Shooting part of traveling Trump shock-o-mania shitshow

In an informal, unscientific survey after former President Trump apparently got part of his ear shot off in Butler, Pennsylvania, roughly half of my friends and neighbors acknowledged believing – at least initially – that the shooting had been a staged campaign event. Given made-to-order photographs of the event taken by mainstream news media of Trump – face bloodied, fist raised defiantly as Secret Service agents rushed him offstage to a waiting vehicle, a U.S. flag soaring overhead heavenlike – who in our doubting world wouldn’t wonder as much?

Lest Trump supporters erupt in indignant outrage that anyone believe this was anything but an outright assassination attempt, remember: For more than three years, Americans have been pressed almost daily by Trump and his sycophants to believe the storming of the U.S. Capitol, complete with attacks on police officers, was a plot provoked by disguised antifa activists and choreographed by the FBI to embarrass and undermine President Trump. A few days after the July 13 assassination attempt, Trump again touted January 6 as a “hoax” in a social-media post.

I was making Saturday night dinner when my wife said Trump, 78, had been shot at one of his campaign rallies. As a lifelong newsman, I ordinarily would have rushed to my iPad or TV to confirm this; as a retired newsman living in the propagandistic, conspiracy-ridden, “truth-isn’t-truth” Age of Trump, I instead wearily suggested my wife consult reliable Washington Post or CBS News websites to ensure such an event had taken place – and that, in any case, dinner was ready. Only a few hours later had I sufficiently galvanized myself to return to the murky depths of Trump’s America.

One reason for skepticism: To experience a Trump rally as I have is to witness several hours of delusion, anger, even torment. Wonder why most people in the risers behind Trump didn’t flee when shots rang out? By then, many had spent hours outside baking in the July sun, often without easy access to water. Some had passed out from heat exhaustion. When cognizant, they listened to a stream of incendiary, overripe warmup speakers whipping them into a dizzying frenzy of victimhood and resentment. By the time gunfire erupted, they were too weak and too transfixed to run for their lives.

In short, the shooting seemed part of the traveling Trump shock-o-mania shitshow where Americans are invited to view themselves in a funhouse mirror of whacky distortions and the carnival barker-in-chief will say anything and everything – often to the point of babbling, and just as incoherently as our sitting president but without the latter’s bowing to certain standards of conduct. If you study the faces of the crowd behind Trump whenever he says something utterly absurd, trips over a spoken gaffe or collapses into garble at rallies, there’s no flash of realization anything is amiss. The lights at home are out.

When a friend who voted twice for Trump raised the assassination attempt the other day, he focused our conversation on ballistics, logistics and security contingency planning. Not once did he express surprise or horror that someone had tried to blow Trump’s head off. Nor did my friend once hint that this must have been some leftist or government plot to assassinate Trump. Our conversation reminded me of my own conclusion the evening of the shooting: If you regularly blow things up and you’re indiscriminate in how you blow things up, don’t be surprised if one day it all blows up in your face.

Trump’s champions in Congress and right-wing media accuse mainstream media and Democrats of inciting violence against Trump by alleging that Trump, the Make America Great Again movement and Project 2025 reek of unadulterated fascism. Yet Trump and his followers show no hesitation in recklessly vilifying others as “socialists” and “communists.” When I walked onto the grounds of the Trump rally at Waco Regional Airport the morning of March 25, 2023, one of the first oversized banners I saw declared: “DEMOCRATS ARE COMMUNISTS,” complete with hammer and sickle.

So why is turnabout not fair play? Republicans have been calling Democrats “communists” for decades. Are Democrats not entitled to claim Republicans are fascists, particularly if they (and a great number of moderates and conservatives) believe it so? Project 2025 reimagines America under a super-presidency largely unchecked by courts or Congress; replacement of millions of non-partisan civil service employees with Trump toadies who could bungle everything from Medicare to federal disaster relief to Social Security payments; and a military leadership more loyal to the president than the U.S. Constitution.

And talk of incendiary: Even now, Trump stokes violence by continually insisting, without evidence, that the 2020 election was “stolen.” Yet some 60 lawsuits alleging this failed in the courts. And despite claims to the contrary, about half of the hearings were evidentiary. To quote several elder Republican statesmen who refuted Trump’s charges in 2022: "Claims that an election was stolen or that the outcome resulted from fraud are deadly serious and should be made only on the basis of real and powerful evidence. If the American people lose trust that our elections are free and fair, we will lose our democracy."

In fact, these hardline Republicans of yesteryear who investigated Trump’s allegations (including former federal judge Michael Luttig and Bush v. Gore election attorney Benjamin Ginsberg) declare in their “Lost, Not Stolen” report: “There is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct. It is wrong, and bad for our country, for people to propagate baseless claims that President Biden’s election was not legitimate.”

Consider, too, the numerous pleas for leniency from many January 6 rioters, insurrectionists and camp followers in federal district court who now blame Trump for inciting the violence.

Recent example: East Texan Alex Harkrider, 36, a Marine veteran convicted of running rampant with a tomahawk at the Capitol. "False claims by President Trump that the election was rigged were made on media sources as well as by the president himself that the election system had been corrupted and that the integrity of the election should be questioned," Harkrider’s attorney argued. "Trump refused to concede. He showed himself willing to undermine confidence in the democratic process and in time managed to convince nearly three-quarters of his supporters that the loser was actually the winner."

Not that this is the only outcome for January 6 dupes. When Tyler Dykes, 26, was sentenced to almost five years in prison this month for assaulting law enforcement as an active-duty Marine on the Sixth, he demonstrated the extremes of defiance deemed acceptable in the Trump ranks. He talked about the unrivaled adrenaline rush he experienced at the Capitol, eclipsing even (he claimed) bungee jumping, and offered in court his unqualified endorsement of Trump for president in 2024. Dykes has already served time for participating in the racist “Unite the Right” violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Trump apologists now demand we at least show decency and deference to Trump after the shooting. But for a tilt of the head, he might have been killed. Yet the former president mocked the hammer attack on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband (and the MAGA crowd laughed); dismissed a very real plot to kidnap a Democratic governor as “fake”; hinted that Second Amendment advocates might want to do something about 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton; and has vowed to pardon January 6 rioters, many of whom roamed Capitol corridors screaming for the blood of Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Pence.

A Pew Research Center survey this year found nearly three times as many Republicans as Democrats believe politicians should be able to express themselves with aggressive or heated language without worrying about the consequences. A day before the Waco rally kicked off his 2024 reelection bid, the former president vented over the prosecution case against him involving hush payments to a porn star. Trump warned of “death and destruction” if the case was allowed to proceed. Rallygoers with whom I spoke the very next day were divided over whether such threatening language was appropriate.

General consensus: “Oh, that’s just Trump being Trump.”

During the 2024 Republican National Convention, Trump declared: “The election result [of 2020], we're never going to let that happen again. They used COVID to cheat.” Does Trump mean he’ll engage in more behind-the-scenes skullduggery to siphon votes his way (which he clearly attempted in 2020) or does he threaten more post-election violence? When Ted Koppel visited a Trump rally in Schnecksville, Penn., in April, some aging rallygoers signaled the latter. “Be ready, just be ready for war,” a burly white man with a “Second Amendment: God, Guns and Guts” cap told the 84-year-old veteran journalist.

