The Editorial No One Asked For
We Still Have 962 Days of this Garbage
Hanlon’s Razor, a playful corollary to Occam’s Razor1, says this: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.” It’s a frequent reminder to myself that I can’t know someone’s motivation; more often than not I’m simply overlaying my own biases. People are wrong all the time; you don’t have to be evil to make a bad decision.
But I also recall the infamous words of Kurt Cobain and Joseph Heller: “Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you.”
Public service (being an elected official) is a weird thing. By and large nobody is asking us (I mean the specific us, the me in particular) to participate in the collective decision-making of governance. I choose to get involved. Similarly, JD Vance chose to get involved. JD Vance wrote a national best seller and went to Yale. He can do whatever he wants, yet he chose to become an elected official.
Why? Presumably because he thinks he can be an agent for change. Because he can make his constituents (in this case the whole country; in my case, the people of Dane County) better off. My vision is one of pluralism and partnership and resiliency. His is one of family and church. Neither is an inherently “better” vision - and, indeed, I’d argue they are not mutually exclusive in an absolute sense even if either he or I would likely draw lines that precluded some portion of the other’s vision.
Thus I try to begin analysis of action with the assumption that the actor is not acting in malice.
But, and I don’t say this lightly, what if he’s not here to make his constituent’s lives better? What if it is malice? What if JD Vance is not here in good faith and is here to dismantle democracy to impose his will?
Or, maybe I am being a little obtuse and I should be more clear. As I look around at the actions of this administration, I ask two basic questions:
1) Is it reasonable for a democracy to vote to dismantle itself? and
2) if so, don’t we at least owe it to the framers of the Constitution to follow the rules for dismantling it (i.e., calling a Constitutional Convention and formally amending the Constitution)?
As a parliamentary matter, the answer to the first question is “yes.” A number of people could get together and decide that they no longer wish to be governed “by the people, for the people”2 but rather by a single benevolent dictator. Indeed, I’ll note here that in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address he specifically points out:
“these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
The Constitution itself (Article 5) outlines two methods of holding a constitutional convention (but no rules for either, except one we’ll touch on in a second). BOTH methods require two-thirds (supermajority) vote: method 1 requires two-thirds of both houses of Congress to vote for the Convention; method 2 requires two-thirds of the states to vote for the Convention. Interestingly, the only rule the Framers imposed was that a State could not be deprived of its 2 Senators unless that state specifically voted to get rid of its Senators.3
So, yes, not only is it theoretically possible to vote to get rid of our democracy, we have 2 methods for doing so. Should I hate the player or the game?
It seems incumbent on me to state the obvious here: people that want to get rid of the rules, don’t particularly care about the rules for doing so. So, no, we do not (yet) have a supermajority of both houses of Congress nor do we have a supermajority of states.4
There are, then, two routes for overthrowing this particular democracy. The “Constitutional” method for doing so requires supermajorities of either Congress or the States. Failing that, it requires violence.5
So how close are we to the supermajorities required to overthrow the democracy “constitutionally”? Well, the current administration did convince .9% more of those that voted (voter turnout was approx. 45.3% of the total population or 65.3% of the voter-eligible population, or roughly 2.3 million people) that the things it campaigned on were better ideas than those espoused by the loser. Should it matter, then, that a very slim popular (not-quite) majority, in fact, voted for a campaign that promised to deport millions of “illegal” immigrants, to fund the genocide of the Palestinian people against the wishes of the western world, and to run roughshod over our global allies - all of which were things that they did campaign on.
So. OK. It seems pretty clear then we voted for cruelty and isolationism. But it seems a stretch to say that “the people” voted for a dismantling of the Constitution’s guarantees of due process, separation of powers, free press, and free association (all of that just within the first 100 days in office, no less!!). None of which were things that this administration campaigned on (and even explicitly rejected during the campaign). Of course, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, the administration has said that “well, the people voted for us and our platform (see above). So we owe it to them to implement it, and the only way to do that is to get rid of these pesky protections for immigrants and the people that support them.”6
“Over 77 million Americans gave President Trump a resounding Election Day mandate to enforce our immigration laws and mass deport criminal illegal aliens,” said White House spokesperson Kush Desai. “The Trump administration is using every power endowed to the Executive Branch … to deliver on this mandate.”7
And, indeed, it seems the more the administration presses these latter ideas, the less popular they have become. Thus, the “constitutional” method for overthrowing our democracy is even less likely.
“I don’t know … I’m not a lawyer. … I was elected to get dangerous people out of the country.” Donald J. Trump when asked about whether non-citizens are entitled to Due Process. [Ed Note: They Are8]
As the administration comes to this realization, and it becomes clear that the only route to dismantling our democracy is violence, I fear for what the remaining 962 days of this Presidency will bring.
Occam’s Razor: The explanation that requires the fewest assumptions is usually correct.
See, e.g., The Gettysburg Address
“… no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.“ You could also argue that this functionally makes it impossible to get rid of the Senate by anything other than a unanimous vote.
A supermajority of 50 states is 34. Surprisingly, there are currently 28 states that have passed a vote for a Constitutional Convention in their legislatures. So, we are currently only 6 states away from a Constitutional Convention as we sit.
See, e.g., the Boston Tea Party and the Civil War
You know, like Due Process, Free press, Courts, Universities, and Protests.
US Constitution, 5th Amendment: “No person … shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Note it says “No person” not “No citizen.”