The end of the Constitution at the hands of the left
Many people have linked to this recent op-ed in The NY Times by Harvard Law professor Ryan Doerfler and Yale Law professor Samuel Moyn. John Hinderaker of Powerline discusses the piece here, as well, and he calls it “literally one of the stupidest things I have ever read.”
I could not disagree more with Hinderaker on that particular point. I don’t believe it’s the least bit stupid, except in the sense that it reveals too much of the left’s plans too soon, and might alarm people other than those on the right. It’s pernicious rather than stupid, and actually rather clever. Apparently the authors don’t think that alarming moderates by stating radical leftist proposals is much of a problem, because the article certainly calls attention to certain plans of the left if they ever get at least 51 reliable votes in the Senate for it while simultaneously controlling the House and the presidency. Right now they have all those things except for the 51 reliable votes for it, but I believe there are only a couple of holdouts.
Here’s the plan, as summarized by Hinderaker, to change what the two Ivy law prof authors call the “inadequate” Constitution – inadequate to leftist aims for total power, that is:
The Times op-ed links to a 2020 article in the Harvard Law Review that advocates a plan whereby leftists can take permanent control over the United States, in effect staging a coup. The proposal is to break the District of Columbia down into 127 neighborhoods, and admit each of those 127 neighborhoods as a new state.
In a comment of mine last night on the subject, I wrote:
It would basically be Washington DC taking control of the entire country and dictating what it would be doing. Sort of analogous to the Enabling Act (since we’re talking about Nazi analogies, right?) only with a DC-dominated legislature doing the dictating rather than the Fuhrer.
Tyrannies are often willing to use legal means to effect their ends of undoing the checks and balances placed in a constitution in order to avoid tyranny. No constitution is perfect, and clever and highly-motivated folks such as Doerfler and Moyn can certainly come up with seemingly legal ways to do it – and although perhaps SCOTUS would try to stop them, how many divisions does SCOTUS have, after all? Plus, the plans are to pack SCOTUS with far-left justices simpatico with “progressive” views.
However, as you can see by that reference to a 2020 Harvard Law Review article, these ideas are not new. I wrote about that Harvard Law Review article in this January 2021 post. Here’s an excerpt from what I wrote back then [emphasis added]:
…I know of no constitutional impediment to that scheme. Unfortunately. But why hasn’t it been tried before? I think the main reason is that the far left has never been in charge of this country before. Previously, although politics has been hard-fought and often dirty, with shady machinations of one sort of other, there has never been an all out totalitarian group in charge before…
Some of the constitutional impediments to making the District a state can be found in this 1993 article, from which you can see that Democrats have contemplated this move before.
Whether SCOTUS would be able or willing to bar the move is unknown, but one thing we do know is that the Democrats in Congress are very serious about this, having passed a bill this past June making DC (or most of it) a state, although the bill died in the GOP-held Congress. Rest assured that it would have a much better chance in the present Congress, and of course Biden would sign it with a flourish. And once a state is admitted it cannot be banished. I believe that the current Democrats are deadly serious about it, although I doubt that all that many people who voted for them last November were even aware of that fact.
D. Cohen mentions at the end of that comment that “it looks like [the Democrats] are being pikers settling for just two extra states.” My response is: what makes you think they plan to stop there?
I mean that quite seriously. Ideas once unthinkable are often first floated in op-eds and/or law review articles, to test the waters and in order to nudge that Overton Window a bit more open. In that regard, please note this article that appeared in the Harvard Law Review last January. It was published as an unsigned “note,” which means that it was the work of students.
It is titled “Pack the Union: A Proposal to Admit New States for the Purpose of Amending the Constitution to Ensure Equal Representation,” and I suggest you read it or at least part of it. Here is a small excerpt:
“To create a system where every vote counts equally, the Constitution must be amended. To do this, Congress should pass legislation reducing the size of Washington, D.C., to an area encompassing only a few core federal buildings and then admit the rest of the District’s 127 neighborhoods as states. These states — which could be added with a simple congressional majority — would add enough votes in Congress to ratify four amendments: (1) a transfer of the Senate’s power to a body that represents citizens equally; (2) an expansion of the House so that all citizens are represented in equal-sized districts; (3) a replacement of the Electoral College with a popular vote; and (4) a modification of the Constitution’s amendment process that would ensure future amendments are ratified by states representing most Americans.
“Radical as this proposal may sound, it is no more radical than a nominally democratic system of government that gives citizens widely disproportionate voting power depending on where they live. The people should not tolerate a system that is manifestly unfair; they should instead fight fire with fire, and use the unfair provisions of the Constitution to create a better system.”
So you see that the very recent op-ed in the Times is just a retread of older proposals, repeated in order to norm very radical ideas and also because I think the January 6th “insurrection” and persecutions, as well as the MAL raid and the continual discrediting of the Founders, have helped pave the way to scrap the Constitution. The right is now sufficiently demonized in the minds of many people that radical moves against the right probably wouldn’t seem all that radical to more and more people, although I don’t think it’s a majority who would support these proposals. However, I believe that most Democratic voters don’t understand the danger of voting for Democrats at this point, and therefore would vote for people who would vote for these sorts of radical changes.
