You Are Here - 8

"No way!"

I. Foreground

In addition to being a mental problem, technically, it is also undemocratic and unlawful to not know where you are (You Are Here, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).

For example if you were distracted and did not notice you were entering an on-ramp instead of an off-ramp at high speed, you are guilty.

Things that are or should be foreseeable under law are required to be "for-seen". 

For example, a democracy descending into an autocracy is foreseeable, and failure to see it coming is no excuse (your democracy will be taken away from you because of your failure to foresee):

"Nearly a year and a half later, surprisingly few understand what January 6 was all about.

Fewer still understand why former President Donald Trump and Republicans persist in their long-disproven claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Much less why they are obsessed about making the 2024 race a referendum on the 'stolen' election of 2020, which even they know was not stolen.

January 6 was never about a stolen election or even about actual voting fraud. It was always and only about an election that Trump lost fair and square, under legislatively promulgated election rules in a handful of swing states that he and other Republicans contend were unlawfully changed by state election officials and state courts to expand the right and opportunity to vote, largely in response to the Covid pandemic.

The Republicans' mystifying claim to this day that Trump did, or would have, received more votes than Joe Biden in 2020 were it not for actual voting fraud, is but the shiny object that Republicans have tauntingly and disingenuously dangled before the American public for almost a year and a half now to distract attention from their far more ambitious objective.

 

That objective is not somehow to rescind the 2020 election, as they would have us believe. That's constitutionally impossible. Trump's and the Republicans' far more ambitious objective is to execute successfully in 2024 the very same plan they failed in executing in 2020 and to overturn the 2024 election if Trump or his anointed successor loses again in the next quadrennial contest. 

 

The last presidential election was a dry run for the next."

(CNN ... blueprint to steal the 2024 election, emphasis added). The federal judge who wrote that article (J. Michael Luttig, a republican appointed by Bush II), had more to say about it in that same CNN article:

"The cornerstone of the plan was to have the Supreme Court embrace the little known "independent state legislature" doctrine, which, in turn, would pave the way for exploitation of the Electoral College process and the Electoral Count Act, and finally for Vice President Mike Pence to reject enough swing state electoral votes to overturn the election using Pence's ceremonial power under the 12th Amendment and award the presidency to Donald Trump. 

 

The independent state legislature doctrine says that, under the Elections and the Electors Clauses of the Constitution, state legislatures possess plenary and exclusive power over the conduct of federal presidential elections and the selection of state presidential electors. Not even a state supreme court, let alone other state elections officials, can alter the legislatively written election rules or interfere with the appointment of state electors by the legislatures, under this theory.

 

The Supreme Court has never decided whether to embrace the independent state legislature doctrine. But then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in separate concurring opinions said they would embrace that doctrine in Bush v. Gore, 20 years earlier, and Republicans had every reason to believe there were at least five votes on the Supreme Court for the doctrine in November 2020, with Amy Coney Barrett having just been confirmed in the eleventh hour before the election."

(ibid, emphasis added). As regular readers know, Dredd Blog saw this type of thing approaching as far back as 2009, and has posted about it several times (Here Come De Conservative Judges, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; A Tale of Coup Cities, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14; When Accountability Is A Plague, 2, 3, 4).

II. Background

We are here at the same place all civilizations before us were:

"Toynbee wrote volumes about two dozen or so civilizations that we only think about when we are in a history class or a library, however, unlike us he didn't just skim the surface, no, he followed ugly all the way to the bone:

"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown."

(A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee). What? Suicide? Murder? ... He was no ordinary historian was he?

That is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, as a world famous encyclopedia points out:

"In the Study Toynbee examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders. Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilizations then sank owing to the sins of nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority.

(Encyclopedia Britannica, emphasis added). Previous posts in this series have zeroed in on the question of what 'tyranny' and 'despotic minority' meant to him."

(How To Identify The Despotic Minority, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14). 

III. Closing Comments

We have to not only read and heed history, we must also read and heed herstory (Dido).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

---

---