Not even two weeks after the shooting, during a rally in Ohio, Republican state Sen. (and Boy Scout!) George Lang proved the Trump movement has learned nothing: “I believe wholeheartedly Donald Trump and Butler County’s JD Vance are the last chance to save our country politically. I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country, and it will be saved. It’s the greatest experiment in the history of mankind. And if we come down to a civil war, I’m glad we got people like Smitty [Mark Smith] and the Bikers for Trump on our side.”

The crowd cheered.

A more recent University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats survey suggests that 7 percent of Americans – roughly 18 million adults – view violence as justifiable in restoring Trump to power. They also deem January 6 insurrectionists as “patriots.” Another 10 percent – some 26 million people – view violence as justifiable in preventing Trump from regaining the presidency. The Chicago Project’s work gauging political violence accelerated only after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to halt the constitutionally mandated certification of the 2020 presidential election.

What’s now really driving the MAGA crowd crazy is they can’t categorize the dead 20-year-old shooter as a card-carrying member of the left. He was reportedly a registered Republican and a gun enthusiast who left few indications of what spurred him to elude security, somehow scale a building on the rally’s outer perimeter and maintain his perch long enough to squeeze off several shots with an assault-styled rifle. British reporter Siobhan Kennedy reports the Trump 2024 campaign considered the shooter’s household in Bethel Park as one of the most sympathetic to Trump’s reelection in the neighborhood.

Investigation continues as conspiracy theories multiply, representing a frantic game of whack-a-mole for the legitimate press charged with timely fact-checking. It’s quite possible the shooter reflects the utter incoherence of a political movement driven less by ideology and integrity, more by idolatry and impulse. The fact the shooter’s cellphone revealed obsessions with both Trump and Biden and their schedules may well hint at how a bewildered, repulsed, up-and-coming generation in the Age of Trump perceives all of us “adults” who, whatever else, have been in charge of America for generations now.

Bill Whitaker spent 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor. He is a member of the Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors. This piece appeared in the Tribune-Herald on July 27.

Riding the storm, directing the whirlwind

 

Two hundred and forty-eight years ago, a group of American patriots gathered to ratify a document written by revolutionary firebrand and intellectual Thomas Jefferson that, more than anything, made abundantly clear their disgust with unaccountable kings deriving their power from the Almighty. And three days before those patriots’ descendants celebrated the Declaration of Independence this month, the Supreme Court of the United States in a burst of judicial activism restored the very monarchial malignancy our forefathers fought against in the American Revolution. It recast the American presidency in a way that 18th century Tories and turncoats might have celebrated.

In a ruling that will forever define the legacy of the Roberts court, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a long, tortuous opinion in Trump v. United States that violates the fundamental, all-American principle that presidents be as accountable under the law as the rest of us. It instead allows immunity loopholes for all sorts of corruption and criminality by a president if he or she can pass off such malfeasance as "official acts." One can actually feel Roberts’ discomfort in the blunderbuss of words he employs to hide the fact he’s defending a deceitful, narcissistic scoundrel who sought to overturn the will of the American people and upend the peaceful transfer of power that had been an American hallmark for 220 years.

In doing so, Roberts at long last ensures himself of the same ignominy that posterity bestows on hoary Chief Justice Roger Taney in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision.

Roberts' reading of The Federalist Papers is clearly selective. He gallops right past Federalist No. 69 by Alexander Hamilton who in 1788 sought to outline for Americans the benefits of a president over a king: "The president of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried and, upon conviction of treason, bribery or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law. The person of the king of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable: There is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a national revolution."

Obviously, the 69-year-old chief justice has had a change of heart since his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005 when he declared: “I believe no one is above the law under our system and that includes the president. The president is fully bound by the law, the Constitution and statutes.” Two decades later, overseeing a bitterly divided court hobbled by corruption, incompetence and incoherence, Roberts now signals in a ruling brimming with contradictions that, well, yes, the president has significant immunity from prosecution for official acts, whatever those acts might be. And that’s the problem with presidents claiming all sorts of powers beyond those set out by Article II of the Constitution.

Yes, one appreciates arguments for a strong, decisive chief executive, especially given that Congress is increasingly dysfunctional – more prone to showmanship and grandstanding than consensus-building and legislating policy. But the very act of emboldening the American presidency demands that those chief executives who exceed their “core constitutional powers” for self-gain be held accountable. That includes Donald Trump who, as sitting president, clearly conspired to subvert the will of the majority in a national election. Yet Roberts writes not only as if this conspiracy never happened, he seeks to hinder and confound and obstruct a federal trial weighing all the evidence and testimony, pro and con.

For graying Americans, the Roberts ruling showcases how effectively Make America Great Again rhetoric and its fanciful reweaving of foundational history has remolded the hearts and minds of some of us to be willing subjects, not discerning citizens. To quote journalist and historian Garrett M. Graff: “I wrote a history of Watergate that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize last year. And let me tell you: When Nixon said, ‘If the president does it, it’s not illegal,’ no one believed that was true. All of American history argues the opposite. And yet that’s exactly what the Supreme Court agreed today. The entire test of Watergate was no one is above the law. Today, the Supreme Court made one man above the law.”

In her powerful dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor makes this point: "After the Watergate tapes revealed President Nixon’s misuse of official power to obstruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation of the Watergate burglary, President Ford pardoned Nixon. Both Ford’s pardon and Nixon’s acceptance of the pardon necessarily 'rested on the understanding that the former president faced potential criminal liability.'" Sotomayor adds: “Trump’s own lawyers during his second impeachment trial [for incitement of an insurrection in 2021] assured senators that declining to impeach Trump for his conduct related to January 6 would not leave him ‘in any way above the law.’” So much for that supposed point of law.

The lack of outrage by everyday Americans – and during the Fourth of July weekend – offers disturbing evidence of how tenuous our collective grasp of foundational American principles is. After a windstorm toppled a large red oak in a neighbor’s yard this spring, he voiced astonishment the tree’s roots didn’t run deeper, given the many years the tree dominated the front yard. The failure of so many Americans – perhaps defeated by the court’s serpentine legal reasoning, perhaps allergic to daunting news reports on complicated topics, perhaps just eager to go out and revel in carefree displays of patriotism – reminds me of that oak’s fate as the nation lazily contemplates another tradition-trashing Trump presidency.

The ruling also reinforces that bright line between what I call “classic conservatives” – those embracing classical principles of limited government and rule of law – and Trump supporters who call themselves conservative but unashamedly shed their principles whenever convenient, particularly in deference to charismatic, divinely dispatched strongmen who cater to their fears and feed their anger and into whose arms they unwittingly surrender much. And it highlights the fact that, in so many infamous authoritarian eruptions, the judiciary is often quick to falter in upholding the law. The collective capitulation shown by so-called “conservative” Supreme Court members suggests we’re witnessing that here and now.      

Many of us who listened to oral arguments before the court by the Department of Justice and Trump’s attorney in April marveled at how right-wing justices shifted and squirmed to avoid discussing the actual case at hand, retreating instead into hypotheticals. Yet those justices who ultimately dissented elicited the most frightening possibilities in this legal game. Justice Sotomayor asked Trump’s attorney: "If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?" Trump’s lawyer: "It would depend on the hypothetical but that could well be an official act."

Really? And that’s constitutionally protected now? In America?

On the very eve of this 6-3 ruling, Trump paused his many posts claiming victimhood by a “weaponized” Department of Justice to instead repost to his online followers a post accusing former Congresswoman Liz Cheney of treason and calling for “televised military tribunals.” He boosted another calling for the imprisonment of President Biden, Vice President Harris, former Vice President Pence and others. Would the high court regard such vengeful acts, were they to occur in a second Trump presidency, protected from prosecution because they qualify as official presidential acts? Or is only a two-month coup to hijack our government masterminded by a losing reality-TV president protected from legal consequence?