In addition – and this is connected to the point I just made – I also believe that most Americans no longer know why we are a republic rather than a democracy, nor do a great many of them even understand the difference between those two terms. Madison’s “tyranny of the majority” and its dangers have no meaning to them, since so many either know little about American history or were taught it is pernicious. This is no accident; it is part of the whole, and that whole is designed to allow the left to take permanent power by hook or by crook.
That’s why you see in that Times op-ed from Doerfler and Moyn – and in so many other pieces and statements recently – references to “democracy” and “our democracy.” The authors are well aware of what a republic is and why the Founders established institutions such as the Electoral College, but the authors and the left rely on the public’s relative ignorance of those things and play up the “democracy” angle which they correctly believe appeals to a lot of people.
Here’s a small excerpt from the op-ed [emphasis mine]:
Starting with a text that is famously undemocratic, progressives are forced to navigate hard-wired features, like the Electoral College and the Senate, designed as impediments to redistributive change…
One way to get to this more democratic world is to pack the Union with new states. Doing so would allow Americans to then use the formal amendment process to alter the basic rules of the politics and break the false deadlock that the Constitution imposes through the Electoral College and Senate on the country, in which substantial majorities are foiled on issue after issue.
Of course there are no such “substantial majorities” – that’s why so many new states with small populations, coming from one wholly-Democratic enclave and encompassing federal employees, must be created to perform this supposedly “democratic” feat. But never mind, right?
And from the 2020 Harvard Law Review article [emphasis mine]:
More aggressively, Congress could simply pass a Congress Act, reorganizing our legislature in ways that are more fairly representative of where people actually live and vote, and perhaps even reducing the Senate to a mere “council of revision” (a term Jamelle Bouie used to describe the Canadian Senate), without the power to obstruct laws.
In so doing, Congress would be pretty openly defying the Constitution to get to a more democratic order — and for that reason would need to insulate the law from judicial review.
A very blatant statement of raw power and disregard for the checks and balances of our government, all in the name of “democracy” in order to engineer a takeover of the federal government that most Americans don’t want and of which they presently are unaware is part of the left’s plans.
In the comments to Hinderaker’s Powerline post, you can find these statements:
Well the French Revolution worked so well, why shouldn’t we try it over here.
What would they do, if they got their pure democracy they want, if the People decided that Harvard and Yale law professors are to be taken out and shot. For holding positions that should have gone to the chosen ones, picked by the People’s Party?
And explicitly have DC control the rest of the country.
In other words, while we have the power to do so we must change all the rules so that we will never lose power.
Indeed, that is the idea of the Times op-ed. And these are not just the thoughts of a few random law professors. Not only do they teach the younger generations, but I am convinced that they are speaking for the left as a whole.
Let me add that a less specific but similar op-ed appeared in the Times nearly a decade ago, and I wrote about it in this post from January of 2013. That was right after Obama had been elected for a second term, and I believe the timing was no accident. The author was another Ivy law professor, that time from Georgetown. Here’s an excerpt from what I wrote back then:
As for why the Times decided to publish this piece right now, one can only conclude they see the time as ripe for delegitimizing the Constitution in order to further the leftist agenda, and seek to use Seidman’s credentials to make the argument from authority. The ground has been well prepared for this by our president, the MSM, and our educational system, so their calculations may indeed be correct.
The left is very very patient.
NOTE: An in-depth discussion of the following point is way beyond the scope of this already-very-long post, but I want to briefly state that I believe the genesis of the approach of Doerfler and Moyn and their fellow legal “progressives” is the 40-year-old field of Critical Legal Studies, which like one of its more recent offshoots, CRT, teaches that power is the only reality and that objectivity in the law is a complete illusion and utter lie. Therefore, go for the power. Moyn himself has written about Critical Legal Theory here, in 2017, but unfortunately, I can only access the first page of his piece on the subject and therefore am not sure what he wrote about it. But from that small sample I am guessing that he would like to revive at least some of the tenets of CLT and reframe them in a more palatable fashion that will stand up better to criticism. Along these lines, see this very recent tweet by Moyn:
“The court has always been quite political. And throughout much of our history, it’s been quite regressive. So I don’t have any illusion that the court was ever really neutral. The idea that judges could be apolitical doesn’t make sense.” https://t.co/3HqT2Bj9o4
— Samuel Moyn ? (@samuelmoyn) August 20, 2022
Of course, the fact that most judges are not able to be completely objective and totally apolitical is not an argument for throwing out the idea of striving for as much objectivity as possible, and instead to make the Court nakedly and obviously political with no pretense of objectivity at all. That would mean the Court was not any sort of court at all, and that the rules that govern a court and in fact law in general could be tossed for political reasons without reserve or apology.
They must want a civil war, cause that would cause a civil war…
This site appears to have the full Moyn paper in pdf:
https://papers.ssrn.Com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2817067
zenman:
I believe they do want the beginnings of a civil war, so they can put it down harshly and intimidate the rest of the right and any possible sympathizers.
Watt:
Thanks very much. I see it’s fairly long. I’ll try to take a look later.
Here’s an alternative link to the NYT op-ed at Archive, endrunning the clicks to NYT direct: https://archive.ph/3Eety
Elie Mystal (of the wild hair and the even more wildly unhinged rhetoric), a perennial favorite of the outrageously-remunerated partisan hacks on MSNBC, has also referred to our Constitution as “trash”. His recently-published book is wildly popular on Amazon, with overwhelmingly favorable “reviews” of a work by a man who is, without question, a race-baiting charlatan and a race-hustling grifter.
