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Monday, January 11, 2021

INSURRECTION--Chain-of-Command Breakdown-- DAY OF INFAMY, 2021

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"… Now, all the authorities, they just stand around and boast How they blackmailed the sergeant at arms into leaving his post..."  (Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited)

 

Incline Village, Nev. (EoC Syndicated)--As timelines go, the focus has been on breaching of the Capitol building by the mob of the president's supporters, many of whom had arrived already prepared for a fight. But another significant timeline has emerged and republished from the Washington Post in the Philadelphia Inquirer this morning surrounding the actual role of the security chain-of-command that failed to respond adequately. According to the report, Steven Sund, the Capitol police chief, requested assistance prior to the electoral college certification;     
     "House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving said he was not comfortable with the 'optics' of formally declaring an emergency before the demonstration, Sund said. Meanwhile, Senate Sergeant at Arms Michael Stenger suggested that Sund informally seek his Guard contacts, asking them to 'lean forward' and be on alert in case Capitol Police needed their help." (Inquirer)
The Post-Inquirer report then gives the long drawn-out interaction between various entities tasked with assistance that ultimately rested on the Pentagon. More than anything, the report suggests the lack of authority to commit the National Guard and the process that requires the approval of getting those boots on the ground on federal property. Curiously, had the request come from a state, it might have been approved without the half-stepping and marching in place that occurred on the Day of Infamy, 2021. 
     What's also a mystery is why a detailed brief was posted by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) just two days prior to the siege that outlined in no uncertain terms who has/had the authority to commit forces into the battle in case of an insurrection; 
     "As noted in CRS Reports R42659 and RL31133, Congress has provided approximately 50 statutory authorizations to use the military forces for foreign or domestic purposes—not including formal declarations of war." (CRS)
Those include the Insurrection Act of 1807 and the War Powers Act of 1973. The second specifically states that the President is authorized to call out the Guard in a "national emergency created by an attack on the United States." The US Constitution has a more nebulous definition as to who retains the authority to act in case of an insurrection, as stated in Section 8 under the powers of Congress; 



     "To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;"
Thus, it seems that everyone, and no one, had the authority to execute the command that would have spared the capitol the attack, and it was without a doubt an attack on the United States, another Day of Infamy as paraphrased by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) , and spared the lives of a half-dozen citizens and police officers in the process. But as in many other cases of American history where who was involved, who incited, who pulled the trigger, how many conspirators escaped to Venezuela, from the Lincoln assassination to the Kennedy assassination, from the Bay of Pigs to Iran-Contra, the same question arises. Did the mob of 20,000 plus on the capitol grounds act alone or was it incited by the president, by his cohorts and family insiders? Was Congress complicit for failure to anticipate the attack and be ready to execute its constitutional authority to call in reinforcements? Why did the Pentagon choose to march in place? Where in the timeline report published by the Post-Inquirer article are the answers to that one serious and simple question?

Cited:
Defense Primer: Legal Authorities for the Use of Military Forces, Defense Primer: Legal Authorities for the Use of Military Forces (congress.gov)
Pontiac Rebellion image, fort.jpg (814×491) (theballreport.com)
Bob Dylan, Highway 61 album cover, 
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Saturday, January 9, 2021

INSURRECTION-- Incitement, Sedition, Common Law--DEMAGOGUERY & CLASS WARFARE

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     "Sedition:  "to raise discontent or disaffection amongst His Majesty’s subjects..."

     Incline Village, Nev. (EoC Syndicated)-- The first draft of the second impeachment effort by the US House of Representatives is now available online (H.Res No #) and the single article  is titled "Incitement of Insurrection." The second part of the title is a no-brainer, it's the first that draws scrutiny. The text of the article attempts to  provide a better definition;
     "Incited by President Trump, a mob unlawfully breached the Capitol, injured law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress and the Vice President, interfered with the Joint Session's solemn constitutional duty to certify the election results, and engaged in violent, deadly, destructive and seditious acts." 


     Skipping over most of the fluff regarding violent, deadly and destructive, the catchword in the indictment is "seditious." Jacob Jaconelli gives insightful analysis in his essay "Incitement: A Study in Language Crime;" He starts out by setting a parameter between language and speech, where the second can fall under freedom of. Jaconelli makes the case that language, not speech, is the force behind incitement and draws focus directly on encouragement with respect to incitement. In one of the more stark examples drawn by the author, Jaconelli cites what he calls "predicate conduct" with respect to sedition;
     "The classic definition of the crime stated that it was 'to incite any person to commit any crime in disturbance of the peace, or to raise discontent or disaffection amongst His Majesty’s subjects, or to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different classes of such subjects.' "
Although Jaconelli follows up with respect to seditious behavior rooted in racial and religious hatred, His Majesty might disagree, basing the crime on class distinction. So what role did that very class distinction play in the riot at the Capitol on Wednesday, January 6, 2021? We might look at Patricia Roberts-Miller and her definitions of a demagogue in  "Demagoguery and Democracy;"
     "polarizes a complicated situation into us and them,...the world can be reduced to those who are with us and those who are against us,...the Truth is easy to perceive and convey,...appeal to inconsistent premises, and argument from personal conviction," and the in-group is faced with extermination, or worse.


