Tag: Civil War

PAPER TIGER REDUX

by Ken Grossberger, PhD

President Biden’s foreign policy mantra is to avoid escalating current conflicts. To use his favorite word: don’t. Don’t do anything that will upset America’s enemies, don’t properly defend American troops abroad, don’t do everything possible to protect American interests, and certainly don’t upset the not-so-mainstream media, upon whom his re-election, in large measure, depends. But history sadly shows us that such weakness causes the very escalation such policies seek to avoid. Trying not to risk expanding conflicts generally leads to expanding those conflicts. One word admonitions scare no one and accomplish nothing, except to make the United States look ridiculous. The US is confronted with multiple wars and serious threats, yet the White House seems oblivious to the lessons of history.

English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously engaged in a policy of appeasement towards Adolf Hitler prior to WWII in an attempt to avoid a major conflict. Hitler had taken the Rhineland, Austria, and part of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Chamberlain met with Hitler to appease him in order to avoid war and both signed the Munich Agreement in 1938. Hitler agreed to no more territorial acquisitions and Chamberlain stated, “I believe it is peace in our time.” But in 1939 Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland, starting WWII.

By the 1850’s the US Congress had made several agreements between northern states and southern states about the extension of slavery as the country grew westward including the Missouri Compromise (1820) and the Compromise of 1850. The war with Mexico, ending in 1845, reignited the slavery issue as Texas would be entering the union as a slave state. Northern abolitionists opposed the extension of slavery and southern slaveholders insisted on it. The Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case in 1857 made the situation much worse by ruling that Congress did not have the authority to prevent the extension of slavery into the new territories. President James Buchanan, a northern Democrat with southern sympathies took office in 1857 but failed to resolve the slavery issue, taking a passive stance and leaving the issue to the radicals on both sides of the issue. He did not run for re-election in 1860, eleven southern states seceded and the Civil War started in April of 1861.  More Americans lost their lives in this conflict than in all other wars combined.  Buchanan didn’t think those states had the right to secede, but he did nothing to stop them, nor to resolve the conflict.  He left office in April 1861 with the country in shambles.

There are other historical examples. The price of weak leadership is extraordinary, but the Biden White House is trying to make sure that whatever we do, we do nothing to expand any of the currently expanding conflicts. We don’t want to further upset anyone. We issue warnings and have demonstrations of force but do little. Evidently the policy is we can get mad at them, but we don’t want them to get mad at us.

The Biden administration is preoccupied with how our enemies feel, so the president makes sure the US doesn’t overreact, even when American interests and American friends are under assault. Terrorist organizations have attacked American bases in the middle east over 100 times, Russia has killed thousands of Ukrainians in a war of conquest, the Chinese Communist Party is working overtime to wreck the US economy and on October 7 Hamas put on a freak show that would have embarrassed the Gestapo. There are college students demonstrating in support of this ridiculous terrorist organization. How crazy do you have to get before these students see how bad this is? Biden does not want to upset these college demonstrators and the Palestinian supporters either, so he simultaneously supports a middle east ceasefire to call attention to the plight of the Palestinians but then states again he is “rock solid” behind Israel.  Then no one gets mad at him or the US.  But as it turn out everyone is mad at America.

Weakness solves nothing, and as Sen. Kennedy (R-LA) stated “more sheep is not going to solve the wolf problem.” Biden cannot ignore the consequences of appeasement and inaction. This toxic dissonance results in bold moves by American enemies abroad, and nationwide demonstrations at home. Biden has the same title as Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, but he is not in the same league.

The Discomfort of Undue Process

Ken Grossberger, PhD

What if George Santos is found not guilty?  What if Donald Trump is?  What if Hunter Biden is? What if Joe Biden gets indicted? The rush to judgment may satisfy emotionally, but due process gets trampled along the way.

Congress may have acted prematurely in the George Santos case. The press, and the people, may have prejudged Trump and anyone named Biden (depending on one’s predilections), in advance of any jury verdict.  This is fine for a discussion at the bar at midnight, terrible for any appreciation of due process. The lesson here is that preemption may be prematurity.  Expelling Santos from Congress and removing Trump from the ballot may be politically palatable to some but is also legally foundationless. The political strategies of ballot denial and power maintenance are also ethically dubious at best. The US Constitution requires due process to protect each individual’s rights, and even though in some venues due process does not apply in fact, it should apply in principle.

The most egregious example is in Maine, where Secretary of State Shenna Bellows unilaterally removed former President Trump from the primary ballot.  Her argument was that Trump was guilty of inciting an insurrection on January 6, thus she was compelled under section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the constitution to rule that Trump could not run for political office.  Access to the ballot, therefore, is left to the constitutional interpretations of hundreds of unelected state administrative officials, a precedent under which democracy, as we know it, would disintegrate.

In Colorado the state supreme court also removed Trump from the ballot under the same logic.  Here we have at least some semblance of jurisprudence, with a court of law involved. However, we also have the legal conundrum as to the intent of section 3 as Congress intended it in 1868.  After the Civil War, Congress was left with the problem of over 5 million people who were still slaves in the south.  Thus the legislature passed the 13th amendment to free them, the 14th amendment to provide them citizenship and the 15th amendment to give former slaves the vote.  The insurrection in question was half the country seceding and fighting a major war of separation from the federal government.  Almost a million Americans lost their lives as hundreds of thousands of soldiers on both sides fought a desperate war in this rebellion.  The superannuated but highly embarrassing January 6 frat party was incredibly wrong and damaging to the American psyche, but hardly an insurrection.  

So, those who graduated from the Google School of Law, and some misguided courts, would have us believe that cherry-picking one’s way through the constitution to find a word or phrase that seemed to justify one’s preconceived conclusion is justified, due process notwithstanding.  Removing Trump from the ballot, ipso fact, is supported by the 14th amendment.

Thus we would be left whims of the perpetually upset never-Trump neurotics, or their counter-parts on the Right, to determine whom they would allow to run for office.  Elections would become free-for-alls with competing jurisdictions summarily removing from the ballot candidates of the opposing parties only to suffer retaliation in turn, and then perhaps no one is left on any ballot.  Court cases would pile up and the entire electoral system would be permanently constipated.

“Democracy is on the ballot,” as we hear so often, and maybe this year it actually is.