The NYT running that kind of editorial less than 3 1/2 months before Democrats almost surely lose control of the House and probably (despite Mitch McConnell) lose control of the Senate is a demonstration of how fundamentally unserious and even deluded the Democratic Party and the overwhelmingly white professional/managerial class has become.
Mike
“I believe they do want the beginnings of a civil war, so they can put it down harshly and intimidate the rest of the right and any possible sympathizers.”
Just six men with hunting rifles and a little planning and coordination could paralyze Washington DC or any major U.S. city for at least a week.
Mike
It would be fairly easy for the Supreme Court to prevent this scheme of very dubious constitutionality. The District of Columbia was ceded to the United States to serve as the seat of government, not for any other purpose. So Congress’s power to “admit” (not “create”) new States does not extend to the District, since that is not the purpose for which it was made subject to Congressional jurisdiction. Maybe if the District were first retroceded to Maryland, the individual neighborhoods could form committees which could petition for statehood. Then again, although retrocession has historical precedent, it isn’t clearly authorized in the Constitution so it might be legally shaky.
Really, the discussion is kind of silly. If the Democrats had the kind of supermajority control of Congress, the Presidency and the Supreme Court necessary to make this scheme work, then the scheme would be wholly unnecessary, because they would already have total control.
That said, this doesn’t have much to do with Critical Legal Studies. CLS mostly involves deconstructionist (aka Derridean or post-structuralist) analyses of social and legal structures, not too-clever-by-half schemes cooked up by clever word-choppers.
mystal, was harvard law review and an intern in holder’s justice department, it is staggering how insane he is, even though he looks like buckwheat went to seed
“Just six men with hunting rifles and a little planning and coordination could paralyze Washington DC or any major U.S. city for at least a week.”
If you want to be a martyr, I hope you set your sights higher.
If I’m not mistaken, each of the 127 neighborhoods would have to be incorporated as a territory, elect a territorial legislature, and then petition for statehood. Then they’d have to get the consent of the majority of the Senate to severely damage the clout of each extant Senator. Cumbersome.
It would be fairly easy for the Supreme Court to prevent this scheme of very dubious constitutionality. The District of Columbia was ceded to the United States to serve as the seat of government, not for any other purpose. So Congress’s power to “admit” (not “create”) new States does not extend to the District, since that is not the purpose for which it was made subject to Congressional jurisdiction.
It was James Jackson Kilpatrick’s contention a generation ago that Maryland’s claim to the District precludes admitting it as a state. It would have to be retroceded, Maryland consent to being partitioned, a territorial government constituted, and the government petition for admission.
Woodrow WIlson rejected the entire concept of Separation of Powers because based on simplistic reasoning about the “organic” nature of government and the assertion that an organism could not have “organs offset against each other as checks, and live.”
That assertion about organisms is incorrect. Living organisms implement Homeostasis….as someone put it in a comment to my 2011 post about Wilson, “All complex organisms are built around the principle of homeostasis, with countervailing hormones and processes antagonizing one another to maintain balanced blood pressure, temperature, pH, etc. Remove any of those check and balances and you are down, right quick.”
The same is true of engineered systems, which make extensive use of Feedback, often involving “organisms offset against each other.” (For example, to slow down the rotation of a crane or heavy gun as it approaches its target position)
And, of course, simple avoidance of Fraud has long used approaches such as the separation of payment authorization from actually making the payment.
“The evil men do lives after them,” and that is certainly the case with Wilson.
y81:
I think you are being too optimistic.
If you follow the links, they state that first DC would be shrunk down to a very small area where the federal buildings are, and that would get around some of the problems. Another thing is that it wouldn’t necessarily happen right away. However, as soon as they were able to pack the Court (after eliminating the filibuster, which certainly could happen) – or when enough conservative members of SCOTUS die when a Democrat president is in charge – they wouldn’t even need to pack it. All they would need is the cooperation of the justices on the left who would then be appointed by the Democratic president.
The persistence of this idea or at least forms of this idea since 1993 tells me they are very very serious about this, and that it has become more mainstream because they’ve shifted the Overton window on it.
And the way I connect this to CLT is through the idea that power is the point of law, and that naked political aims and methods are justified.
And a supermajority would hardly be necessary to get this going. If the filibuster is eliminated, there is no impediment to accomplishing it by a simple majority, as far as I can tell.
I don’t even want to read it, too depressing.
Actually it is a stupid idea. If it were put into practice it would not result in complete Democratic rule, except possibly for a very brief period of time. It would result in the breakup of the United States into some number of successor states. Whether this could happen relatively peacefully or whether it would would result in a violent civil war . . . well, my crystal ball is a bit cloudy at the moment. The future’s not ours to see (as a famous American reminded us about 70 years ago).
I encountered an explanation of precisely this phenomenon concerning the JWST just this morning: (1:35:00 ~ 1:38:00) https://youtu.be/NFiX4ayj2As
matthew49:
As I wrote earlier, I think any civil war that would ensue would be put down harshly and IMHO with a good chance of success, although of course I’m not sure of the outcome. It’s really a case of how resistant the population would be versus how the police and especially the army would act, and I think in recent years we’ve seen a great deal of evidence of the leftward drift and/or leftist cooperation of those institutions.
