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Bigger Than Trump
Having now reviewed everything I can find on what the President actually said at the protest in D.C., I can state with confidence that he did not cross a line into legally actionable speech. The bar set for classifying speech as criminal is pretty high, and the President did not even come close to meeting it.
Try to set aside what you think about President Trump. That’s a stretch goal for a lot of us, but let’s stretch: consider, for just a moment, that there might be an issue here that’s bigger than the President himself, and that could have repercussions that go far beyond January of 2021.
Those who call for the President’s removal from office are asking that punitive action be taken — in fact, that the most punitive action which can be taken, in the case of the Chief Executive, be taken — for his exercise of constitutionally protected speech.
Let that sink in. If the most powerful man in the United States can receive the highest punishment which Congress can mete out for the non-crime of speaking in a way that offends many people, then what protection does anyone have to speak freely? What does it mean to set a precedent that a sitting President can be removed from office for constitutionally protected speech?
During the Kavanaugh hearings, I argued that it was critical that the Senate confirm the nominee following the vague and unsubstantiated allegations made by Ms. Ford. A failure to do so would diminish the Senate’s authority by signaling that any future nominee could be derailed by nothing more than an unverifiable claim of past misbehavior.
Something even greater than that is at stake here. If we remove the sitting President, a man who received, barely two months ago, the support of more than seventy million Americans, that decision should be rooted in the most profound and solid Constitutional reasoning. Anything less elevates virtue signaling above the Constitution, and both endorses and enshrines the left’s view that the right not to be offended transcends freedom of speech and the rule of law.
If this disregard for law and the Constitution were coming only from the left, from people who already held neither law nor the Constitution in high esteem, I could almost overlook it as merely more of the unprincipled toxicity of the progressive movement. But some on the right are falling for this too — as evidenced by Ricochet’s own misguided rush-to-judgment piece a few days ago.
It’s time to put one’s feelings about the President aside, and to take a hard-headed look at the law and the Constitutional principles that are at stake. Everyone’s right to free expression is in the dock right now. That serves a left that has already embraced censorship and controlled speech. We on the right must do better.
Published in General
I actually agree that they should see trial. Many of them are probably innocent of knowingly done anything wrong. Some of them may not be. Uphold the law, show leniency where appropriate, punish were appropriate. I’m good with that.
I agree, but Meghan McCain wants them prosecuted as terrorists and insurrectionists.
Should I even ask where she was when Kenosha was burning down?
It was all a reaction to an obscure internet video.
This is how Congress experienced it:
https://youtu.be/J1PS31qRi28
Honestly, I’m surprised people are taking it so lightly.
Oh dear. I know, incredible right. AOC said we almost had half of Congress killed.
And everyone knows that AOC is unbiased and honest.
This once again gets into the fact that six days after the riot, we still don’t really know some significant details. Let’s start with how many weapons were confiscated.
I’m going to go out on a limb here just a little. All through 2020, the press studiously avoided accurately portraying hundreds of violent riots all across the country because that violence would undermine a narrative. I am guessing that the paucity of clear reporting on the Capitol riot is similarly motivated: depicting the general tone and extent of it would undermine a narrative.
Just a guess.
Well let’s see. Last I heard there were 52 arrests. Presumably each of them has 10 fingers and a mouth. So that would be at least 572 weapons. More if you count brains as weapons too, which the left very well might.
(That’s also assuming they’re really Trump supporters.)
Well, by golly, you may have it! Our godawful media has turned two idealists into cynics.
I’ve been commenting on the “5 died” narrative as well, the details of which are rather unclear.
I think AOC double qualified her words, “nearly we almost had…” or something like that.
Honestly, I don’t see the big deal: last I heard, none of us has more than 12 years to live before global warming kills us all. Almost doing them a favor….
“The mere thought hadn’t even begun to speculate about the merest possibility of crossing my mind.”
Actually, since 20-whatever years ago they predicted the end of the world already by now, we’re already dead and this is just the final nightmare.
They say it’ll bring back the dinosaurs. Well, actually, I am the only one I know who’s said that, but I know other people are thinking it and looking forward to the Great Transition.
In my mind, I’ve been comparing ‘America’ to Hisashi Ouchi, the only person to ‘live’ for any length of time without DNA, after it was basically melted away from radiation exposure; poor guy might plausibly have been described as a sentient corpse, they kept him ‘alive’ for 83 days, but he was begging to be put out of his misery within three weeks. If the founding principles and a citizenry that loosely supports them could be considered the national DNA, that’s us. The only difference is that approximately 49% of the ‘cells’ in our ‘body’ still have DNA, so something can still be preserved out of the ashes of what was once the greatest country in the history of mankind, but it will live on as just a shadow of its former self.
Let’s cut through the nonsense. The fact is, Trump has been promulgating the lie that the election was stolen from him for the past two months. That’s why those gullible people stormed the Capitol building. End of story.
Well, he’s been enthusiastically promulgating the unproven allegation that the election was stolen from him. I’ll go with you that far.
Which some Republicans seem a lot more angry about than months of Democrats promulgating BLM lies, and most Republicans either appeasing them or hiding in response.
The charge has been made by some of our fellow conservatives that Trump ginned up a crowd to invade the capital by telling them lies about how the election was stolen knowing full well that such a protest would lead to violence, and that therefore he ought to be impeached and removed. What he did was moreover an unlawful grab for power.
I don’t think that Trump was telling lies. I think he believed that what he was saying was the truth, that the election was truly stolen, and that justice demanded that the crime be called out and the election results corrected accordingly. He was calling for investigations.
Trump certainly did not know nor should he have known that a protest would lead to violence. On the contrary he’d had experience through his rallies telling him that the crowds who come out for him are never violent.
It was not unlawful for Trump to seek to exercise his legal options.
Finally, I wish someone could tell me where I can go to read about how the charges of stealing the election were “debunked”, as the above conservatives insist. I know of no such information. I know that people like them have loudly and repeatedly denied that the election was stolen, but as far as I know the evidence with a few exceptions has never actually been examined in any official or transparent way by anyone. The courts just ducked the issue with technicalities. The news media just refused to consider it.
Amen. And awomen, for that matter.
“Free Roderic! Free Roderic!”
“Vewy well…!”
No way. The process is the punishment. They shouldn’t be hauled into a leftist-shopped-for court until every BLM and Antifa rioter is tried, sentenced, and in an Epstein-themed cell.
Stop talking as if the field is level. Stop thinking that there’s some neutral spectrum of left and right, and that the middle must be the high point. There are no good people of the left. They are fallen, and they have embraced that state.
And stop thinking that the law applies anymore.
The law is now just a thin veneer over the reality of arbitrary enforcement for the purposes of securing political power.
Don’t want to hit ‘like’ but I just did.
And what about the tens of thousands more who peacefully protested. That’s rather inconvenient for those pushing the idea that people don’t make decisions based on free will. End of story!
Uh huh. Where has the allegation that the election was stolen been shown to be a lie?
I’ll wait.
I recommend a cooler full of beverages, a telephone to order pizza, a large fruit bowl, and some chips. It’s going to be a very long wait.