Let Us Have The Will

 “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Joan Didion, The White Album, 1979.

Eight words that hold a real truth. They apply to each of us as a person but they also apply to us as a nation. In 441 days we will have a general election in which 1/3 of the Senate, all of the House of Representatives, and the next President will be selected. The coup that Donald Trump attempted in 2020 did not culminate in January 2021. It is a slow coup that has festered since then with Trump and his cult of MAGA followers (including what used to be known as the Republican Party) has kept alive and which still threatens our country. 

David French has a sobering analysis in the New York Times today. He references a 126-page paper in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review by William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen entitled The Sweep and Force of Section Three. Baude and Stokes, two conservative law professors who are members of the Federalist Society (and by no means partisan) make the point that Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment already prohibits Donald John Trump from ever holding office after his seditious actions in the 2020 election. This position has also been advanced by J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe in The Atlantic on 19 August 2023. 

French points out that two former Presidents, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, did not cave to insurrection. Washington, as President, donned his uniform and led troops to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794. Abraham Lincoln, of course, led the United States to victory over the treason of the Confederacy in the deadliest war in American history. In the final paragraph of French’s editorial, he writes

Victory is not incompatible with mercy, and mercy can be indispensable after victory. But while the threat remains, so must the resolve, even if it means asking the Supreme Court to intervene at the worst possible time. Let me end where I began. Read Baude and Paulsen — and not just for their compelling legal argument. Read and remember what it was like when people of character and conviction inhabited the American political class. They have given us the tools to defend the American experiment. All we need is the will.

Returning to Didion’s quote, this means we must have the resolve not to accept or capitulate to the crazy stories of the MAGA cult. Sedition and attempting to overturn the Constitution is totally unacceptable. Donald Trump, if found guilty in a court of law of the myriad felonies for which he has been indicted, belongs in prison. He is no more above the law than anyone else. He also belongs in the dustbin of history like his authoritarian idols of the early 20th century. Let us have the will to make that happen.