}}} “To create a system where every vote counts equally,
And RIGHT THERE is the problem. There is a reason the system isn’t about equal votes, it’s why we are a REPUBLIC and not a DEMOCRACY.
MBunge:
Some years ago a single (crazy) man with a car, a rifle, and a 16 year old accomplice almost paralyzed the District of Colombia. He had a hole in the hatch back of his station wagon, IIRC, and he would lie prone in the back with a rifle while his accomplice drove to a location, then would shoot someone. I think he managed to kill 4-5 people, apparently at random, before someone tipped off the cops to a guy in a station wagon with a hole in the hatch back. I believe six such crazies could indeed have paralyzed the District. For a few weeks — then law enforcement would come down hard. Heck, a one inch snowfall paralyzes the District.
For sake of argument, let’s say they are successful in creating 127 new states out of DC neighborhoods.
What’s to stop a conservative state, like Texas, from doing the same thing, i.e., making each of its counties a new state? Texas has twice as many counties (254) as the new states in DC.
It also has 43 times the population as DC (29 million vs 670,000).
And that doesn’t count all the illegals in Texas.
What if Florida did the same thing? Or several other red states?
And if they are blocked by a progressive Federal Legislature? Well, secession is not out of the question. It happened once before, as you may recall.
It looks like the bright idea to control everything from DC isn’t so bright after all.
Progressives never seem to comprehend that radical actions can be a two-way street.
The left is apoplectic that they are the majority and still don’t get to rule, forgetting all the decades they reminded everyone how the rights of the minority must not be trampled on. Didn’t they use the constitution for that justification?
}}} As I wrote earlier, I think any civil war that would ensue would be put down harshly and IMHO with a good chance of success,
I respectfully disagree, for the simple reason that there is a lot of dissatisfaction floating around. And I think the ham-handedness of the Left would result in atrocities that would induce still more outrage.
And most of the “right leaning” military they’ve been letting go and tossing off are both the competent ones AND the ones with real experience in guerrilla warfare and tactics via Iraq and Afghanistan. Because this isn’t going to be about set-piece battles. And if there are, it’s going to be the national guard of some of the larger and more competent states, not just the military vs. the armed plebes. The armed plebes are the disruptors, the NGs are the overall ground troops. I suspect that quite a few politicians that go along with it at first are going to find either their own heads disconnected from the rest of their bodies, and/or get very tired of hiding behind bullet proof glass and riding in armored limos unable to dare to even stick their heads out in the sunlight.
I would be far far more worried about the end result of the changes that would occur, and the charlatans are a lot more in evidence this time than they were from 1776 to 1789.
Could we get enough people who were willing and able to Do The Right Thing in the aftermath? THAT is the real concern, to me.
tom:
I believe the answer is rather simple.
To create a new state, the people of the state have to vote yes and then a majority of Congress has to vote yes. In the case of Texas, if the Democrats controlled Congress those Texas states would not be admitted.
The Democrats controlling Congress with all those tiny DC states could also amend the Constitution (with the votes of people in those new DC states, of course) and set the bar higher after that for the admission of new states.
The idea is to take power and secure it in any way possible.
Would the Democrats’ effort be successful in achieving that goal? I don’t know, but I do know that I have zero confidence in the ability of the current Democrats in Congress to vote “no” to stop such a scheme. They were all onboard with ending the filibuster, for example, except Manchin and Sinema.
Believe me, people advocating this 127 state plan are not stupid. They have thought this through more carefully than one might think.
Also, once a state is admitted, it can’t be unadmitted.
We need to have a right leaning billionaire surreptitiously buy up most of DC so when the democrats execute their plan they can evict the current residents and move in a bunch of Republicans.
Wouldn’t each of the 127 states have to prove that they have the ability to function as autonomous states, with the capacity to fund their own budgets?
I suppose the government’s of those several states would not be drawn from the locals, but would be appointed for them, by the Federal government, at least until, ” the people are ready to govern themselves ”
How convenient. The population of DC is just short of 690,000, meaning each state would have a population of around 5500 people. Small towns can get by, usually only with help from the State, where would these several states derive their funding?
As you have noted, this is merely a plan for tyranny.
SCOTT the BADGER:
I believe all that would be necessary is that each “state” would need to write a state Constitution.
Martin:
I nominate Elon Musk.
See this from Kurt Schlichter, about current day Republican politicians–and referencing Mike Pence and Tim Scott specifically–who think it is still 2005 when it’s 2022, we’re in a far different political situation and atmosphere, far different rules apply and, therefore, a whole different kind of politician, with a much different attitude is necessary.
See https://ace.mu.nu/archives/400594.php
Bunge:
Roadside bombs, IEDs, EFPs, death squads, murder, mayhem, chaos, starvation, thats what a civil war comes down to. Not just snipers.
“Believe me, people advocating this 127 state plan are not stupid.”
Yes, they are stupid, Neo. To advocate something like this as something more than a joke is to believe everything would just go on like normal.
29 states currently have Republican governors. Each one has a law enforcement and military to call upon, as well as their own government beauracracies and local economic infrastructure. That’s not considering the millions of Republicans living in Democratically-run states. To believe they would consent to permanent disenfranchisement is to be stupid, insane, or some combination of the two.
