[Snippage]
I’ve been teaching and studying the U.S. Constitution for a
quarter-century, and events have sometimes tugged at my procedural head
and my substantive heart in different directions.
The impeachment of Bill Clinton, for example, struck me as a ludicrous
comic-opera coup d’etat—
The Constitution is not, however, as Justice Robert Jackson once
famously wrote, “a suicide pact.” That phrase is usually used to
suggest that government can legitimately overstep its bounds in times
of emergency. But it also refers, I think, to moments when “we the
people” pour a national libation of Kool-Aid and demand that everybody
drink.
I won’t.
The election of Donald Trump was, in procedural terms, scrupulously
fair. I hold no dark suspicions of altered vote counts or intimidation
at the polls. We may wish the Voting Rights Act had not been gutted by
the Court; but the election of 2016 followed the law of 2016.
Clearly
a large proportion of American citizens—not as many as voted for
Hillary Clinton, but still, under our strange system, enough—wanted
Trump as their president and now hope that he fulfills the loud
promises he repeatedly made to the country.
But those promises are the problem. Donald Trump ran on a platform of
relentless, thoroughgoing
rejection
of the Constitution itself (?), and its
underlying principle of democratic self-government and individual
rights. True, he never endorsed quartering of troops in private homes
in time of peace, but aside from that there is hardly a provision of
the Bill of Rights or later amendments he did not explicitly promise to
override, f
rom First Amendment
freedom of the press and of religion to Fourth Amendment freedom from
“unreasonable searches and seizures” to Sixth Amendment right to
counsel to Fourteenth Amendment birthright citizenship and Equal
Protection and Fifteenth Amendment voting rights. (so?)
I deny their right to give Trump my rights or those
of
others who cannot defend themselves. No result is legitimate that
threatens the Constitution its very promise of the “blessings of
liberty.” No transient plurality, no matter how angry, has the power to
strip minorities of equal status and protection; no mass of voters, no
matter how frightened, has the power to vote away the democratic future
of their children and their children’s children.
(HUH?)
American national leaders gain their legitimacy by competing in
compliance with not merely the outward forms but the clear values of
our Constitution—equal dignity, religious freedom and tolerance, open
deliberation, and the rule of law. These values don’t bind Donald
Trump; norms of decency do not apply; he shrugs off the very burden of
fact itself.
Like dictators of the Old World,
he
uses his mass media power to
lie, to insult, to strip individuals of their dignity, to commit the
grossest libels of religious and national groups, and to encourage
persecution, torture, and public violence. He actively campaigns
against any notions of racial, religious, and sexual equality. He
threatens those who oppose him with the unchecked power of the state.
(HUH
the fk?)
But I know this as well: Trump was elected President on November 8.
But he is not my president and he never will be.
FULL
GARRETT EPPS