Trump celebrated the ruling on Truth Social: "Without Presidential Immunity, a President of the United States literally could not function! It should be a STRONG IMMUNITY, where proper decisions can be made, where our Country can be POWERFUL and THRIVE and where Opponents cannot hold up and extort a Future President for Political Gain. It is a BIG decision, an important decision, a decision which can affect the Success or Failure of our Country for decades to come. We want a GREAT Country, not a weak, withering and ineffective one." His campaign marketed T-shirts: "Trump 2024: Don't Tread on MAGA,” complete with timber rattler – ironically playing off the Revolutionary-era flag defying kings.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, former guiding light of the off-the-rails Texas Public Policy Foundation, praised the court decision on presidential immunity as “vital” – hardly a surprise as he likely views it as more easily facilitating his goal of “institutionalizing Trumpism,” including radical measures in Project 2025 such as replacing much of the federal workforce with Trump loyalists, however competent. In an interview, he quite naturally cited Federalist No. 70, published March 15, 1788, in which Hamilton argued for a vigorous chief executive – also predictably quoted by the chief justice. Yet this essay surely didn’t negate Hamilton’s thoughts on presidents and the law in Federalist No. 69, published a day earlier.

For the record, Hamilton proved shrewdly perceptive. When Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied in the hard-fought presidential election of 1800, Hamilton surprised some by helping tilt the election outcome to Jefferson, even though Jefferson and Hamilton were fierce political rivals. So far as Hamilton was concerned, Jefferson at least had principles; Burr had none: “Mr. Jefferson, though too revolutionary in his notions, is yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly government. Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself – thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement – and will be content with nothing short of permanent power in his own hands.”

Burr’s post-election intrigue allegedly involving shadowy efforts to prompt the secession of western lands and invade Mexico left him on trial for treason in 1807. He was acquitted but his reputation never recovered. By then Burr had also killed Hamilton in America’s most famous duel. Chief Justice Roberts actually cites United States v. Burr in his own Trump v. United States ruling, but in his bid to crown Trump with presidential immunity he contorts the broader views of Chief Justice John Marshall, who presided over the Burr trial. Whatever else on finer points in this complicated case, Marshall famously reasoned that “the law does not discriminate between the president and a private citizen.”

This much is clear: Alexander Hamilton anticipated Donald Trump 223 years before, judging from this 1792 epistle: “When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper . . . despotic in his ordinary demeanor – known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty – when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity – to join in the cry of danger to liberty – to take every opportunity of embarrassing the general government and bringing it under suspicion – to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day – it may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may 'ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

In his smug interview on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Heritage executive Kevin Roberts skates past such historical distinctions. He delights in the “radical left” going apoplectic “because our side is winning.” He claims the nation is undergoing “the process of the Second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” This raises a question given this historian and election denier’s suggestion that whoever resists this “revolution” – including presumably we moderates and anti-Trump conservatives – will be dealt with. Are we permitted to at least resist with, say, the ferocity and dedication displayed by self-righteous, delusional, far-right “heroes” of the Sixth of January?  

Equally disturbing is the court majority’s dictate – and without any constitutional originalism to back it up – that lower courts “may not inquire into the president’s motives … nor may courts deem an action unofficial merely because it allegedly violates a generally applicable law.” And, amazingly, the court ruled Trump’s exchanges with Department of Justice officials to overthrow the 2020 election in his favor are protected by presidential immunity because such exchanges qualify as “officials acts.” Constitutional scholar and Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin correctly argues this "radical break from history and the rule of law shows how far Trump’s lawlessness has contaminated the Supreme Court." Indeed.

Even Trump-nominated Justice Amy Coney Barrett balked at John Roberts' sweeping view of presidential immunity for acts hardly within a president’s constitutional realm. "Take the president’s alleged attempt to organize alternative slates of electors," Barrett wrote in a partial dissent. "In my view, that conduct is private and therefore not entitled to protection. The Constitution vests power to appoint presidential electors in the states. And while Congress has a limited role in that process, the president has none. In short, a president has no legal authority – and thus no official capacity – to influence how the states appoint their electors. I see no plausible argument for barring prosecution of that alleged conduct.”

Yet Chief Justice Roberts seeks to excuse a movement bent on dictatorship, if Trump’s words of recent are to be taken seriously. At one point, Roberts argues immunity may be warranted involving Trump’s self-serving efforts to pressure his vice president to reject or question Electoral College votes from battleground states sufficiently to allow Trump a path to electoral victory. Vice President Pence refused to do so, citing his strictly ceremonial role as defined by law, including the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution. Yet Roberts trivializes the key fact that Pence, in his role on January 6, was functioning as president of the Senate – and not as vice president.

"When may a former president be prosecuted for official acts taken during his presidency?" Roberts asks in his opinion. "Our nation has never before needed an answer. But in addressing that question today, unlike the political branches and the public at large, we cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies. In a case like this one, focusing on 'transient results' may have profound consequences for the separation of powers and for the future of our republic." And thus he cavalierly justifies a bewildering, disordered decision that is more an assemblage of impressions and musings, dispensed with little or no solid foundation and providing no real resolution to our "present exigencies."

Freewheeling Justice Clarence Thomas expands on Roberts' scattershot approach in a concurrence that isn't really even a concurrence, questioning the appointment of "a private citizen as special counsel to prosecute a former president on behalf of the United States." It lands far from the immunity question, yet is perversely intriguing given a member of the Thomas household who, in the wake of the disputed 2020 presidential election, longingly contemplated "the Biden crime family and ballot-fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc.)" being arrested and "living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition."

Roberts’ tangled web of arguments for unburdening Trump, even as the court now returns the case to District Judge Tanya Chutkan to sort out to see if a trial is even possible, confirms that we the people are indeed the proverbial frogs in the proverbial slow-boiling pot. The Roberts court has given oligarchs free rein to buy elections and candidates in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and unleashed an avalanche of anti-democratic laws aimed at making voting harder through Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which gutted the Voting Rights Act that, ironically, might have allowed President Trump to legally prevent the “election irregularities” that supposedly foiled his reelection in 2020. Yet this latest ruling is far more malignant.

For one thing, it’s astounding in its reversal of what so many of these justices claimed during their own nomination hearings. For another, it’s stunning in its cowardice. The former president has immunity in conversations with the vice president – maybe. The former president has immunity in his conspiracy to assemble fake electors – maybe. The former president has immunity in his rhetoric and presumably his dereliction of duty on the Sixth – maybe. The one silver lining is that this bag of worms is back before Judge Chutkan, whose decisive, tightly worded Dec. 1 ruling on presidential immunity revealed far more constitutional resolve than the toxic ambiguities offered by Roberts and his crew of Trump apologists.

Roberts’ Trump v. United States opinion – affirmed by two justices (Thomas, Samuel Alito) who arguably violated federal ethics law by not recusing themselves from this particular case and three more justices who owe their powerful lifetime appointments to Trump – clashes with not only the Declaration of Independence but the Constitution. The president has no legitimate role whatsoever in contesting election outcomes except as a litigant through the courts (in which Trump consistently failed in 2020). And the president certainly has no constitutional right to strong-arm and browbeat governors, state lawmakers and secretaries of state into violating the law.

