Democracy appears to be losing its appeal on the left. After campaigning on panic politics and predicting the imminent death of democracy, some on the left are now calling to burn the system down in light of Republicans not only taking both houses and the White House but Trump likely winning the popular vote.
Some seem to believe that what happened on November 5th is a license to become a modern version of Guy Fawkes (“Remember, remember, the 5th of November; Gunpowder, treason and plot; I see no reason; Why gunpowder treason; Should ever be forgot”).
Protesters after the election called for tearing down the system as a whole, insisting that “Trump is not an individual. He’s a figurehead of a system that’s rotten.” Even before the election, law professors and law deans called for a break from the Constitution. Those voices will likely be amplified after the massive electoral loss by Democrats.
Others are seeking to evade the results of the election to still bring Harris to power. CNN’s Bakari Sellers wants to pressure Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to resign and replace her with Harris. Former Harris aide Jamal Simmons wants Biden to resign to allow Harris to become president despite the vote of the majority.
It is an ironic twist after Democratic politicians and pundits repeated the mantra that, if we did not elect Harris, this might be our last election. After losing that election, democracy appears to be the problem. The majority of Americans voting for Trump have been called “anti-American” by Gov. Hochul. Other politicians and pundits have called them racists, misogynists, or weaklings seeking domination by strongmen and bullies.
The problem is now with young and minority voters. Trump won white women voters by eight points at 53 percent. Harris actually fell slightly in the support of women overall. Conversely, roughly 43 percent of men voted for Harris. Forty percent of women under 30 voted for Trump. Even CNN reports that Trump’s performance was the best among young people (18-29 years old) in 20 years, Black voters in 48 years, and Hispanic voters in more than 50 years.
So, it appears that it is time to move on. The call for Biden to simply do what the public did not want to do (in making Harris president) is particularly ironic. Many voters were repulsed by the Democrats simply making Harris the nominee after all the primaries were over. This was the candidate who could not garner any appreciable votes in the prior presidential primaries before being made Vice President by Biden. Now, the idea is that she would be elevated by the unilateral act of Biden.
Without a hint of self-awareness or recognition of the hypocrisy, Simmons insisted that this would “Fulfill [Biden’s] last promise — to be transitional.” Most people understood that to mean democratically transitional in opening the way for the election of new leadership. He did so after he was forced to step aside after winning every Democratic primary and tens of millions of votes.
Nevertheless, Simmons argued that “Democrats have to learn drama and transparency and doing things that the public wanna see is the time.” That would certainly be dramatic as well as anti-Democratic. Yet, Simmons explained that “this is the moment for us to change the entire perspective of how Democrats operate.”
Indeed, it would. It would confirm that the Democratic Party is an effective oligarchy, the very thing that they just campaigned against.
Sellers is more modest. He just wants Harris on the Supreme Court. At no point in history has anyone suggested that Harris was a leading legal mind. Nothing in her history suggests that she is a competent, let alone promising, candidate for the highest court.
Harris has previously suggested her support for possible radical changes on the Court, including court packing. She is also a decidedly anti-free speech figure in American politics.
None of that matters any more than the results of the election. Harris would be put on the Court not due to any specific talents or skills but because it would be “consequential.” He wrapped up by saying “let Republicans go crazy, ape, I’m even mentioning that option.”
Others are not pushing Harris but are pushing Sotomayor to resign to allow for one of the fastest confirmations in history. Under this theory, a lame duck president would muscle through a confirmation before Trump could come into power.
Of course, that ignores the possibility that you could vacate the seat and then fall short in the sharply divided Senate. That includes the possible loss of senators who might balk at such a maneuver, including outgoing Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
The one option that does not appear to be popular is to listen to the voters and actually return the Democratic Party back toward the center of our politics. The problem is now the voters themselves.
French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau once famously insisted that “War is too important to be left to the generals.” The Democrats appear to be working on a new view that democracy is too important to be left to the voters.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”
Of course they are moving on from Democracy. The same techno-managerial class who engineered the Soviet system and the post WWI state-level system in Germany are the same ones yelling and threatening today. It’s not right versus left, it is their struggle to impose a top-down hierarchy on civilization.
We will be analyzing the managerial class attempted takeover for years to come. We can plainly see now in the irrational claims and rage here today how Stalin was able to execute 40,000 people a month at the height of his terror. It is good that we see the followers of these this same class dropping like flies now. I saw that AOC has lost 150,000 X followers. We’ll hope the scam is done.
David B. Benson provided us with California communist legal analysis genius:
If so, only because the Supremes recently so misruled
There you have it! If SCOTUS ruled in a way California communists disagree with, their disagreement is proof they misruled.
If you want analysis of SCOTUS rulings, who better to provide analysis than a California communist?
Followed by further California communist legal brilliance after being told he was full of Democrat Schiff to claim declassification required a paper trail and the decision regarding Clinton’s hidden classification proved he was a liar (or idiot, or both):
OAD — Go back to properly packing your parachute. Moreover, under the Atomic Energy Act of 195x, certain facts are to forever remaining classified.
Some government documents are not ‘Presidential records’.
Here’s the link to the latest version of Athe tomic Energy Act of 1954, current as last amended July 9, 2024: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-1630/pdf/COMPS-1630.pdf
Not a single sentence or even word relating to classifying or declassifying information in it. Not one mention in those 196 pages.
Clearly, you should have stuck with packing your tranny friends’ poop chutes rather than attempting to lie to the audience while claiming you are practicing internet law.
So now that you’re flexing your California Internet Lawyer bar membership, where in the Atomic Energy Act of 195x U.S.C. or the U.S. C. do you find legislation that forbids the Commander In Chief from declassifying ANYTHING if he chooses to do so?
Is there also a section that prohibits Congress from amending the Atomic Energy Act in any way that would lead to the declassification of anything previously classified?
You’re an member of the California Internet Lawyers bar association, a nuclear scientist… but you don’t have the intelligence to do at least cursory background research before launching lies claiming that act prohibits any and all presidents from declassifying information?
California can’t field even one communist liar that can at least do a better job than Cringe Jean-Pierre doing the official lying for Biden at the White House.