     Most of the horse and buggy thinking right now falls into Roberts-Miller's descriptions of the old parameters of demagoguery such as leader charisma, is the person bad, appealing to populist notions and manipulative. Certainly from an incitement point of view with regard to sedition, those parameters may be sufficient, but are not accurate. With respect to what Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas)  called the "Day of Infamy" on CNN's Pamela Brown segment tonight,  a closer look reveals the hidden agenda following more closely what His Majesty feared of his subjects way back during the days of common law. Much of it might also be corroborated by Roberts-Miller's further extrapolations, such as underpinning the common fallacies of the demagogue. 
     Circular reasoning and tautology create the impression that the rhetor can be trusted by the parameter of personal conviction, "trust me." Even though, for instance, the resolution for impeachment includes the allegation that the President attempted to influence the outcome of the Georgia votes in the general election, it is not enough to satisfy yet another component of the innovative demagoguery definition. That can be found elsewhere, in an unlikely spot, with regard to the pandemic statistics;
     "Naïve realists often believe that they can judge the validity of statistics on the basis of whether they support a conclusion they believe to be obviously true, so they accept as true those statistics with which they agree and dismiss as untrue those statistics with which they disagree." (Roberts-Miller)
As recently as a week ago, Jemima McEvoy reported in Forbes the President's efforts to misalign the CDC stats downward in order to make his administration appear we are coming out of the crisis; 
      "Trump suggested that the U.S. Covid-19 death toll includes deaths that weren’t caused by the virus, providing no evidence for either claim. " (Forbes)
Not just fitting the profile of the new demagogue definition, the hidden agenda is that of the class-struggle between those who have lost their jobs, business, homes and family members because of the pandemic, but those who have not, the political elite that has been foot dragging in key areas such as unemployment relief and stimulus checks. The blame fell squarely on the House of Representatives for its weak $600 package when the White House demanded $2000. To complicate the matter, infighting inside the president's own party further stalled economic relief for the struggling classes. No longer defined by an oversimplified "they stole the election" outcry, Roberts-Miller's scare tactics used by the loser that some apocalyptic event will happen if the protesters don't storm the capitol and halt at any cost the electoral college count results. All of it was fueled by class distinction, indeed a relevant argument for the "seditious acts" phrase written into the impeachment article. 
     "Shortly before the Joint Session commenced, President Trump addressed a crowd of his political supporters nearby. There he reiterated false claims that 'we won this election, and we won it by a landslide,.' " (Article I)
And now, the upper crust lawmakers in the House chamber are going to give it away, rob the poor, the unemployed and the bankrupt in the mob. By His Majesty's definition, the President willfully and carefully plotted the seditious act for which he is now accused; rhetoric aside, syntax and semantics to the wind. Sedition, a high crime, not a misdemeanor, by common law from the days of royalty, pegged to class struggle. Following the speech to incite insurrection, the President left the scene, with his entourage of wealthy sycophants and family insiders, also onstage briefly to incite the mob. Certainly they must have sensed the outcome even before it happened, with cellphone videos of them dancing and carrying on, behavior that can only be attributed to those so incredibly rich to be completely out of touch with the monster they had just created and unleashed, in utter contempt of the working class they incited. Yet to be examined are the Marxian and Freudian analyses of this aberration of democracy.
     As the pundits and former chiefs of  staff repeat the story a dozen times on CNN for the past few days leading up to Monday's House vote, they get the reasons all wrong, they have been out of college too long. The definitions have changed, they see it all through a naïve realism of their own that what counts in a court of opinion on television also counts in a court of law. And at least Dana Bash of CNN noted today, a senate trial is no court of law.
Here's what the DC US Attorney, Michael Sherwin, had to say; 

 "I don't want this tyranny of labels saying this was sedition, this was a coup," Sherwin says. "But what I will say is, it was criminal." 

reported by Martin Kaste for NPR, 
Cited:
Roberts-Miller, Patricia, Demagoguery and Democracy, The Experiment, NY, 2020 paperback.
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