The Roberts ruling signals not only the court’s plummeting legitimacy but our nation's decline. Consider President Trump's insistence in June 2019 that "Article II allows me to do whatever I want" or his Dec. 3, 2022, call for "termination" of the Constitution to return him to power. Then consider a post-presidential observation in 1913 by Theodore Roosevelt, one of our nation's most vigorous chief executives, yet one cognizant and respectful of our history and the Constitution in ways Trump and the high court are not: “My belief was that it was not only [the president’s] right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or by the laws.”

Former federal jurist Michael Luttig, whose conservatism is beyond question, showed his contempt for the ruling by quoting American revolutionary Thomas Paine from “Common Sense” (1776): “But where, say some, is the king of America? . . . [S]o far as we approve of monarchy . . . in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.” For his part, Luttig in February joined in an amicus brief that asked the high court: "What kind of Constitution would immunize and thereby embolden losing first-term presidents to violate federal criminal statutes through either official or unofficial acts in efforts to usurp a second term?"

The answer, it turns out, pivots on a court that has forsaken originalism and is soaring well beyond our constitutional framework, desperately snatching bits and fragments of text out of context to bolster preposterous positions, paving the way for arguably America’s darkest days. The answer pivots on the court’s awe of a constitutionally contemptuous political figure who seeks to “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.” As Luttig says, "the decision is irreconcilable with America's democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law." Yet many who pride themselves as patriotic Americans without fully understanding the American Revolution, the Constitution, Jefferson, Paine or Hamilton will celebrate this ruling.

Sotomayor’s rousing dissent finale has been widely quoted; equally relevant is her point that the court majority “invents an atextual, ahistorical and unjustifiable immunity that puts the president above the law.” And quoting the landmark 1821 Cohens v. Virginia ruling by a unanimous Marshall court, dissenting Justice Ketanji Jackson adds: “As we enter this uncharted territory, the People, in their wisdom, will need to remain ever attentive, consistently fulfilling their established role in our constitutional democracy and thus collectively serving as the ultimate safeguard against any chaos spawned by this court’s decision. For, like our democracy, our Constitution is ‘the creature of their will, and lives only by their will.’”

Yet Justice Jackson’s insights draw from another time. One fears America has settled into a bread-and-circus era when many of us rally around leaders who entertain and arouse us with demagoguery, uncouthness and hatred for fellow citizens, saying things decency, manners and political correctness once discouraged. We care little if such leaders cheat on their spouses with porn stars, get caught enriching themselves at the public trough, talk of becoming dictators or try to cancel out votes of our fellow citizens. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed after his travels through America in 1831, “A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.”    

In siding with Trump, the Roberts court also thumbs its nose at the spectacle of an angry, resentful mob of Trump supporters brutalizing police outside the U.S. Capitol and chasing lawmakers into hiding as it seized the building and delayed the constitutionally mandated certification of the presidential election. Had the mob stormed the nearby Supreme Court building, justices so desperate to reposition Trump for another destructive term in the American presidency might have had far more sobering thoughts about the rule of law in America. The Roberts court has lost its constitutional compass, let alone any moral compass. It is worthy of contempt and condemnation, infamy and irrelevance, now and forever.

Bill Whitaker spent 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor. He is a member of the Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors.

MAGA CROWD READY TO HANG THE TRUMP JURY

Not content with efforts to suppress voting rights after unsubstantiated claims of a stolen presidential election failed to resonate in courts nationwide, Republicans high and low now target another feature of our flailing democracy: the rule of law and everyday jurors tapped by that law to decide the guilt or innocence of defendants on trial or, in grand juries, to decide whether sufficient evidence even exists for prosecution. For the uninformed, the Bill of Rights guarantees criminal prosecutions “by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”

As usual when it comes to trashing American norms, 2024 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is at the root of recent threats of violence against jurors – in this case, the dozen who found him guilty on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to funnel hush money to a porn star. Granted, of all the allegations dogging Trump, this struck me as the most tenuous; yet it became clear during trial that Trump employed skullduggery and deceit to hide from voters in 2016 that he had sex earlier with a pornography star. Foolishly, he cooked the books to ensure her silence, thus cooking his own goose.

However convoluted the crime, New York jurors nonetheless decided the former president violated state law – and so a chorus of Republican politicians who supposedly cherish law and order lost no time in condemning the outcome, including the notion that New York jurors could ever render a fair verdict regarding Trump and that he had been due, at the very least, a change of venue. Trump eclipsed all in claiming injustice, labeling the trial “a disgrace. They wouldn't give us a venue change. We were at 5 percent or 6 percent [popularity] in this district, in this area. This was a rigged, disgraceful trial."

Not so fast, say no less than two high-ranking, Trump-appointed judges in a decision by a three-judge panel of the influential U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., rendered two days before the New York verdict on Trump. In a spinoff of United States v. Webster, Marine veteran and former New York Police Department officer Thomas Webster – one of the most ferocious of insurrectionists storming the Capitol on behalf of Trump on January 6 – argued that his own request for a change of venue in his 2022 criminal trial should have been granted.

Webster, 58, sentenced to 10 years in prison for viciously assaulting a police officer and related charges, argued that he could not get an impartial jury in the District of Columbia because its jury pool was “simply too Democratic, too connected to the federal government and too steeped in January 6th news coverage to produce 12 unbiased jurors.” The trial court denied Webster’s motion, reasoning the district’s size and characteristics did not indicate a jury pool – whatever its thoughts on January 6 – was prejudiced against Webster personally.

The appeals court panel affirmed this denial in its May 28 ruling: To paraphrase, one need not favor bank robberies to serve as an impartial juror in the trial of someone charged with bank robbery. Few of us approve of the storming of the U.S. Capitol, whatever our political beliefs. That doesn’t mean the Department of Justice case against each and every person charged in the violence and chaos of January 6 is necessarily guilty. Solemn jurors are charged with weighing prosecution and defense evidence and testimony to make a studied, fair determination in each individual case.

“We expect jurors to view significant criminal events in their hometown with an unapproving eye, whether it is the January 6th attack on the Capitol, a murder or an armed robbery spree,” the judges wrote. “Generalized disapproval of criminal conduct – even the specific conduct at issue in a defendant’s case – says nothing about a juror’s ability to be impartial in deciding whether a particular individual committed a crime or not. What the Constitution forbids is for a juror to hold a firmly entrenched view about an individual defendant’s guilt or innocence before the trial starts.”

In his suit, Webster notes Jurors 3 and 8 generally expressed negative views of Trump and his supporters. “I certainly don’t have a high opinion of former President Donald Trump and, by extension, I don’t think his supporters are particularly smart for supporting him,” Juror 3 testified during jury selection. Juror 8 acknowledged: “I wasn’t a fan of Trump … so his supporters, I mean, you know … some of them do get a little chaotic and they’re not fun to be around when they’re being wild around the streets.” Juror 13 shared that, as “a black woman, at that period of [Trump] being president, I just felt unsafe.”

Yet the judges note: “Nothing in those jurors’ statements suggests that they had prejudged Webster’s guilt or were incapable of deciding the case objectively based on the evidence. Webster’s counsel, in fact, was so unconcerned that he did not move to strike any of them. He also declined the offer to question Juror 8 further.” As for Juror 3, Webster’s counsel asked only if Webster was “at a disadvantage with” him. When Juror 3 said no, the defense counsel responded, “[N]o? OK,” and moved on. Webster’s attorney also had little reservation about Juror 13 after further questioning.

