Republicans are busy undermining the next election. But giving up on democracy isn’t an option. We must fight back, and here’s how
By Laurence H Tribe / The Guardian / Jan. 4, 2022
Only free and fair elections in which the loser abides by the result stand between each of us and life at the mercy of a despotic regime – one we had no voice in choosing and one that can freely violate all our rights. So everything is at stake in the peaceful transfer of power from a government that has lost its people’s confidence to its victorious successor. It was that peaceful transfer that Trump and his minions sought to obstruct and almost succeeded in overthrowing when Joe Biden was elected president.
A year has passed since Donald Trump’s attempted coup and his supporters’ violent storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021, in a nearly successful effort to prevent Congress from certifying Trump’s decisive loss of the election to Biden. Watching the images that day of the seat of US democracy overtaken and defiled, it was impossible not to viscerally feel the grave danger that confronted the republic. In the tumultuous year since, the immediacy of that sensation has waned – and the magnitude of the stakes has receded from memory.
In the rubble of the insurrection, the sheer shock of the moment jarred loose hints of long-lost bipartisanship and national unity and rekindled an appreciation of why a successful coup would have meant the end of all we care about. The House of Representatives expeditiously moved to impeach Trump for his role in fomenting the attack and 57 senators, including seven Republicans, voted to convict him on 13 February after a masterful presentation led by Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat of Maryland. After Trump had become the first American president to be impeached twice, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, delivered a blistering rebuke of Trump from the Senate floor, justifying his and many other Republicans’ votes to acquit only on the thin reed that, by the time of his Senate trial, Trump was no longer president.
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Laurence H Tribe is the Carl M Loeb University professor emeritus and professor of constitutional law emeritus at Harvard University and an accomplished supreme court advocate
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Buy a gun.
Thanks to Laurence Tribe, one of the nation’s preeminent scholars of the U.S. Constitution. He has spent his life — as has the famous Erwin Chemerinsky now of UC Berkeley School of Law — explaining in terms all of us can understand why the Constitution is a gem we should protect with all our hearts and all our strength. The power of ideas contained in that document is all that stands between the fragile life of an individual and the immense power of government. People all over the globe are putting their lives and livelihoods at risk to overcome governments that scoff at democratic elections. But here, we have so many folks who are willing to sacrifice democratic elections and the Bill of Rights, because they mistakenly believe: (1) that they are loved by the autocrats who manipulate them with lies, and (2) that they constitute a group that will always prevail as a majority in power. They cannot imagine a time, once the Constitution is gone, when there is nothing standing between their own conscience and the desire of autocratic leaders who see our people as masses to be controlled by fear, false praise, or exclusion. We need a field trip to Sudan.