What Can Be Done? - Part 1

Part 1

The American republic faces its greatest existential threat since its founding. We must see this threat for what it is, and then find ways to defeat it and preserve the nation our forefathers founded.

For the moment, the levers of power in Washington are out of the hands of Constitutionally-motivated American patriots.

The Judicial Branch is compromised, thanks to the hundreds of federal judges (out of nearly a thousand total) ideologically aligned with the current regime – we saw their power (and that of many state-level courts) in their refusal to even hear cases alleging 2020 election fraud. The Supreme Court has a majority of conservative Justices right now, which constitutes a bulwark of sorts against particularly egregious actions, so long as its voice is heard, its Constitutionally granted authority is respected, its justices do not die or resign, and the regime fails to pack the Court with additional Justices of its own choosing, despite its clear desire to do so.

The Legislative Branch is dysfunctional (not always a bad thing, as Will Rogers pointed out). The Democratic majority in the House is beginning to show fault lines over fiscal and other regime policy initiatives as many members contemplate their prospects for re-election. The Senate is split 50-50 between the two major parties. On any vote that requires a simple majority, if Senators vote with their party, the Democrats can get their way by Vice President Harris casting a tie-breaking vote. However, a single defection from Democratic ranks will make that impossible, so long as Republicans stand firm when it counts, as they – somewhat surprisingly! – did on several occasions in 2021.

Various scenarios of Presidential succession – should Biden die, resign or be adjudicated incompetent under the 25^th Amendment – have been discussed. Interestingly, in such an event, Vice President Harris would become President, but a new Vice President would have to be appointed by her and approved by simple majorities in both Houses of Congress. And with the Vice Presidency vacant, there would be no tie-breaking vote in the Senate. If the Senate deadlocked, there would be no Vice President, and therefore no tie-breaking vote for future Senate votes. Congressional dysfunction might progress to full paralysis, which under the present unfortunate circumstances might be a good thing in a way, but would only embolden the administration to double down on its rule by executive fiat.

The Executive Branch is controlled by the socialist enemies of our republic. Because this includes the appointed leadership of every executive agency, and in turn the next rank of leaders promoted by them out of the senior ranks of the civil service – and because we have become a nation less of laws than of regulations promulgated by these unaccountable, unelected apparatchiks – this is where the most immediate threat to our freedom resides. In the first year of the Biden regime, we saw a flood of executive orders that put every previous presidential administration in history to shame, precisely because the regime realized how difficult it would be to advance its programs through legislation. Every one of those orders is vulnerable to challenge in the courts or in the Congress, and many have been stopped short of implementation, but with the full force of the Executive Branch in play, they have accomplished too much, too fast, to leave us with much assurance of reversing the decline of our republic.

You can find reams of deeper analysis of all the preceding assessments across the internet and conservative think tanks, but the essence of the situation is this: what's happening to our country at the hands of the current regime may be delayed, may be disrupted, but is not likely to be stopped, much less reversed, by any conceivable action at the federal level over at least the next year or three. And all those possibilities of delay and disruption depend upon what may be quaint and unrealistic assumptions about continued respect for the rule of law and the balance of power established by the Constitution. We've spoken before of normalcy bias; expecting the kind of enemies we face today to respect these concepts may prove to be an example of normalcy bias of the worst kind. Other nations facing a ruthless revolutionary movement have continued with similar denials of its potential right up to the last moment, when the darkness descends. We need to be starkly realistic.

It is probably a similar fallacy to assume that all this can be turned around in the 2022 mid-term elections, or the presidential election of 2024. Is it likely, that having seized power in 2020 through massive election fraud, the regime and its backers would refrain from using the same tactics to control the outcome of these elections? As in the last election, they do not need to engineer the outcomes of all races or in all states, but only in certain key races, and (in 2024) certain electoral "swing" states.

There are many examples of authoritarian regimes holding regular elections to sustain a fiction of popular rule; the Soviet Union is perhaps the first and foremost example. If no true opposition is allowed to run a slate of candidates, or if the counting of votes is in the hands of a cynical regime, without public transparency or any means of challenge or recourse, elections are a sham. A popular song from the 1970s said, "Don't think that it can't happen, just because it hasn't happened yet." And now of course, it has happened; there is little reason to believe that it won't happen again. You could "hope" for some improbable chain of events to repair the electoral system; but hope is not a strategy.

Summary

We start from this pessimistic assessment of the current state of affairs. Our purpose is to define it more closely, and to identify courses of action that can create – or create the conditions for – positive change in the face of these challenges.