Mike
There are a couple of issues I see with successfully implementing this idea, and these issues devolve down to political self-interest.
First, you would need to convince the existing members of the Senate to willingly dilute their power on a *massive* scale. There are fifty states presently, and Senate representation is on a per-state basis. This scheme would effectively add over two and a half times more senators to the Senate, which would make each Senator’s vote worth significantly less. Would *all* of the Democratic senators go for this? I can see some zealots agreeing. But I suspect many would balk when they considered the long-term ramifications to their personal power.
Second, let’s assume that it passes. Two-hundred And fifty-four new senators have been added to the Senate. And now the backers are calling for the passage of a constitutional amendment that implements proportional representation. The new mini-state senate seats would subsequently be subject to proportional representation. That means that each of the mini-states would promptly lose one of their Senate seats to another state, putting half of the mini-states’ senators out of work. Are the mini-states’ senators going to vote themselves into a situation where they risk their incumbency against their fellow mini-states senator?
I suspect quite a few of them will balk.
“Roadside bombs, IEDs, EFPs, death squads, murder, mayhem, chaos, starvation, thats what a civil war comes down to. Not just snipers.”
The point I’m making, though, is that it would actually take a relatively minor amount of organized violent resistance to make American society essentially ungovernable.
Mike
junior:
Study the passage of the Nazis’ Enabling Act. Threats, fear, promised rewards, whatever it takes. They voted away all their power as members of the Reichstag.
I certainly hope it would be different here and that the more optimistic among you are correct.
“The proposal is to break the District of Columbia down into 127 neighborhoods, and admit each of those 127 neighborhoods as a new state.” Hinderaker
The District of Columbia’s population in 2022 is listed as 707,109. Divided by 127 would admit ‘states’ with average populations of 5,568 residents. Not going to happen, at least not that scenario.
“Tyrannies are often willing to use legal means to effect their ends of undoing the checks and balances placed in a constitution in order to avoid tyranny.” neo
Indeed.
“…I know of no constitutional impediment to that scheme.” neo
Currently and for the foreseeable future I think there would be political and judicial opposition to that scheme. But in the event it was implemented, there would be entrenched ideological opposition to that scheme. Ideology as motivation is obviously not to be underestimated, much less dismissed. And the ideological principle to which I refer is the core principle upon which the US Constitution is founded; specifically the “inalienable rights” of the individual. God given rights, which cannot be ‘amended’ much less dismissed. Lincoln alluded to that principle when he unequivocally stated, “Don’t interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.”
So relevant to today, Lincoln also presciently said; “We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.”
Pervert the Constitution the left has repeatedly done, it is now nearly a dead letter when democrats are in control and they are at base, determined to eliminate the very concept of inalienable rights. And in that determination, they set us upon an inescapable course, which can only have one destination.
I am very grateful for all you do to resist tyranny. From my limited perspective, this blog is very unique in how you blend deep and timely research and analysis with your more frivolous but very informed interests. Today, I am more worried than ever about the future of our republic. I just donated $250 to reward and encourage you.
Alan F:
Thank you SO much.
I likewise have become more worried about the future of the republic.
“ Believe me, people advocating this 127 state plan are not stupid. They have thought this through more carefully than one might think.”
But they are stupid. They’d have to get the disenfranchised part of the country to meekly accept what they had done. Not happening, the rest of the country would revolt, either by just ignoring them, or if there an attempt at coercion, a hot civil war that is unwinnable by blue America. Blue America’s Achille’s heel is its high density and population. Suppose the major roads in and out of NYC and DC were shut down by hundreds of 18 wheelers disabled and abandoned all along the interstates. Ditto the rail lines that carry freight in and out. Suppose also that the electricity was cut off and made difficult or impossible to repair. Now what? Wind and solar is going to save you? Hah. By the end of the first week mass looting and riots. By the end of the month, mass starvation and death, and even cannibalism. The airports wouldn’t be operating so even the Davos crowd couldn’t escape to Hamptons. It would be one happy huggy time for everyone, the rich and the poor alike.
Bunge:
Sniper detection systems. Technology moves on. Old bloody realities of Civil War remain the same.
Antifa and BLM gave it a try in 2020. Kenosha happened, but not as they expected. Civil Wars don’t turn out as expected. Not a bug.
Re: Texas breaking up.
Texas specifically has the legal privilege of breaking itself into a number of states (Wikipedia mentions four) as part of the treaty of annexation between the United States and the Republic of Texas.
Mind, that treaty has a weird asterisk on it; it was not only never ratified by the Senate, but explicitly rejected. It was eventually passed by a joint resolution by the House and Senate, which is very much not how treaties are ratified. But inasmuch as Texas (and Hawaii, which used the same process) was legally annexed, it legally has the right to splinter.
“Sniper detection systems. Technology moves on. Old bloody realities of Civil War remain the same.
Antifa and BLM gave it a try in 2020. Kenosha happened, but not as they expected. Civil Wars don’t turn out as expected. Not a bug.”
I know you’re just being you…but all the modern technology in the world didn’t allow the U.S. military to defeat a bunch of cave-dwelling goat-lovers in Afghanistan. And that was in a country that was locked down in a state of war for 20 years, not an open society like the United States.
