An old legal maxim holds that one is presumed to intend the natural and foreseeable consequences of his acts. The presumption isn’t always accurate; some people are short on foresight. Still, it is a good starting point for looking behind the hysteria that is being whipped up over the riot in the Capitol Building a year ago, an incident being compared, with every sign of seriousness, to Pearl Harbor, 9/11 or even the Civil War.
Some consequences that the hysteriacs may hope for impress me as outside the “natural and foreseeable” range. Every day I get half a dozen or so e-mails from Democrat-connected organizations calling for Donald Trump to be banned from running for office again and for Congressmen who allegedly “plotted” the “insurrection” to be expelled from the Legislature. The dean of the Democrats’ election lawyers has suggested lawsuits to that end. Unless the universe takes a most improbable turn, none of that will happen.
Nor is it very likely that the great mass of voters will become convinced that January 6th really was like 9/11 and that they therefore should forget about inflation, crime, foreign policy debacles, inept and authoritarian Covid policies, shortages in stores and the sad fact that President Biden patently lacks physical and mental faculties on the level needed to carry out the duties of the world’s most demanding office.
On the other hand, the President and his Congressional supporters have set in motion a train of events whose end point is plain to see. Their rhetoric about January 6th is inextricably linked to demands that Congress enact legislation “protecting” voting rights by outlawing mandatory photo ID for voters, expanding mail-in balloting, legalizing ballot harvesting and otherwise opening the door wider to intimidation and fraud.
These proposals have virtually no prospect of becoming law. Passage will be possible only if the Senate creates a new exception to the 60-vote threshold for advancing legislation, and all indications are that a majority of the Senate opposes that step. There are also grave questions concerning the Constitutionality of federal intrusion into the manner of conducting Presidential elections. Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution provides that each state’s Presidential electors shall be appointed “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct”. Congress’s only power is to “determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes”.
Nevertheless, proposals don’t have to become law in order to have effects. Progressive jeremiads insist that state legislation to reform slovenly election procedures is a continuation of the “insurrection”. According to the New York Times editorial board, “The Capitol riot continues in statehouses across the country, in a bloodless, legalized form that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.” Vice President Harris has gone a bit further, declaring that, without the Democrat-sponsored “reforms”, the United States will cease to be a “role model” for opponents of autocracy.
It is natural and foreseeable that a very large segment of the Democratic Party rank-and-file will believe the Vice President and the other party spokesmen who intone the same line, just as a large segment of Republican voters believe that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen thanks to insecure voting procedures that were in many instances altered without legislative approval in ways that made them even less reliable.
What reaction, then, is natural and foreseeable if, as a great many observers anticipate, the 2022 elections go very badly for the Democrats? Not so long ago, the nation saw the ferocity of riots – far more violent than the January 6th outburst – to which many Democratic leaders reacted with indifference, if not approval. It is almost as if the party’s leaders are priming their followers for – might one call it an “insurrection”?
Further Reading: John Lott, Jr., “Is ensuring election integrity anti-democratic? Facts say no”. In 2005, a bipartisan commission co-chaired by Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker recommended a series of election reforms along the lines that Republican-controlled state legislatures are mulling, including universal photo ID requirements, severe restrictions on mail-in voting and ensuring the accuracy of voter registration rolls. If those recommendations had been adopted, Donald Trump would have found it far harder to raise questions about the accuracy of the election returns.
N.B. Not all liberals buy the equation of an aimless riot with genuine insurrection: Glenn Greenwald, “The Histrionics and Melodrama Around 1/6 Are Laughable, but They Serve Several Key Purposes”; Matt Taibbi, “A Tale of Two Authoritarians”; Jonathan Turley, “‘Preserve the Narrative’: The Public Rejects the ‘Insurrection’ Claim in New Polling”.
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