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The first thing we should do is celebrate Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s stunning success in organizing bipartisan Senate support codifying marriage equality for same-sex and interracial couples into federal law in the face of the continuing threat to equal rights by the radical, rightwing U.S Supreme Court.
Now more than ever, we need strong bipartisan political leadership in support of our nation’s fundamental Constitutional rights. That’s because over the weekend a serious new threat to American democracy arose. A crazy old man in Florida publicly advocated “termination” of the U.S. Constitution because he wasn’t elected president in 2020.
Ordinarily no one would feel threatened by nonsensical statements from a deranged Florida retiree. But this one was Donald Trump, the disastrous one-term Republican president whose constant lies about the election are taken as gospel by at least a third of the Republican Party. Trump is already a leading candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination. Now he’s decided to make abolishing the Constitution his top issue.
Trump’s justifications for suspending Constitutional rights are the same lies he’s been telling ever since he lost the election—that President Biden and Democrats stole millions of votes nationwide. Because Trump’s never produced any evidence for his fraudulent claims, they’ve been thrown out of more than 60 courts and twice by his own appointees on the Supreme Court.
All the more reason for Trump to terminate the Constitution and get rid of all those damned courts that refuse to support him.
“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote Saturday on his failing social media site that has attracted only two million active users. “Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”
Trump followed that up a few hours later with a post screaming hysterically in capital letters: “UNPRECEDENTED FRAUD REQUIRES UNPRECEDENTED CURE!” In another, he tried to goad Republicans into publicly taking a stand. “I wonder what Mitch McConnell, the RINOS, and all the weak Republicans who couldn’t get the Presidential Election of 2020 approved and out of the way fast enough, are thinking now?” Trump wrote.
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GOP Leaders Silent
Appropriately enough, the official White House response was also curious about whether Republican leaders would support the Constitution or their former president’s proposal that it be terminated.
“Attacking the Constitution and all it stands for is anathema to the soul of our nation and should be universally condemned,” said White House spokesman Andrew Bates. Calling the Constitution a “sacrosanct document,” he added a quote Biden has frequently made publicly, “You cannot only love America when you win.”
So far, neither Senate minority leader McConnell nor Kevin McCarthy, who desperately wants to become House Speaker, have commented publicly on Trump’s proposal. It won’t matter when they do. Destroying the Constitution is what Trump’s entire presidency was all about. That has never stopped Republicans before from supporting him no matter what they say publicly.
When Trump sent a murderous mob on a violent rampage to overthrow Biden’s election so Trump could remain in office after losing the election, Republican leaders including McConnell and McCarthy who fled for their lives from the Capitol issued meaningless words condemning Trump’s actions before vowing to support him if he were nominated again.
Stack the Court
Trump’s destruction of Constitutional rights has already begun with the stacking of the Supreme Court by Trump and McConnell to destroy equal rights for American women to make their own decisions about their own bodies, their lives, their careers and their families. The overwhelming response from Republicans has been celebration with the most Republican states passing the cruelest laws forcing victims of rape and incest including young children to give birth.
Destroying racial and gender equality in America has long been a guiding principle in the Republican party. The most corrupt, partisan supporter of Trump in the lawless Supreme Court majority is Justice Clarence Thomas, the extreme rightwing African American cynically appointed three decades ago by President H.W. George Bush to replace civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall.
When the lopsided Trump court majority overturned a half century of equal rights for women, Thomas put out a hit list of other American rights he wanted destroyed. Baldwin has now added protection for marriage equality that led his list. Thomas didn’t mention destroying voting rights, but Republicans are clearly out to destroy them. Thomas’s wife Ginni openly lobbied Wisconsin and other states that Biden won to send fraudulent Trump electoral votes to Congress.
We can’t depend on Republicans to protect the Constitution or American democracy. Too many Republicans no longer believe in either one. We’ve defeated Trump in three straight elections, but it’s been way too close. Like Baldwin, we have to keep building support among decent Americans to create a more perfect union.