To imagine Civil War in America, think of the Taliban in Afghanistan times about 1000 and supported by municipal and state governments operating largely independent of the feds. And that’s, of course, assuming there’s no resistance from within the U.S. military itself.
Mike
“They’d have to get the disenfranchised part of the country to meekly accept what they had done.”
Oh, I’m pretty certain that the Democrats are more than prepared to attack to the point of eradication that half of the population (or more than half) that they’ve been doing their UTMOST to DEMONIZE, DELEGITIMIZE, DISEMPOWER and DISOWN ever since even before H. Clinton let rip with her despicable—but truly RELEVATORY—“DEPLORABLES” comment.
Those who are demonized tirelessly, aggressively, unceasingly—and STRATEGICALLY (i.e., as a matter of policy)—would do well to comprehend what the NEXT STEP will be;
would do well to understand what the next step must logically—must NECESSARILY bring.
This UTTER AND COMPLETE demonization of the Right is “SIMPLY” a preparing of the ground for widespread national atrocity. (What the Democrats have done to the Jan. 6 protesters will be mere child’s play by comparison.)
IOW this demonization is THE softening-up operation—a prelude to a great and widespread atrocity.
That, at least, is the intention.
The execution will, God-willing, be far, far more complicated.
Related:
Doing their absolute best to foment a race war…
…and then WARNING the country (and the world) that white supremacists are going to….—that’s RIGHT—…start a race war.
(Kinda like Ray Epps “KNOWING” that there would be a pipe bomb or two or three at the Jan 6. GRAND ENTRAPMENT FESTIVAL…. Just his special intuition, I guess….)
When a progressive says something reasonable, they’re lying.
When a progressive says something extreme, they’re telling the truth.
neo on August 22, 2022 at 6:12 pm said:
Martin:
I nominate Elon Musk.
_______
I did the back of the envelope calculation and it actually worked. I guessed it would not. It would consume roughly 1/2 of Musk’s net worth assuming he could materialize that much cash without wrecking something first.
Re: 127 states
It’s not a bad plan. It’s a gamble too.
They must be very confident of success or they must desperate.
I think the “very confident” plan has expired. But that does not rule out rolling the dice on “desperate.”
Bunge:
When Americans decide it is time to strap on C4 vests and blow themselves up to kill other Americans, get back to me about Afghanistan analogies. And when Canada and Mexico provide safe havens to insurgents (remember Pakistan, oh Bunge the Majestic) get back to me.
Until then.
Don’t be a Bunge.
Impossible, you are, after all, the Bunge.
Barry Meislin,
“Oh, I’m pretty certain that the Democrats are more than prepared to attack to the point of eradication that half of the population”
However willing and mentally prepared large elements on the left may be, attempting to load half of America into cattle cars and sent to reeducation camps would trigger a civil war, one that the left would lose badly for all the reasons I’ve often mentioned.
But lately I’ve realized that murderous thugs with guns are not needed when you have the requisite degree of malice and control the public’s access to money and food. A government controlled digital currency system, food production nearly entirely generated by large agribusinesses (currently 95%) and a fully implemented social credit system will make the possession of guns irrelevant.
There’s now enough ‘liberal’ governments ‘experimenting’ with those three factors to conclude that, that is how they plan to implement their “for the greater good” tyranny.
It’s tyranny with a bland Trudeau’n smile on its face.
Bunge:
When Americans decide it is time to strap on C4 vests and blow themselves up to kill other Americans get back to me with your profound Afghanistan analogies. And when Canada and Mexico provide safe havens to insurgents (remember Pakistan, oh Bunge the Majestic) get back to me.
Until then.
Don’t be a Bunge.
Impossible, you are, after all, the Bunge.
“When Americans decide…”
Dude. Just stop. Just stop. You’re going to give yourself fatal cringe cancer.
Americans wouldn’t need suicide bombers. We’ve got a massively larger fighting force that would be massively better armed and equipped, operating within a massively larger population and over a massively larger and more diverse territory. And there’s also that little thing about largely independent local and regional governments offering implicit or explicit support.
Or try to wrap your little brain around this: One of the first and most important things any federal government would have to do in a “Red vs. Blue” civil war is clamp down hard on interstate travel, including commerce, because of the staggering vulnerability that’s been pointed out of cities like New York or DC. Can you even imagine the impact of that on all those tiny little Blue states in the northeast? They’re not exactly agricultural or manufacturing powerhouses.
By the way, did AMC hire you several years ago to write scripts for the various Walking Dead tv shows? Because the increasingly stupid episodes cranked out by that franchise seem like they could flow right out of your “mind.”
Mike
Now I have read the comments and am more depressed. Talk of Civil War does that.
Bunge:
Come now tell us more about your grand Afghanistan explanation about Civil Wars in North America because it was so apt. Or not at all. The rest of your jabbering is just a cover for your ego.
It’s a Bunge thing.
Civil Wars don’t turn out as expected or to plan. Both sides are fighting after all. You do understand that essential feature of warfare?
Carry on as only you can, watching zombie movies. LOL.
“Civil Wars don’t turn out as expected.”
Many picnickers who were present at Bull Run/Manassas on that fateful day in 1861 can attest to this. Everyone on both sides thought that the war would be over in a hurry. But it took four very long and very bloody (and very destructive, particularly for the South) years.