And what sort of potential juror should be struck from consideration for obvious or suspected bias? The appeals court again points the way, citing in the case a potential juror who “said that he did not view the trial as ‘a zero-zero game to start’ and, when asked if he could abide by the presumption of innocence, candidly responded, ‘I really, I honestly don’t think so.’” For whatever reason, this prospective juror was never seated in the case of United States v. Webster. 

What made any jury decision about Webster easy was what the appeals court in review described as the “overwhelming evidence against him, including at least four videos of the assault.” And to quote the federal prosecutor at sentencing: “Overall, the defendant's conduct and statements before, on and immediately after January 6th show that he anticipated violence, that he wanted violence and that he instigated violence. He brought with him his MREs, his NYPD gun, a ballistic vest, a military rucksack. He was clearly anticipating a violent clash.” 

It’s also relevant that, during sentencing, Webster himself acknowledged being played the fool by Trump and his political and media minions: “Unfortunately, I became swept up in politics and former President Trump’s rhetoric. A picture of voter fraud had been painted. As a veteran, that created a panic and fear in my mind.” Defense attorney James Monroe noted that his client was “disabused of any notion that the 2020 election was illegitimate.” Monroe blamed Trump and the Republican Party for turning Webster and “otherwise decent, law-abiding individuals … against fellow Americans.”

The two Trump-appointed judges reaching this decision about jurors, impartiality and change-of-venue motions are Gregory Katsas, a former deputy White House counsel under President Trump, and Neomi Rao, who once served under Trump as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. They rendered their decision along with Judge Patricia Millett, an Obama appointee who actually wrote the opinion on behalf of all three.

Yet the appeals court ruling sits uneasily alongside maniacal supporters of the man who appointed Katsas and Rao: Once again, we see Republican politicians recklessly and maliciously claiming Trump was railroaded. And Trump supporters are, once again, reverting to violent form a la January 6, threatening the lives of jurors, even their children. Yet these jurors were unanimous on all 34 felony counts, including one who identified as primary news sources Trump’s Truth Social media account and X, formerly Twitter, run by right-wing entrepreneur and conspiracy theorist Elon Musk. 

It’s also relevant that the New York jury was selected with input from Trump’s own defense team.

“The institution of the jury may be aristocratic or democratic, according to the class from which the jurors are taken,” French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville observed of juries in Europe and America in his seminal work “Democracy in America” after touring the United States only four decades after its constitutional founding. “But it always preserves its republican character in that it places the real direction of society in the hands of the governed, or a portion of the governed, and not that of the government.” In short, juries are “we the people” in action.

No wonder a neighbor of mine, a lifelong attorney who voted twice for Trump, exploded in outrage at the vicious threats leveled at jurors by Trump sycophants after a verdict was rendered: My friend knows well what those of us who spent our careers in daily journalism know: Jurors, who don’t ask to serve on juries but do so as good citizens, ordinarily take their responsibilities seriously – far more so than some privileged oaf of a defendant who sleeps in court, then departs to bellow, whine and trash the court and complain of being mistreated. It is a spectacle to indulge and thrill willing idiots.

So much for any remaining notion of the Republican Party being the party of law and order. If there's any other enlightening link between the broader Webster and Trump scenarios, it may involve the words of the trial judge during Webster's sentencing: "Now does he bear responsibility for it? Of course he does. But I said before and I will continue to say at every one of these sentencings, people who stand before me to be sentenced and in every other courtroom in this courthouse are in a sense victims too. And Americans of all stripes should understand that."

Bill Whitaker spent 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor. He is a member of the Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors.

'EBJ' triumphed over Jim Crow, encouraged others to follow

During a funeral of more than three hours, a line of political and spiritual leaders, one after another, briefly took the spotlight at Dallas’ Concord Church to memorialize former Democratic Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, the Waco native and onetime nurse who over 89 years of uphill struggle surmounted entrenched Jim Crow barriers set up to stymie those of her race and sex. Yet all the platitudes paled alongside the tribute issued by Republican Congressman Frank Lucas.

“I’m deeply saddened by the passing of Eddie Bernice Johnson,” the 64-year-old Oklahoma lawmaker said in a New Year’s Eve statement hours after her death. “We worked side by side for years and I was proud to call her a friend in addition to a colleague. She was a trailblazer in every sense of the word and I was continually impressed by her dedication to public service. EBJ, as I affectionately called her, was an old-school legislator who sincerely cared about the cause of advancing American science. It was a privilege to serve as the ranking member during her chairmanship of the House Science Committee. Together, we passed generational legislation that will set the course for science and technology development for decades to come.”

Lucas added that such legislation "wouldn’t have been possible without her leadership and commitment to working in a bipartisan fashion.”

Let’s face it. Partisan lawmakers these days seldom issue such tributes to colleagues of the political opposition. During this same period former President Trump recklessly claimed “Democrats want to burn America to the ground” – an astounding statement for a man forever linked to the storming of the U.S. Capitol, undertaken to overthrow the 2020 presidential election and subvert the U.S. Constitution. Rolling up one’s sleeves, stowing incendiary talk and working toward genuine consensus rather than engaging in flamethrowing theatrics may well have been the key to Johnson’s legislative success.  

Granted, any book on great African-American lawmakers of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries will devote thick chapters to John Lewis, Elijah Cummings, Bennie Thompson and James Clyburn while “EBJ” is likely to be relegated to the index and footnotes. Yet those who knew her say she wasn’t out to get the credit and wasn’t interested in rhetorical swordfights, notwithstanding her background as a Texas civil rights activist in the turbulent 1960s. As an enduring member of the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology and the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, she steadily pressed for widespread science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education – understandable for a woman who only went into nursing after a high school guidance counselor in Waco in the 1950s advised that her dream of one day becoming a doctor was impossible because of her gender.

“Eddie Bernice Johnson was a quiet hero,” Democratic House Leader Hakeem Jeffries, 53, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said at her Jan. 9 funeral. “She taught us that you don’t have to be the loudest voice in the room to get the most done, and that’s what she did. Don’t confuse the presence of dignity with the absence of determination. Eddie Bernice Johnson was both dignified and determined and one of the most accomplished legislators of the United States Congress.”

The richly informative biography in Johnson’s funeral program acknowledged as much: “Hers is a congressional career that is measured not just by the legislative results she attained but how she did it. For most of her time in Congress, she was in the minority party. To get anything done, she had to reach across the aisle and work with Republicans. She had to cultivate relationships, command respect, negotiate and remain persistent.” Consequently, over three decades on Capitol Hill she authored or co-authored more than 300 bills displaying an unusually wide range of interests and concerns including health care, veterans, voting rights, education, trade, economic development and combating sexual harassment. To quote great-granddaughters Kennedy Lee Winter-Johnson and Lily Rose Johnson during the funeral, her admonitions to the youngsters were: “Work hard every day and never give up when things get tough. Be strong in mind and heart. Always do the right thing even if it’s not fun.”

Or, to quote former U.S. Trade Representative and former Dallas mayor Ron Kirk, 69, also at the funeral, “And I want to say to those of you here who are not elected officials: Don’t ask us one more time what we got to do to make our country better, what we have to do to get rid of all the noise and discord. If you were paying attention to the life of this remarkable woman, she’s already given us the answer: Do the work.”

During a 2022 C-SPAN interview, Johnson recalled forming congressional alliances with other women such as Republican Congresswoman Connie Morella to pursue legislation that encouraged young women and persons of color to pursue rewarding careers in science and technology. All this culminated in the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 that boosted semiconductor research, development and production, ensuring U.S. leadership in technology that is the foundation of everything from automobiles to household appliances to defense systems. The legislation also expanded investments in "institutional diversity of research institutions and the students and researchers they serve, including new initiatives to support Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other minority-serving institutions.”

