The authoritarian impulse is alive and well in your modern GOP. The party which in other contexts implores us to hew to the mythical “original” meaning of the constitution, has shown itself during the primary campaign to be utterly contemptuous of that document when it comes to nuisances like the rule of law or separation of powers. To wit:
Newt Gingrich is continuing his outrageous campaign to subvert one of the most sacred and revolutionary democratic principles, that of the independent judiciary:
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is doubling down from Thursday’s Fox News debate on his vow to abolish federal courts if he disagreed with their decision.
According to The Hill, in a conference call with reporters, Gingrich indicated that it was in the president’s power as commander-in-chief to deem any Supreme Court ruling irrelevant if he or she in the White House disagreed. […]
Gingrich also backed his position to subpoena judges or abolish courts entirely if he thought their final rulings were wrong.
At the last Republican debate he repeated this bold plan to transform the U.S. into a banana republic by making the rule of law subservient to executive caprice.
Ron Paul, god bless him, was the only candidate to challenge him on it. The recent polling suggests that Gingrich will likely be slithering back into his private life as an influence peddler soon enough. But I find it outrageous that the recent front-runner for the Republican nomination could express such overt constitutional contempt without opprobrium of any kind.
The next item is a more general critique but I think recognizable to us all. In the recent debates the most popular refrain from the candidates when asked about military or security policy has been that they would “listen to the commanders on the ground.” This sort of language serves as a very easy way for politicians to signal to military fetishists that they are tough and like tough things such as men with epaulets. And to be fair, one hears this tiresome deference to the “commanders on the ground” from both parties. But I think it can be fairly said that it’s the liberty-loving GOP most enthralled with the idea of civilians “listening to the generals”—rather than the other way round—in the conduct of war policy.
Just yesterday there was a very important corrective to this inversion from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Martin Dempsey. General Dempsey was asked if his advice on extended troop presence in Afghanistan after 2014 will be heeded in Washington. His surprising and brilliant response:
I’ll probably make news with this but I find some of those articles about divergence or control of the generals to be kind of offensive to me. And here’s why. One of the things that makes us as a military profession in a democracy is civilian rule. Our civilian leaders are under no obligation to accept our advice; and that’s what it is. Its advice. It’s military judgments, it’s alternatives, it’s options. And at the end of the day, our system is built on the fact that it will be our civilian leaders who make that decision and I don’t find that in any way to challenge my manhood, nor my position. In fact, if it were the opposite, I think we should all be concerned.”
Here is one case in which listening to the generals would be wise indeed.
This might all be dismissed as campaign nonsense. However, in a week in which we’ve lost the great Czech champion of human freedom and democracy, as well as his ghoulish diametric opposite in North Korea; and as we watch Egypt descend into violent martial law, with the heroes of Tahrir Square beaten and shot and gassed by generals who do not recognize the legitimacy of civilian rule; and as the rule of law remains nothing more than the morality of the strong in so many parts of the world; we should shame from public life such demagogues as Mr. Gingrich, who seek applause lines from credulous voters by selling them a subversion of the very principles they claim to venerate.
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