But enough about Bunge and his grand Afghanistan analogy, here is something much closer to the point, shredding the Constitution and precedent by the Brandon junta;
https://redstate.com/bonchie/2022/08/22/report-memos-show-joe-biden-tried-to-entrap-donald-trump-over-classified-documents-n616274
Impeachment 2023.
Another take on the Brandon junta and Mar a Lago:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/08/22/revealed-biden-white-house-directly-involved-in-conspiracy-to-entrap-trump-in-criminal-fbi-probe-n1623323
Faithfully uphold the Constitution and defend the nation from enemies foreign (cough cough) and domestic? Not so much, eh Brandon?
“…control the public’s access to money and food….”
Yes.
And as we have witnessed over the past 30 or so months, to jobs, pharmaceuticals, medical treatment and medical care.
It is all rather amazing when one thinks about it.
A totalitarian’s wet dream.
(Stalin is no doubt turning over in his mausoleum, muttering to himself, “Tovarisch, you were horoshoh, you were the best…but you were born a century too early…”)
Why would you need Elon Musk to evict the current DC residents? There are only about half a million DC residents; let one million Republicans move into the district and turn those 127 “states” into 254 Republican votes.
None of this is going to happen. It’s like the trillion dollar coin trick to evade the debt ceiling.
There were informal rules as to how many voters a territory had to have to become a new state. That’s a big reason why Wyoming introduced women’s suffrage. It doubled it’s number of potential voters over night. Nevada got around the rules because of the Civil War, but Arizona had to wait for decades until it had enough people. Creating a 127 states out of Washington DC, is an unbelievably stupid idea. It won’t go anywhere. Statehood for DC and Puerto Rico might. But the Democrats’ control of Congress may not even last out the year.
Funny coincidence: As I sit here reading this post and responses, I have Gutfeld! playing on the TV and what do they bring up for discussion? This NYT op-ed. Jimmy Failla: First the D’s complain that the R’s are undermining faith in our institutions! And then: Here’s a great idea, let’s destroy our institutions!
Douglas Murray: When you are looking for something to guide you, mustn’t you look to the past for the consequences?
[These are not direct quotes but kind of close.]
Interesting to see this come up on a comedy discussion show.
Lots of great comments and links here, and in the previous thread.
And an actual CW 2.0 is anybody’s guess as to how it starts or proceeds.
The 127 state scheme does sound pretty scary, but I also am glad to see the counter arguments presented here, and they give me some hope for sanity to prevail.
As for the issue of “…control the public’s access to money and food….”, that does sound pretty daunting at first blush, but we need to remember that if “the people” are denied access to their dollar denominated money, they will invent some other form of money [even Power Point created paper bills, copied many fold, might work? or ammo?] and agree to use it instead for exchange of necessary goods and services. That money will be agreed to be a valid and proper store of value for the goods and services so exchanged. At least within various regions/areas, such as the territory of GB, or of Neo, or of OM, etc., as “the war” progresses.
Money is “only” an agreement, as the surrogate for the value created by people in some other less convenient form, not that value in and of itself. And we might also recall that eventually Hamilton caused the Continentals and other debt instruments to be paid off by the new national government. Not pretty, but survivable.
(1) a transfer of the Senate’s power to a body that represents citizens equally;
Not every conceivable change can be effected by a Constitutional amendment. The creation of a population-based Senate is expressly stated to be beyond the reach of the amendment power: “Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”
Unless they can get around that, the worst we have to fear is a Senate controlled by 127 corrupt nanostates, each of which would also have one Representative and 3 electoral votes. With that kind of control they wouldn’t need to pass any Constitutional amendments, except of course to repeal thie Bill of Rights.
Statehood for DC and Puerto Rico might.
I hope not.
The concerns which informed the provision under which the District was created are anachronistic as we speak. The sensible thing to do is to retrocede the territory to Maryland. The federal government can negotiate a compact with Virginia and Maryland which allows federal authorities some special franchises in a menu of counties on each side of the river and creates some joint agencies supervised by tripartite boards – say, governing mass transit, limited access highways, bridges and appended stretches, a scaffolding of urban planning, historic preservation, federal police jurisdiction &c.
As for Puerto Rico, it should have been put on the road to sovereignty after the war. It’s its own country, not part of the United States except in a legal-formal sense.
After the war, France generally retained its insular and coastal dependencies except when they were fairly populous (e.g. Madagascar) or doing so would have required force of arms (Pondicherry). There were a couple of exceptions around the Indian Ocean, but that’s it. Rather regrettable that the United States, Britain, &c. did not follow a similar policy. These places generally lack the manpower to staff the political and economic institution which make for full sovereignty so would benefit from protectorate status. That includes pretty much all the Pacific Islands, New Guinea and New Zealand excepted.
As has been pointed out above, all they need is DC and Puerto Rico. Just adding those two can be considered a “compromise”
compared to the original proposal.
In the event of a potential armed conflict, what does the military do? I think the officers, careerists that they are, turn on the population. The troops walk away and go home, possibly to defend their families from their prior employer.
China’s plan has come together perfectly. Those were Yuan well spent.
They got “their guy” in the White House after the big cheat……and now all the other Chinese agents in the Senate and Congress will have an easier time of it while America fights with itself.
Because if America is tearing itself apart……..its enemies don’t have to worry about interference with THEIR plans.
