The standards for insurrection are just woefully low these days
Democratic statesman and perennial niceguy Tim Kaine thinks there’s a “powerful argument” to be made for using the 14th Amendment’s insurrection/rebellion clause to bar Donald Trump from becoming president again. “The language is specific,” he says. “If you give aid and comfort to those who engage in an insurrection against the Constitution of the United States … In my view, the attack on the Capitol that day was designed for a particular purpose … and that was to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power as is laid out in the Constitution.”
I have written about this before, not that anyone reads anything I write (except you, of course), but I’ll write about it again: It seems, I don’t know, extremely perilous to dumb down the idea of “insurrection” to the level of the stupid mob demonstration that occurred on January 6, 2021. You know, we’re the United States of America. We have a little four-year-long exchange in our history called the Civil War, one that by most reasonable standards met the threshold for an actual “insurrection,” with the conflict having been launched by an actual offensive bombardment on a federal military facility. There is no mistaking what happened there. The Jan. 6 incident, on the other hand, involved a bunch of fat redneck women and guys with names like Dirk and Luther running around the Capitol for a few hours and tussling with some guards before getting arrested. It was, by any sensible metric, little more than a sort of quasi-riot—a prosecutable offense to be sure, but an “insurrection?” Really? Look, I think the Confederates set the bar pretty high here and I don’t think Dirk and Luther came anywhere close to clearing it. I don’t think you think that either.
It used to be, not very long ago, that progressives were distinctly uneasy with redefining our political lexicon to facilitate extreme and consequential prosecution. Remember in the aftermath of 9/11 when there was acute anxiety on the Left over how fulsomely Republicans were willing to transform the idea of “terrorism?” Remember how worried Michael Moore was about U.S. civil liberties at the time? Michael Moore now defines the Jan. 6 riot as an “attempted coup” and a “violent coup” (apparently it was both attempted and successful the same time) as well as an “insurrection,” one carried out by “domestic terrorists” at the urging of a “treasonous” president. How times change! I don’t know if Michael Moore is still worried about the PATRIOT Act but he’s definitely not worried about using the kind of legal language that can easily get people executed by lethal injection—over a stupid riot! What a shift.
Note that this extreme language is not merely the bailiwick of overeager Democratic senators and rather dated left-wing activists. CNN still refers to the event as an “insurrection,” as do PBS, CBS, the Hill, the LA Times, the Dallas Morning News, take your pick. I will say it again: Insurrection as a class of felony can, if prosecuted under statutes of treason, result in the death penalty. This is not conjecture, it’s in the U.S. Code! You can die over this sort of thing. Are people really this comfortable with potentially killing men and women—injecting them with lethal chemicals that cause their lungs to collapse, or electrocuting them to death—over the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot? Do the events of that day seem serious enough to warrant that kind of retribution?
I don’t know. Maybe they do to Tim Kaine. A lot of political actors seem to have undergone a radical, possibly irreversible transformation in the wake of the Trump years. Things previously unthought now seem to be perfectly thinkable. I suppose that kind of weird alchemy defines the entire arc of the Trump presidency: A brash, loudmouthed game show host and middling real estate mogul becomes president in 2016, and a few years later Michael Moore has become a hanging judge. I don’t think you need a map to know where this sort of thing goes—how the easy, stupid rhetoric of political expediency eventually becomes a far more potent and ruthless weapon than its authors ever intended. January 6 may have been the end of Trump’s reasonable hopes of being re-elected, but it was quite plainly the start of something else, something considerably more dangerous to the republic than a silly riot ever could be.