In a bipartisan piece in The Hill – published the day Johnson’s funeral procession from Dallas to Texas State Cemetery in Austin turned off I-35 into her old hometown of Waco to pass slowly by the Doris Miller Memorial along the Brazos – Lucas and Democratic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, both white, wrote how Johnson in her leadership posts on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology "knew that if we fell behind in expanding human knowledge and ensuring the workforce behind it was diverse, our nation’s future would suffer. She beamed with pride as President Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act into law. We now take the responsibility of ensuring the goals we set out to achieve with this law are realized."

“We needed the talent in this country,” Congresswoman Johnson told C-SPAN on the eve of her House

retirement after 30 years. “We were brain-draining other countries when we had people here we were overlooking, not getting them ready to meet the challenges of the future, all the way up to today. Just this week I read something that said, ‘Well, a college degree might not be the best opportunity now for good jobs.’ We’ve been saying that for 30 years, looking at technology and the skills that are needed. If I can’t think of anything else, the achievement of writing most of the CHIPS bill from this committee was something I can really be proud of.”

Johnson wasn’t the most eloquent member of the Black Congressional Caucus alongside such powerful orators as Lewis, Clyburn and Cummings. Nor could she rival the soaring rhetoric of, say, entrepreneur and SpaceX founder Elon Musk when it came to talking of making mankind a multi-planet species. I recall her once fumbling about trying to use the solar eclipse of 2017 to spur in the young an interest in science and technology. But she had the right idea. And the sort of mankind she talked of launching into the heavens strikes one as far more hopeful, more unified and more humane than the universe Musk seems to idealize if his controversial overhaul of Twitter or X is any indication with its nutty conspiracy theorists, propaganda ministers and hatemongers.

In recent weeks, Musk, 52, has embarked on a puzzling social-media campaign to belittle the concept of diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace – a Republican talking point of late but anathema to Johnson, who certainly wasn’t proposing that women and persons of color be tapped for key jobs without sufficient preparation and qualifications. As an African-American nurse hired sight-unseen by the Veterans Administration Hospital in Dallas, she was preceded on her hospital rounds by a white employee who reassured patients that Johnson would be acceptable in managing their care – "really the most blatant, overt racism that I ever experienced in my life," Johnson recalled. No wonder Johnson referred to the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology as “the Committee of the Future.” To quote former colleagues Lofgren and Lucas, “she was always so focused on building a better future for everyone – a future where all can pursue STEM, regardless of race, gender, background or ZIP code.”

Like the starry-eyed, paradigm-bashing billionaire, Johnson talked about travel to Mars and beyond but with a decidedly more inclusive vision. “She always thought about what we might gain and glean from the space program, the STEM program, to help not only the United States but the world, and what impact it might be to study those particular areas,” her second cousin, Army veteran and Waco Housing Authority official Gerald Bridgewater, 63, told me as he and others waited for her funeral procession to pass by the Doris Miller Memorial. “She saw science as more than something we just think about in terms of its just being science and space. That was a passion she had because she felt that, through those technologies, people could change and interact with medical and technical advances and all that.”

I didn’t know Johnson personally, though I worked with her staff in shaping several columns by her for the Tribune-Herald. She long worked (but without success) to gain a posthumous Medal of Honor for Doris Miller, the 23-year-old black sharecroppers’ son from Waco who during the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941 abandoned his menial duties aboard the USS West Virginia in a segregated U.S. Navy to man an anti-aircraft gun to return fire. Awarded the Navy Cross, Miller briefly toured the nation (including his hometown of Waco) on a war-bond drive before returning to battle duty. He perished with his shipmates on the USS Liscome Bay in November 1943.

Considering the racial and sexual discrimination she faced in Waco, Johnson’s optimism rates respect, even by those who might disagree with her politics. During the gathering of some 60 well-wishers near the Doris Miller Memorial, former Democratic Congressman Chet Edwards, 72, who began his 20 years in the U.S. House representing Waco two years before Johnson arrived from Dallas, expressed admiration for all she attained. He singled out her traveling alone as a young black woman to Indiana in summer 1952 to begin nursing studies at St. Mary’s College because Texas segregation precluded her from such an education at nearby Baylor University, despite graduating at the top of her class at A.J. Moore High School in Waco.

“Rather than letting that horrible injustice make her bitter, she used the spirit of Doris Miller to spend her life in public service with dignity, with grace,” Edwards told those assembled, noting the series of firsts she accomplished throughout her career in medicine and politics. “She taught me the power of faith and love overcoming the power of hate and discrimination. She taught me that each of us can make a difference.” He later added that her parents in Waco "taught her the values of faith, hard work, determination and grace. And Toliver Chapel Missionary Baptist Church shaped her faith and values."

Edwards considered Johnson an especially close friend. “My two sons were born 25 and 27 years ago,” he said. “Eddie Bernice gave them each their first piggy bank. My wife and I matched their savings and, over the years, it built up and built up, and they invested their earnings from Eddie Bernice’s piggy banks in the stock market. And two years ago, my 27-year-old son and his wife used Eddie Bernice’s piggybank money to make the down payment on their first home as a couple in Fort Worth. She just had that personal dignity and kindness.”

There’s a wonderful story about Johnson, near the end of her congressional tenure an engaging, rotund little woman of 86, quietly returning to her Capitol office on Jan. 6, 2021, only to encounter someone in the hallway who seemed lost and disoriented – someone she later deduced was among the first wave of Trump supporters to breach the Capitol, then under lockdown but for lawmakers and their staffs. Unwittingly, she asked if she could help him. He explained that he had secured an "all-expense-paid trip to Washington and he wanted to see what it looked like,” she told The Grio months later. “So I told him to have a nice trip. But I went in my office and locked the door."

Simple story? Sure. But considering the violent siege of the Capitol that she and her staff witnessed from their barricaded office later that day, mounted by a mob yelling “1776!” and “Our House!” and vowing to hang the vice president, the anecdote illustrates the clash of ideologies we now witness in America: one embraced by a person who quietly and through consensus-building worked within the American constitutional system to eliminate barriers set up to impede those of her race and sex and to provide equal opportunity to all, the other embraced by a person who likely didn’t know anything more of constitutional order and the founding framework than his idol did and was set that day on invalidating through brute force the votes of millions of fellow Americans, white, black and brown, in the election of 2020.

Who in that Capitol hallway was the real patriot?

Bill Whitaker spent nearly 45 years as a daily Texas journalist, including nearly a dozen years as opinion editor at the Waco Tribune-Herald. He now serves on the Trib Board of Contributors.

Celebrating Moore v. Harper on the Fourth 2023

 

Given the din of political and cultural strife marking our times, the Fourth of July 2023 is the perfect occasion to revel in a rare triumph of constitutional fidelity, one George Washington, John Marshall and James Madison would surely recognize. And while this development puts a massive hole in the keel of the 2022 Republican Party of Texas platform and spoils dreams of Republicans who believe Joe Biden is an “illegitimately elected” president (to quote the GOP platform), those who still believe in such founding principles as separation of powers and judicial review have much to celebrate. 

Especially worthy of this year's Independence Day fireworks: Progressives and conservatives on the Supreme Court of the United States coming together last week to consign to the trash heap of ideological claptrap the so-called "independent state legislature theory," a crackpot scheme that argues state courts have limited say-so over certain ill-defined election-oriented actions of state legislatures, even if whatever election skullduggery state legislators pass into law conflicts with state and federal constitutions. 