Because XI is like that guy on the A-Team who liked to say “I Love it when a plan comes together”
Flush it
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/08/should-we-be-trying-to-create-a-circular-urine-economy/
I’ll cosign y81’s comment early in the thread. The guys writing this fantasy are hand-waving away the very sticky issue that the territory ceded by Virginia and Maryland for DC was originally a part of duly organized states, and there is precedent going way back such as the creation of Kentucky only with the consent of Virginia of which it was a part, as well as a Constitutional provision, that territory organized and admitted to the Union as part of one state can not be reorganized as another independent state simply by act of Congress. This was further ratified by the retrocession of part of DC back to Virginia.
Maybe Maryland and Virginia would agree to it but maybe they wouldn’t, and one could say the same about any USSC review of the actions. In any event the passage of an act creating 127 states out of DC would be just the first move in what would probably be a long and protracted battle in the courts and legislatures to legitimize it. Ultimately y81’s conclusion, and the conclusion of several other commenters, would probably hold. If the Democrats had sufficient control of the Federal, Maryland, Virgina, and other state governments to make this happen, it would be completely unnecessary relative to the other things they could do without creating any new states.
VDH recently wrote about Civil War pr0n coming from Democrats, and this has much the same feel. Maybe this is intended to make agreeing to only two states out of DC and PR feel like a ‘compromise’ to the usual weak-kneed RINOs but I think it’s more likely just written to get the Democrat juices flowing prior to the 2022 elections. They’ve got little else to fuel their onanistic fantasies of ‘owning the Rethuglicans’, The Turtle’s dour predictions notwithstanding. May as well dream big.
I don’t think people would stand for 127 microstates made from D.C. neighborhoods, at least before there is general public acceptance for the idea of scrapping the Constitution altogether. I could see the addition of 127 states as a coup de grace at the end of the process, but probably not as the opening move. PR and DC would probably be the opening move.
(And I wouldn’t put too much faith in the amendments clause in Article V. Leftists have been ignoring the text of the Constitution for over a century now – e.g. the “interstate” commerce clause.)
Brian E: Churchill knew what was up:
If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed;
if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may
come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.”
W.S. Churchill
How do they intend to “pack the union” when large parts of it are being colonized by Mexico?
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“I believe they do want the beginnings of a civil war, so they can put it down harshly and intimidate the rest of the right and any possible sympathizers.”
I see this somewhat similar to the raid on Trump’s MAL estate, along with their persecution of the J6 protesters. No doubt, they would try to intimidate their opposition. That is just how they operate. I would throw in the AntiFA and BLM riots of 2020, pussy hats at the 2019 festivities when Trump was inaugurated, etc.
That’s just their usual modus operendi. But their strength of overriding norms and doing what it takes to seize power is also their weakness. They don’t have limits, and don’t respect them as a result. They will go too far, and that ultimately means that martyrs will be created. Not just one or two like Ashlii Babbitt, but innocent women and esp kids. They will die, due to the ham handed intimidation that the left will utilize, and the worse it gets for the leftist oppressors, the more they will try to impose their will by violent intimidation.
It’s the martyrs that I think would turn the civil war hot. Yes, for now, the left that is in power in DC has the attack aircraft, the tanks, etc, to kill a lot of people. But that advantage won’t last long. If used against the American people, innocents will die, and that means more martyrs. Tit for tat means that the military bases being used against the American public would be targeted. Too many people will know where the sorties were being launched from. And, the bulk of the bases are located in Red America. If you launch weapons on Americans, and martyrs are created, as they would be, Expect that your wife and children would be targeted for retaliation. Sure, the military brass may try to protect the families of the pilots and assault troops, but they just don’t have enough combat troops to do more than that (I have seen estimates of how many combat brigades the military has, even with reserves, and there just aren’t enough of them). And 87,000 new, armed, IRS agents aren’t going to help. They would, ultimately be up against retired seasoned combat troops on the other side. Millions of them – the bulk of combat troops have long come from Red America.
And, of course, logistics for the left would quickly collapse. I know someone who could take down much of the power grid in the Pacific West with a single en block clip from a M1 Garand. Maybe two. Just hit the right power panel at the right substation. S CA gets much of its power from 7 other states, over many thousands of miles of high tension power lines, running through enemy territory. Everyone knows where those power lines are – they tend to run through half mile wide rights of way (except in CA, where they haven’t been properly maintained). Same sorts of logistical issues with other sources of power, food, etc. All transferred through thousands of miles of enemy territory.
To summarize – if the left, if Blue America tries to intimate Red America through using troops and other militarized government workers against them, they will almost assuredly use (much) too much force, and martyrs will be created, and that is when the gun safes around the country will be unlocked, military families involved will be targeted until their military members defect, and the parts of Blue America supporting them will be left foodless and powerless, starving in the unairconditioned summer heat or unheated winter cold.
Far left consolidation of power is the plan. The purpose is one party tyranny. (California and New York State are the model they hope to impose upon the rest of us.) And I’m preparing for blood thirty war to see them decimated in spilled blood and bones piled high up, offering my own in the trade-off.
It the only real way to the future and freedom, as the Founders honestly knew.
At 127 neighborhoods, the proposal is getting close to one state for each household. This is dangerously close to the Soverign Citizen concept, mention of which could get you locked up even before January 6th.