Walker’s reforms even went so far as to require public employees to contribute to their health-insurance and pension costs-while still paying less for those benefits than the average Wisconsin citizen. ![]() Schumer was threatening or encouraging violence.)Ī decade ago, an even more direct and threatening, though ultimately (mostly) nonviolent, challenge to constitutional government was offered by Wisconsin public employee unions who invaded that state’s Capitol to protest and attempt to block Governor Scott Walker’s program of reforming public-employee contracts so as to balance the state budget without raising taxes, and also liberate public school administrations from rigid tenure rules (closely paralleled in school districts throughout the country) that prevented them from hiring teachers based on merit and adjusting their pay based on performance. (Schumer’s act won a rare rebuke from the normally reserved Chief Justice Roberts, who denounced Schumer’s comments as “inappropriate” and “dangerous,” stressing, that “all members of the court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.” In a proto-Trumpian response, Schumer spokesman Justin Goodman explained that his boss’s words didn’t mean what they sounded like, and denied that. ![]() More recently, a thoroughly anti-constitutional precedent was set by then-minority leader Chuck Schumer only last March, when he led a posse of about 75 members up the steps of the Supreme Court to warn recently appointed justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh that they had “released the whirlwind,” would “pay a price,” and would “not know what hit” them if they voted the “wrong” way on an abortion case. Starting with the election of 2000, prominent Democrats have questioned the legitimacy of every election in which a Republican won the Presidency-indeed, devoting a majority of Trump’s term to trying him to remove him, on grounds far more spurious than those on which his post-Presidential impeachment rested. Whether or not Donald Trump’s January 6 address to his supporters rose to the level of criminal incitement under the Supreme Court’s perhaps excessively liberal Brandenburg standard, it was undeniably a thoroughly reprehensible act, or, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell put it following the impeachment trial, “a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty.” Nothing can excuse it.īut while news media have every right and reason to condemn Trump’s behavior in provoking a mob (despite his admonition that they should act “peaceably”) to engage in a violent assault that resulted in five deaths (and might have cost more, had it not been for the courageous acts of the understaffed Capitol Police), it is unfortunate that few have placed Trump’s act in a broader context that would acknowledge the threats to our Constitutional order arising from elsewhere on the political spectrum.
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