“It would be impossible to overstate the enormity of yesterday's seminal decision in Moore v. Harper," declared retired U.S. appeals Judge Michael Luttig, one of the few authentic conservative jurists still speaking out. "Not only is it now the single most important constitutional case for American Democracy since the nation's founding almost 250 years ago, it is also now one of the most important constitutional cases for representative government in America. Today, it takes its deserved place in the pantheon of great Supreme Court cases that give meaning to the Constitution's genius of a separation of powers – among the national Legislature, Executive and Judiciary – and also between the national government and the governments of the respective 50 states of the United States."

No doubt Judge Luttig’s enthusiasm has been tempered by decisions since Moore v. Harper, including the high court's embarrassing decision that the state of Colorado cannot legally enforce a state anti-discrimination law against a Christian website designer who balked at creating wedding websites for same-sex couples. Only now is the public learning that the supposedly gay man who supposedly sought the website designer’s services never requested such services, that he has been married to a woman for 15 years and that he’s a website designer himself. If so … oops.

The high court's 6-3 decision in Moore v. Harper is more bad news for Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, lately suspended from duty pending an upcoming impeachment trial in the Texas Senate over corruption charges but in December 2020 author (supposedly) of a Trump-driven lawsuit rooted in independent state legislature theory mechanics. Paxton's suit, which leapfrogged to the Supreme Court, sought to cancel out the votes of fellow citizens in four battleground states because election laws of state legislatures in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin weren't strictly followed. The reason they weren't strictly followed is because the nation was gripped by a global pandemic that killed more than a million Americans; state courts, governors and other state officials, in full crisis mode, made adjustments in election protocols so citizens could vote without risking their lives.

The nation’s highest court smartly sent Paxton and his preposterous lawsuit packing without a hearing.

Ironically, the state of Texas was guilty of the very sin Paxton alleged other states were doing. Key difference: Texas overwhelmingly supported President Trump's reelection while the other four states fell into the Biden column once all votes were counted. Because of widespread pandemic fears, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott correctly extended early voting in the 2020 general election to keep Texas voters from bunching up in polling places and contaminating one another. Texas Republican firebrands sued to kill this executive measure, but the Republican-stocked Texas Supreme Court in an Oct. 7, 2020, decision sided with the Republican governor.

Under the independent state legislature theory, the state's highest court and arguably the governor would or could not have acted without approval by the biennial legislature. The Texas Legislature's laws under such a theory would have ideally remained intact in all of their unchecked legislative glory, no matter how the crisis endangered citizens and constituents.

Supporters of this fringe theory argue that their concept of independent state legislature power in electoral matters is rooted in constitutional text, Article I, Section 4, Clause 1: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing [sic] Senators.” Yet this theory defies logic: For one thing, it would be ridiculous for a state legislature to be permitted to violate the state constitution that created it. And history indicates the Framers were wary of state lawmakers to the degree they included in the U.S. Constitution the Elections Clause to ensure Congress retained final power to set rules for federal elections.

"Marbury v. Madison famously proclaimed this court’s authority to invalidate laws that violate the Federal Constitution," U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority opinion pulling the plug on independent state legislative theory. "But Marbury did not invent the concept of judicial review. State courts had already begun to impose restraints on state legislatures, even before the Constitutional Convention, and the practice continued to mature during the founding era. James Madison extolled judicial review as one of the key virtues of a constitutional system, and the concept of judicial review was so entrenched by the time the court decided Marbury that Chief Justice Marshall referred to it as one of society’s 'fundamental principles.’”

The Moore v. Harper ruling, and by a Republican-dominated court no less, is also bad news for fierce partisans happy to set aside, during the likely 2024 rematch between Biden and Trump, state and federal constitutions that they supposedly cherish and that many as public servants have sworn to uphold. One concern was that, if Trump again lost key battleground states, state legislatures under his thumb could disregard the election returns and expand upon the 2020 scheme of electing phony electors to cast ballots in the Electoral College – and without interference by meddlesome courts reviewing and scrutinizing such actions against the texts of their own laws and constitutions.

Forget January 6. One can imagine riots in the streets and at state capitols if state legislatures were allowed to ignore the will of the people, even if citizens were acting legitimately through the courts as a last resort. Such pursuits, if pursued with even less regard for constitutional integrity than last time, might ultimately contribute to destruction of the Electoral College so many Trump populists loudly championed in 2016 when the votes went their way – and then tried to manipulate in 2020 through the independent state legislature theory when the votes didn’t go their way.

Regarding disputes by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, Thomas’ dissent towers as the most convoluted and most desperate, pretty well confirming that his reputation as the court’s most fervent originalist is now a charade, lost amid his wife’s equally fervent post-election efforts to overthrow the presidential election through such plots as the independent state legislature theory. It also scuttles the much-vaunted constitutional expertise of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas lawmaker who volunteered to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court Paxton’s absurd 2020 lawsuit which, as a May 18, 2022, complaint about Cruz before the State Bar of Texas argues, would "disenfranchise over 20 million voters on factual and legal assertions that lacked any foundation and that state and lower federal courts had already uniformly rejected." The complaint notes that as fellow senators went into hiding as insurrectionists violently seized the U.S. Capitol on January 6, Cruz incredibly found time to dispatch a fundraising note: “I’m leading the fight to reject electors from key states unless there is an emergency audit of the election results. Will you stand with me?”

Judge Luttig’s optimism over Moore v. Harper suggests informed citizens anxious about Republican efforts to scuttle constitutional checks and balances can breathe easy and enjoy the fireworks this Fourth. Still, one can’t ignore the lasting damage the Roberts court has done to democracy through such decisions as the corrupting Citizens United v. FEC opinion (2010) and Shelby v. Holder (2013), the latter of which shelved Department of Justice scrutiny over even the most insignificant-seeming electoral changes and tweaks in states with historically dismal voting rights records. That opinion ironically ensured an avalanche of court litigation over disputed election law.

One must remember, too, that a third or more of us by now are unmoored from most founding principles and are fine with yet other undemocratic schemes discussed in the final desperate days of the Trump presidency, including subpoenaing ballot boxes in battleground states and even declaring martial law – something Texas right-wingers ironically suspected, without justification, that Trump’s hated African-American predecessor would attempt in 2015. Whether your brand of patriotism leans right, left or down the middle, our tumultuous past proves the struggle against those who would sink this wobbly experiment in democracy never ends.

Bill Whitaker spent more than 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in daily Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor.

Pondering the reality of locking him up

Less than three months after former President Trump began his 2024 reelection bid with a campaign rally here in Waco, he found himself under two indictments – one for falsifying records to hide from voters an extra-marital fling with a porn star, the other a needless, soon-to-be costly battle he picked with the National Archives when, in defiance of long-established law, he boxed up and took with him at the end of his embattled presidency hundreds of classified documents, including those showing just how vulnerable the United States of America is or isn't to some sort of attack.

This is the “patriot” leading the pack for the 2024 Republican Party presidential nomination. That should indicate to any responsible citizen how unmoored the party is from not just reality but matters of national security that once were this party's forte. Don't complain about national security in regard to our border policy and then look away from Trump's recklessness with our classified national security documents. This latter indictment is far more serious than Trump's bid to deceive voters over secret payoffs to sexual partners.

If that’s not enough, more legal problems loom, including whatever charges arise from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s role in what clearly constituted an insurrection on January 6, 2021.

