Excerpt:
It’s extremely difficult to square this ruling with the text of Section 3 [of the Fourteenth Amendment]. The language is clearly mandatory. The first words are “No person shall be” a member of Congress or a state or federal officer if that person has engaged in insurrection or rebellion or provided aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution. The Section then says, “But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability.”
In other words, the Constitution imposes the disability, and only a supermajority of Congress can remove it. But under the Supreme Court’s reasoning, the meaning is inverted: The Constitution merely allows Congress to impose the disability, and if Congress chooses not to enact legislation enforcing the section, then the disability does not exist. The Supreme Court has effectively replaced a very high bar for allowing insurrectionists into federal office — a supermajority vote by Congress — with the lowest bar imaginable: congressional inaction.
This is a fairly easy read for the legal layperson, and the best general overview I’ve seen yet that sets forth the various legal and constitutional factors involved in today’s decision, including the concurring dissent by Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson.
This is how you get a civil war
Do you see this mess stabilizing without one? I want Republicans to have access to medical care, an equitable economy, and education, god knows they need it.
They openly prefer people like me were dead. There’s no negotiating with that.
Yes. We aren’t at the civil war stage yet, and to suggest differently may be somewhat unhinged at this phase.
I look at it like this:Two sides. One side is completely full of shit and they know it. They also know the other side knows. However, both sides have agreed to keep up the pretense of everything being okay, for whatever reason. I like to call it the “Slow Break-up”.
It’s like when your romantic partner stops showing up for date nights, then they get home late, then they start sleeping on the couch. And eventually you get around to asking, “Is something wrong?” And they’re all like, “No, everything is fine, work’s just been riding me so hard lately, and now I get home so late that I don’t want to wake you up.” Then one day they’re packing their shit to leave, and they look at you and go, “Look, we both saw this coming.”
It’s always “not happening” until it’s already happened. The moment is skipped over where they could acknowledge they misled you, try to make amends, maybe do something about the problem.
But, my overall point is this. A civil war would be like a fight between spouses. Like, a big serious fight. Where there is the possibility that someone’s going to yell “I want a divorce!”. So the divorce happens, but both parties move on, and try to heal. I am on the side that wants to have the fight, move on, and heal.
Let’s be honest. Either way here could easily end in a civil war. The temperature in the pot has been raising for 40 years. The earlier we lance this boil, the better off we’ll be though. Kicking the can down the road allows extremist ideologies to spread more and more. Which does nothing but guarantee more suffering.
A civil war between what forces? An arm of the US military and a small fragment of the population rilled up enough to attempt human wave tactics?
It might lead to a ton of scholastic violence, maybe riots and some attempts on public figures from random idiots…
But let’s assume people go charging out armed into the streets and get organized
But there’s something important to think about. We have a “just in time” food distribution system. Grocery stores would be empty in a couple weeks if food deliveries are stopped, say by blockading roads. The US government and military keeps ungodly amounts of food supplies stashed around strategically too…
The only way it could happen is if part of the military attempted a coup. That requires a split at the top. Plenty of grunts might defect, but grunts aren’t going to do a lot. You need to take entire military bases to keep aircraft running and to get that nice information asymmetry.
We’re living fragile, interconnected lives at the end of the Anthropocene.
We can’t have a civil war. We’re incapable of it.
We could have a little chaos for a few days, it might even be a wakeup call