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Laurence Tribe of Harvard Law is the country’s most prestigious law professor. He’s a teacher and mentor to the current attorney general, Merrick Garland. He headlines an op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times, “ The insurrection won’t end until Trump is prosecuted and disqualified from future office.” You can skip the first part and go to this at the end:
And should Trump get an encore, look to pre-World War II Germany for a mirror. A failed coup in 1923 taught Hitler a better route to dictatorship nine years later.
Those who repeat history are doomed to learn it. The hard way.
Tribe
There’s an unwritten rule in opinion writing: Bring up Hitler on anything but a direct connection to him or his actions, and your argument immediately is void. How can one argue against someone being Hitler?
But since Tribe brought it up, one of the keys to Hitler’s dictatorship was one-party rule. But that’s the case for the Jan. 6 Committe Tribe so much praises, and depends on. Two of the five Republicans appointed to it by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy were rejected by Reichtag Leader Nancy Pelosi. So McCarthy withdrew all his appointments. Pelosi replaced them with two anti-Trump Republicans who hated him, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. What kind of government allows no opposition? Not a democracy.
Cheney especially hated Trump for attacking the disastrous Iraq War identified with her dear father, former VP Dick Cheney. Trump, in fact, started no new wars, and was winding down the other wars. By contrast, the two top fascists, Hitler and Mussolini, were known for advocating aggressive wars supposedly to strengthen their countries — leading, instead, to defeat and mass death.
And while Trump has been calling for peace in the Ukraine War, as has left-wing linguist Noam Chomsky, it’s Biden and the Democrats who have advanced this horrible war in cahoots with the neo-Nazi Azov Battallion.
It’s also Garland who has been attacking parents who speak up at their local school boards. According to U.S. News last October, “Garland Refuses to Rescind Memo Asking FBI to Probe School Board Threats.”
Of course, Tribe is posturing. If Garland ever were to charge Trump with inciting an “insurrection,” the former president’s popularity would soar even higher. Especially as Americans remember we enjoyed $2 gas and low inflation under Trump. As well as no new wars and a general feeling somebody competent was running the government machinery, even if one disagreed with specific policies.
Now Democats are musing about how to push Biden aside, without ending up with cackling Kamala. The Atlantic, which has become a major Democratic theoretical journal, ran an article by Ronald Brownstein, “The Democrats’ New Spokesman in the Culture Wars: The left desperately needs someone to stand up to Republicans’ rights rollback. Is Gavin Newsom up to the task?”
Actually, Newsom has gone so far Left he couldn’t win such battleground states as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. He comes from a California elite family, went to elite schools, never served in the military and has no idea what working-class members of his own party believe in the Rust Belt.
Tribe’s diatribe is part of this “out of touch” vibe Democrats are sending everywhere. Meanwhile, Mayra Flores became the first Republican to win in her South Texas district since Democrats were still trying to get past their support of slavery 150 years ago. Repulsed by Biden, Tribe and Newsom, Latinos are moving to the party that more represents their traditional customs and beliefs.
Whether Republicans reward that new loyalty with some decent policies, instead of selling out as they often do, remains to be seen. Although perhaps the problem will become moot if Tribe and Garland jail all the elephants.
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