By now, most discerning citizens who value facts over rhetoric have read the June 8 federal indictment for themselves. It offers detailed allegations which prosecutors must of course prove before a jury of Trump's peers in the ruby-red state of Florida before a Trump-biased judge (at least judging from an earlier slap-down of this judge by a three-judge panel of the 11th Court of Appeals). It's an amazing document if true, demonstrating the former president's increasing resistance to any authority beyond his own, even the deferential but persistent officials of the National Archives. These folks were presumably only trying to follow the law set by Congress for them and former presidents.

The situation reminds one of an overly indulgent teacher trying to press an obstinate child to turn in his homework when due or at least soon after. Trump, 77, was reluctant to turn over classified documents that he not only coveted for reasons thus far unknown but left unsecured at two of his key properties, each of which has welcomed tens of thousands of high-dollar visitors from far and near. In resisting authorities, the former president reportedly jumped back and forth between three key strategies: stonewalling, lying or stonewalling and lying.

At various points, Trump allegedly deceived his own attorneys, which may explain why he has problems securing legal counsel these days. What attorney wants to get famously thrown under the proverbial bus by an undisciplined, high-profile client? Reporting by the Washington Post indicates he got into this latest imbroglio by heeding not his attorneys – some of whom tried to patch up differences between the government and the former president – but Judicial Watch gadfly Tom Fitton, who reportedly convinced Trump that he could legally keep the classified documents. Fitton, 55, who is not an attorney, could arguably be described as a right-wing rumormonger; the group he spearheads could reasonably be labeled anti-government, at least when Democrats are in charge. It’s just enough to make you wonder about all those people Trump fired with such gusto on “The Apprentice” – and those he kept on.

The indictment makes clear two other points: First, the federal government has evidence that Trump showed some of these classified documents to visitors who lacked security clearance – possibly just to impress them and shore up a wounded post-presidency ego; second, Trump knew the importance of securing classified documents, proven by the remarks he repeatedly made during the 2016 election when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Trump's opponent, was under a national heat lamp for extreme sloppiness in private emails involving matters of national security – an Achilles heel that likely contributed to her narrow election defeat amid Republican cries of “Lock her up!”

So here then is Trump involved in a mess of his making more serious than the Clinton debacle. Unlike Clinton, who cooperated by turning over thousands of emails to the FBI, Trump arguably committed graver sins by repeatedly lying to federal authorities – something you and I don't dare do without risking our freedom. Indeed, in reading the indictment, one realizes Trump believes he truly is above the laws the rest of us must obey, constituting the very sort of entitled, elitist and arrogant oligarch that John Adams – a real patriot, by the way – feared might one day prevail to the detriment of the republic.

To quote Adams from his provocative if obscure “Discourses on Davila,” penned in 1790 when he served as the nation’s 55-year-old first-ever vice president under George Washington and pondered the sort of nobility that might sprout in a young, unsteady democracy without monarchs and nobility descended from royal bloodlines: “Riches force the opinion on man that he is the object of the congratulations of others … His imagination expands and his heart dilates at these charming illusions.” Adams understood that while a nobleman – or, by extension, one who assumes its guise – “excites the indignation of many, and the envy of more, it still attracts the attention of the world.”

Yet Trump’s picking a fight with the National Archives, the FBI and grand jurors should leave any rational citizen concerned. Does a twice-impeached president forever tied to efforts to subvert the peaceful transfer of power in America believe this latest fight is prudent and in his self-interest when he so lusts to return to power? Does he not risk alienating at least some core supporters through careless regard for our nation’s security? What must this say of his judgment as a presidential candidate or a president? Is this the fight any smart business entrepreneur would wage? Or has Trump been manipulated by the likes of Tom Fitton? Is it then any wonder President Trump was convinced of a wild scheme peddled by renegade law professor John Eastman and others to invalidate 2020 election returns to his benefit?

No less than the fiercely right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board, which has long functioned as a reliable apologist for Trump, acknowledged hard realities in a damning June 13 edition: "If Mr. Trump is the GOP nominee, he is unlikely to defeat Joe Biden. But if he did win, the document fiasco is what a second term would be like. He wouldn’t be able to deliver the conservative policy victories that Republicans want because he can’t control himself. He’d be preoccupied with grievance and what he calls ‘retribution.’ The best people won’t work for him because they see how he mistreated so many loyalists in the first term."

Yet arguably risking our national security matters little to latter-day Republicans, most of whom continue to support Trump's long march toward the presidential nomination despite indisputable evidence of his attempting to overthrow a presidential election he lost, his public appeal to suspend the U.S. Constitution in his favor and presidential transgressions during his tenure that would have shocked earlier generations of Americans. For those of us who identify more closely with the conservatism of our father and grandfathers, there is great resonance in the words of retired U.S. District Judge Michael Luttig in a June 25 New York Times column: “No assemblage of politicians except the Republicans would ever conceive of running for the American presidency by running against the Constitution and the rule of law. But that’s exactly what they’re planning.”

As the retired judge ruled in the court of public opinion, "Republicans are as responsible as Mr. Trump for this month’s indictment — and will be as responsible for any indictment and prosecution of him for Jan. 6.”

If I were a Trump 2024 campaign official, or even a follower who subscribes to his grievance-filled populism, I’d be horrified and livid at not only the former president’s refusal to cooperate over sensitive classified documents but his vow to appoint a special prosecutor upon reelection to "go after" Biden, “the most corrupt president in the history of the USA,” and “the entire Biden crime family.” I’d worry about revival of public interest in the mostly forgotten Mueller report regarding the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian intrigue. No, it doesn’t prove Trump “colluded” with the Russian government, but it makes abundantly clear to the most obtuse citizen that President Putin worked overtime to elect Trump – and that while hardly co-conspirators in a strictly legal sense, Trump and his family openly and warmly welcomed Russian help in the U.S. presidential race of 2016.

But I'm not a Trump follower, never have been, even as I've tried in countless interviews to understand his enduring appeal. Year after year, I'm mystified at citizens such as those in Washington on June 24 attending the Faith & Freedom Coalition, a group whose creaky traveling bandwagon of opportunistic blasphemers and political agitators occasionally rolls through my town of Waco, here to question the faith and patriotism and morals of others. I'm mystified at those who fervently claim to be Christians, fervently claim to be conservatives, fervently claim to cherish Jesus' teachings, fervently claim to value character and family values, yet demonstrate every sordid quality of membership in a rigorous cult of personality, ignoring in themselves the sins they see in the world about them. Trump, charismatic showman as ever, lovingly and passionately played his part as the Christ-like martyr during his appearance before this national assemblage. "Every time the radical-left Democrats, Marxists, communists and fascists indict me, I consider it a great badge of courage," he told the faithful to unrestrained cheers, applause, whistles and screams of joy. "I'm being indicted for you, and I believe 'you' is more than 200 million people that love our country. They're out there and they love our country."

Lock him up? Is it really coming to that?

As President Ford and, to a degree, disgraced President Nixon arguably understood nearly 50 years ago, Americans recoil at the notion of imprisoning former presidents and political opponents. It conjures up not a democratic republic grounded in the peaceful transfer of power but a banana republic with the stench of rebellion, tyranny and corruption. After Trump left power in January 2021, many of us – like or dislike him – hoped he would simply do what former presidents in America do: find some favorite causes benefiting the greater good to champion in retirement. But how is a constitutional republic to deal with one whose favorite cause is himself and who demonstrates such a willingness to turn our divided nation into a sprawling banana republic?

Bill Whitaker spent more than 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in daily Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor. He is a member of the Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors.