The American Police State – Heading towards Permanence?

 

     Armed soldiers in front of empty DC restaurant

The American Police State – Heading towards Permanence?

"The chance of having violent acts committed upon you in [House Speaker] Mike Johnson's Louisiana, in red state Louisiana, a red state that Donald Trump carried and every Republican has carried since Bill Clinton… are 400 times higher than in California. Let me say that again, let me underline that again: You have a 400 percent higher chance of being murdered in red state Louisiana, Mike Johnson's home state, than you do on the left coast in Gavin Newsom's California." 

 MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, citing government statistics.

One of the first lessons I learned in analyzing political statements: when politicians cite anecdotal evidence without fact-checkable statistics, prepare for a lie masquerading as spin. When truth and facts no longer matter to our nation’s leadership, democracy withers and dies. This is precisely the traditional justification for dictatorial takeovers and policies driven by the brutal and costly prosecution of critics and opponents. John Bolton, anyone? Intimidation works. And God help any federal employee of note who tells an inconvenient truth that contradicts Donald Trump, even if there is indisputable proof of the accuracy of the contradiction. Bolstered by Israeli intelligence, as Lt. General Jeffrey Kruse was summarily fired as head of the US Defense Intelligence Agency after confirming that Iranian nuclear enrichment sites were not, as Trump has maintained, totally “obliterated” by the US B2 strike in June.

In recent anecdotal statements by Donald Trump, noting the reasons for a spate of additional “my way or the highway” executive orders and city takeovers, he cited as success the lack of murders in DC since the military occupation of that city. He did not mention that locals are staying home in droves, instead citing anecdotal statements he claims to have heard from visitor/friends they have enjoyed excellent meals at local DC restaurants that were “packed.” This flies in the face of restaurant owners and reservation sites (e.g., OpenTable.com) showing that there are between 30% and 50% fewer such diners in DC across the board.

The soldiers in DC, mostly National Guardsmen from red states, are now armed… but not allowed (yet) to arrest anyone. They still do not venture into the high-crime neighborhoods, but their fear and intimidation factor is intense, profoundly undemocratic and very much counter the Posse Comitatus Act, which severely limits the use of federal military in domestic situations. As Trump announces his intention to deploy similar armed forces in “high crime” cities (all with seriously falling crime statistics, even using FBI numbers) – mentioning only blue cities like Chicago, Baltimore, Oakland and New York and completely ignoring red cities with substantially higher crime rates at every level – he seems to be enjoying the new power such deployments yield, compelling him to continue creating a new pseudo-federal statutory system by fiat (executive order). Who needs Congress, and if he cannot force Congress to follow his detailed orders, he will force reconfigure Congress itself?

All of these efforts are amplified by his demand of red states to gerrymander the nation’s congressional voting districts (Texas stepped up first) to ensure that Democrats may never again control Congress or federal elections. The Democratic counter, hemmed in by local neutral districting boards, is at best challenging. In 2019, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 5-4 in both Rucho v. Common Cause (North Carolina) and Lamone v. Benisek (Maryland) that partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions that fall beyond the jurisdiction of the federal judiciary. So go for it!!!

Even as the United States is rapidly losing the protection of constitutional restrictions, even as lower courts are trying to protect those basic rights, ultra-conservative members of the Supreme Court want to see their draconian mandates enforced to the letter: “A growing sense of frustration with some lower courts — articulated in terms that at times sound similar to Trump’s own rhetoric — has crept into a series of opinions this summer from the Supreme Court’s conservative justices as they juggle a flood of emergency cases dealing with Trump’s second term… Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them,” Justice Neil Gorsuch admonished in an opinion last week tied to the court’s decision to allow Trump to cancel nearly $800 million in research grants.” CNN, August 26th.

But the President has zero compunction against ignoring that Court; a new executive order signed by President Donald Trump August 25th bans the burning of the American Flag, in direct contradiction to a precent set by 1989 Supreme Court in the Texas v. Johnson deeming the action an act of "symbolic speech." He fabricated the notion that flag burning incites major riots. Trump’s total justification for sending troops into blue states is predicated on his mere unsupported statements, which resonate well with too many voters, that disproportional crime is primarily a blue state problem that he alone can fix. “Trump’s torrid rhetoric claiming that crime is out of control, which is often misleading, is a classic page from the playbook of strongman leaders. It could precipitate high tensions between the federal government and states over the limits of his constitutional and legal authority…

“The president’s threats prompted alarmed Democrats on Sunday [8/25] to warn that there would be no justification for him to dispatch troops to a city such as Chicago over local opposition… ‘We should continue to support local law enforcement and not simply allow Donald Trump to play games with the lives of the American people as part of his effort to manufacture a crisis and create a distraction because he’s deeply unpopular,’ House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told CNN’s Dana Bash on ‘State of the Union.’” Stephen Collinson, CNN, August 26th.

But unless the Supreme Court intervenes to ban gerrymandering and to limit the President’s use of federal troops in states that won’t vote him under false pretenses, democracy will indeed be replaced by autocracy, and there will be virtually no legal means to reverse that trend. A gerrymandered Congress supported by a rejiggered electoral college will prevent a neutral Supreme Court from ever getting appointed and confirmed to restore democracy. As I have blogged before, the United States has no constitutional basis to allow states to secede from the union, no mechanism even for a national vote to this effect. As Trump crushes our best universities, pulls research grants intended to benefit all Americans, allows a very rich elite to call the shots while cutting benefits for the rest, expect a major exodus of younger Americans to other nations as they seek democracy and equal opportunity that died in the US. And expect the US to falter and succumb to successful competition from other nations.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I am deeply saddened as I spend the rest of my life watching the country I love and adore become a brutal dictatorship based on fabricated “emergencies” and policies devoid of any meaningful factual basis.