out the hard way. Kudos to Milley for proactively de-escalating the situation with China. But this was way too close for comfort. Nearly all the adults in the room had been replaced with toadies. Suppose there was no adult supervision at all and that crazy orange bastard had decided that launching nukes at China would guarantee his re-election? Scary shit.
Irrespective of the Constitution, any senior military officer has the moral and legal responsibility to make sure that war is conducted in a legal manner. If he acted out of a legitimate concern that Trump was going to initiate war illegally, then he can certainly disrupt those efforts, regardless of what the Constitution says or doesn’t say. He might have faced a court martial and/or discharge from service, obviously, but IIRC, he was following then-fired Esper’s guidance, based on the concerns of a number of people close to the WH who had observed increasingly erratic behavior.
Milley’s concern might have been predicated on the very stupid thing Trump almost managed to get away with……apparently Trump - with the help of his 30 yr old hatchet man Johnny McEntee and an ex-military advisor named Douglas McGregor - sent a memo to the Pentagon ordering the full withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan before January 15th.
The memo went out without the usual process of review by the national security team and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Milley pushed back and the directive was cancelled.
But Milley’s concern that Trump would do something crazy was based on the fact that Trump did something crazy.
I am grateful for the actions Milley took and support all calls for him to be hailed as a hero.
Nevertheless, there are constitutional issues to be nailed down in clear procedures (a comment I’ve been appending to most of my posts on the subject). Civilian control of our military is not only the constitutional and historical norm in the USA, it’s also smart and beneficial.
We haven’t needed clearly-delineated procedures for situations such as Milley found himself in after January 6, when it was painfully clear that Donald Trump was a lawless and irresponsible President. We never dreamed that a lawless and irresponsible person could hold the Presidency and the nuclear codes. Now, we now it’s abundantly possible. (Just today I heard a respectable pundit suggest that it was quite likely that the My Pillow guy might get the 2024 GOP nomination, assuming Donald is incapacitated.)
So it all needs to be nailed down. What can the top generals legally do if and when it looks as though the President will set off nukes to help himself stay in office? We need it codified.
I see DeSantis as more likely than Mike Lindell (the My Pillow guy) too, but I was just noting that a fairly well-known pundit suggested Lindell as a strong possibility. I don’t remember which pundit, because I was so shocked.
The suggestion was a Mike Lindell/Tucker Carlson ticket. Carlson could well team up with DeSantis, too: it would be that desirable-to-Republicans All-White-Guy ticket, and both are well known and (obviously) television-ready.
The Lindell suggestion had to do with the fact that, supposedly, he comes off as a ‘regular guy’ to GOP voters.
DeSantis, despite his mugging for the camera in ‘I don’t know how masks work’ poses, has something substantial to overcome: education credits at both Yale and Harvard. GOP voters do not like that sort of thing, or at least have to be massaged artfully to be willing to overlook it.
Still, I agree with you that he’s the likely candidate, assuming Donald can’t think of a way to poison his well.
The new “sedition memo” has been discussed in many threads, but I don’t think this particular piece has been posted. This piece drives home the fact that it’s a game changer, that it proves Trump got up the morning of January 6th expecting to have overturned the election by the end of the day. Conspiracy to overthrow the government, pure and simple.
But wait, there’s more…………
In addition to the sedition memo, the lawyers for the insurrection have revealed the rest of their sinister long term plans in this piece. It relies on a legal theory that they made up called “protective resumption”, which means that the states can expand their police power and use it go after the federal government. It’s as bad as it sounds.
( this link goes to a vile site and you may not want to go there. But you should gird your brain and read it, because everyone needs to understand that this is happening)
Here’s a good article on the article, the legal theory it espouses and what it all means
It offers some deep and terrifying insights into the method behind the madness, the long coup, as it were. The seditionist legal scholars -this one comes from Eastman colleague Steven Balch are arguing that “an audacity is now called for, a willingness to stretch institutional bonds to a degree that genuinely alarms our conniving subverters. They even suggest that states issue their own cryptocurrency in order to undermine the US financial system.
Basically, they are advocating for Civil War. There’s really no other way to parse it. This is what happens when the federal government turns a blind eye to crimes because IOKWARDI
Thanks for all that. It’s horrifying and depressing in equal measure. But we can’t let the ‘depressing’ aspect gain the upper hand.
It’s particularly unfortunate that Biden appointed a head of the Department of Justice who seems paralyzed by his need to have Republicans like him (or at least that’s my interpretation). Possibly things are happening on the ‘hold insurrection-planners/facilitators accountable’ front that we can’t yet seen. But it’s also quite possible that nothing much is happening.
I always come back to the role of the White-Supremacist/Gun-Profits media. If Fox News, for example, were not the beneficiary of the aura of legitimacy that comes with being a default standard-cable channel, paid for by everyone who has cable, then would its reach be so extensive? Might a change in that situation derail at least some of the current ‘let’s bring down the USA’ movement? Would members of that movement be put on the defensive at all if Fox News were demoted to the lower status of a pay-if-you-want-it entertainment channel?
Democratic Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney says some of his Republican colleagues were reacting with glee during the insurrectionist attack, naming Marjorie Taylor Greene by name.
The US Secret Service erased text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021, shortly after they were requested by oversight officials investigating the agency’s response to the US Capitol riot, according to a letter given to the House select committee investigating the insurrection and obtained by CNN.
But . . . But . . . I thought that deleting emails after they were requested by an investagation was one of the highest crimes that could be committed? Why aren’t Republicans outraged over this?
Does it matter if they “erased” the text messages? Aren’t they accessible through the phone carrier? I thought you couldn’t actually erase the message from all platforms?
Or do secret service agents have their own telephone network?
Speculation is that the deleted messages may have contained coordination between Secret Service personnel and associates of Trump about the movement of armed militia members to the Capitol on 1/6, with the SS facilitating such movement.
DOJ needs to do something other than giving this a pass. Destruction of evidence should not be given a nod and a wink.
Every single agent assigned to the DJT White House should be farmed out to field offices to go after counterfeiters. If those text messages can be recovered by the carrier and show they were complicit, then send them all to Leavenworth.
As much as I like the first part (the second part goes without saying) there are some problems. If you send them all to East Pig Knuckle, they will be in a red state, surrounded by others who are contaminated, with nothing to do because East Pig Knuckle isn’t what you would call a hotbed of counterfeiting. That just sends them further down the rat hole of crazy. Send them to a blue state, where everybody knows what a fuckup they are, and they have no choice but to do solid work, in an area with lots of counterfeiting, undoubtedly winning accolades and promotions.