Constitutional Crisis!

I've been saying for a couple of weeks that we're in the Morning After phase of a moral panic, and part of the hangover this time is a quiet constitutional crisis. Part of the issue now, though possibly not the underlying one, is that nobody in the line of succession, the president, the vice president, or the speaker, is up to the job, and I'm not sure if we have the luxury of three years, or even 11 months, for this to work itself out.

People are starting to notice.

[Historian] Jon Meacham scares his audience, Democrats, into thinking that if Trump runs and loses again, he will do as he did in 2020 and refuse to accept the loss. He will again claim the election was stolen from him. Meacham appeared on Fareed Zakaria’s Sunday show on CNN and when asked if such a scenario would present a constitutional crisis, Meacham responded by saying, “It’s an unfolding one.”

According to the UK Daily Mail,

Presidential historian and former Biden speechwriter Jon Meacham said that he believes if ex-President Donald Trump runs for a third time in 2024, America may be thrown into a civil war as Democrats continue to press for voting rights legislation.

Meacham, a regular CNN contributor, appeared on Fareed Zakaria's Sunday show on the network, where the host said Trump will claim he won regardless of the results in 2024.

'Doesn't that present us with a constitutional crisis?' Zakarias asked.

'I think it's an unfolding one,' Meacham replied, calling it 'an interesting use of the word crisis.'

Meacham said the riot at the Capitol on January 6 was the closest America came to forfeiting its Democracy since the Civil War.

I don't think we can dispute that people across the political spectrum -- Meacham is on the left and a Biden speechwriter -- have had an instinctive feeling that something was hinky about either the November 3, 2020 US presidential election or the January 6, 2021 demonstration at the US Capitol that protested that election. I'm an agnostic about whether the election was stolen, although clearly as a practical matter, US citizens generally have come to behave as though it was legitimate and are working through the political process to redress grievances in future elections.

And so far, it appears that they may well succeed. 2024 is a long way off for prognostication, but Trump at this point continues to dominate the political scene, consistently winning hypothetical rematches against Biden, while his endorsements of other Republican candidates are important. But even if he were to fade -- something we can't rule out -- there are other strong potential Republican candidates, including now Ted Cruz, who performed well in 2016.

What Meacham and others of the elite who were quick to agree with him on the CNN show reocognize is that the see-saw political settlement that emerged in the 1970s, resulting first from Nixon's landslide defeat of McGovern in 1972 followed by his forced resignation in 1974 and Carter's election in 1976, is coming apart. Biden and Pelosi both began their political careers during this period and advanced as conventional machine politicians.

Their problem is that the Republican party has adapted over the succeeding decades, while the Democrats have continued to rely on formulas developed during Watergate. Both Bush administrations owe a lot to Gerald Ford, but the Bushies are gone, with a tiny rear guard led by Lynne Cheney. On the other hand, the Democrat strategy against Trump following his upset election was pure Nixon era, to concoct media-driven scandals and try to drive him from office via congressional investigations, and when that didn't work, they simply repeated the effort expecting a different result. We now hear the January 6 committee will redouble its efforts in the new year. Good luck with that.

The problem with the current national mood is that whatever the Democrats were trying to accomplish in 2020, it simply didn't work, and we're seeing the results on a daily basis. That seems to be bothering everyone, but for now, we don't have any kind of resolution.