It’s been a long time, but people of my generation remember when assassination seemed a normal part of our political discourse. It wasn’t, never is. But man oh dear … John F, Kennedy, his brother, Bobby. Blacks marched and demanded civil rights … movement leaders Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr. were both gunned down.
In 1972, George Wallace was shot four times and survived, paralyzed from the waist down. An avowed racist and segregationist running for president as a Democrat, Wallace wasn’t shot for his politics, but in a vain hope for a moment’s fame. Who today remembers Arthur Bremer?
In that era, liberal politics held sway. Cities burned as protesters demanded an end to an unpopular war, equal rights and an end to systemic injustice to Blacks, women, Native Americans.
Our 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, founder of the Republican party, was the first to be assassinated for his support of Black rights.
Assassination as a political tool was as wrong in the era of peace, love and flower power as it is now in this era of conservatism, Christian Nationalism and MAGA. Our constitution provides an ample framework for even as diverse a nation as ours to resolve our political differences short of murder.
But we seem to lose sight of that when our political pendulum swings to an extreme and becomes temporarily stuck there, as it did in the 1960s to the radical left, as it has now to the radical right. These are the times when our nation is at its greatest peril.
While abhorrent, an attempted assassination does not grant special status or privilege to a campaigner. It does not absolve them their shortcomings, especially one who is clearly unfit as evidenced by his actions in attempting to overturn the very constitution he swore an oath to uphold.
We cannot allow those shots fired Saturday to set off the volatile tinderbox that is our current political climate, we cannot let them distract us from what’s at stake November 5 or deter us from shouldering the vast responsibility passed to us by the irresponsible.
In “normal” times, a candidate such as Donald Trump would have been left at the starting gate in any race for office of public trust unless he ran unopposed.
In extreme times, he would be elected to the nation’s highest office, serve an inept and farcical first term, surviving one impeachment for his attempt to coerce another nation’s leader for his own political gain, then a second for his treasonous and violent attempt to overturn the results of a lawful election.
Three and a half years later, he would still be lauded by millions, his lies believed, front runner in his third campaign for president on promises that he will, if elected, finish dismantling the constitution, use “his” Department of Justice to persecute those who stood up to him, release the “patriots” who stormed the capitol on his behalf, fire thousands upon thousands of government employees who serve the public and replace them with devotees willing to serve none but Trump and to ” root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,”
Just think of all he can accomplish in a second term now that the U.S. Supreme Court has granted his request for presidential immunity from criminal prosecution.
Today he is expected to offer a call for unity in his remarks at the 2024 Republican National Convention, having had his previous speech rewritten following his Josh Hawley moment Saturday, but a bullet to the ear does not confer enlightenment and “best wishes for a speedy recovery” sympathies ought not … can not … extend to sympathy votes, especially with Donald John Trump, king beneficiary of delayed justice and bucks passed.
In the impeachment hearings, the U.S. Senate passed the buck, saying it was up to the courts to determine guilt or innocence. The court, as noted above, in effect passed the buck, saying it is up to the voters to decide whom we should trust to have criminal immunity, who we will trust to be above the law.
Voters at the ballot boxes of the nation this November 5, just four months away, will be something they’ve never before been and were never meant to be … arbiters of justice as well as electors to offices of public trust. By fiat, the legislative and judicial branches of the federal government have effectively ceded their powers of wielding checks and balances on the executive branch, carefully designed to prevent the ascension of a monarch or a king, to the electorate, the voting citizens of these United States, and there isn’t time for voters to protest or even process the scope of this unwanted but essential new responsibility before they go to the polls in the most consequential election in this nation’s history.
As qualified electors November 5, by our vote for president, we will also be voting, by referendum, on whether or not our constitutional republic will survive long enough for the political pendulum to swing back toward moderation. Sympathy for a pierced ear cannot be allowed to keep us from doing what those we entrusted failed or refused to do:
“… support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic …”
~ from the U.S. Senate oath of office