The Lincoln Project: This is NOT Conservatism. This is a CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS!

"If you feel like you're in a constitutional crisis, you are." 

Source:The Lincoln Project's Rick Wilson.

From The Lincoln Project

Rick Wilson talking about President Trump's White House staff: 

"You should be telling him the optics are bad, the impact is bad. What you're doing is bad, but they don't really care to. I'll tell you why, because everyone there now knows they live or die literally and politically, by Donald Trump's pleasure. Every single of those people around Donald Trump right now knows that if they say one word, if they say boo.

By the way, Donald, if you flip that switch, a thousand babies die. I wouldn't flip the switch. I like that switch. It's a good switch.

No one's ever seen a switch like this. He doesn't care. And they'll just disappear, They'll go away. They will be fired, they will be exiled, they will be stoked, they will be harassed.

That's it. These lawyers in the White House and the DOJ, they understand that the actions being taken by Doge and by Elon and by his team of boy geniuses are illegal. They understand that statutory requirements for monies to be spent harkened back to Article one and Article two of the Constitution. These describe the separation of powers of three co equal branches of government.

It is not Trump HQ, Trump Capitol Hill Division, and Trump Court's Inc. That's not how it works. That's not how a system in America that any conservative should want because believe you me, what you are stacking up right now is a series of awful precedents. No one believes that the abuse of power ever ends well.

But the abuse of power is what you are witnessing right now. The constitutional crisis you are witnessing is because of an abuse of power. It is going to accelerate. We are going to reach a moment of crisis very very very very soon...

From Speaker

According to Wikipedia: 

"In political science, a constitutional crisis is a problem or conflict in the function of a government that the political constitution or other fundamental governing law is perceived to be unable to resolve. There are several variations to this definition... 

From Wikipedia

I just want to take issue with 1 thing that Rick Wilson said first and then I'll get into my broader point here. 

I don't even pretend to be a lawyer, because I'm not that good of an actor. What I know about the law, is what I read myself about it, as well as listening to good lawyers. But if you want my definition of a "constitutional crisis", I will it to you anyway: a constitutional crisis would be when President Trump decides not to enforce a court decision that he lost. 

Rick Wilson gave us a list of terrible's that he think are possible... the President ordering his Attorney General Pam Bondi to arrest a Federal Judge for ruling against him and the Attorney General carrying out that order, would be what a "constitutional crisis" could look like. Both of those actions would be impeachable offenses. Now could either the President or Attorney General be arrested for that... what did I tell you about me not being a lawyer? But that would put the country I believe in a "constitutional crisis".

But Rick Wilson is damn right about MAGA not being a conservative movement. Now I think the best definition of a Conservative is: "averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values". Now move that up into an America  political sense, that would mean someone who believes in conserving the American form of government, our individual rights, American tradition, etc. 

A Conservative based on the definition that I just gave you, is not someone who is always talking about: 

taking down the establishment 

or taking down the deep state 

maybe America needs a dictator

or using the rule of law against their political opponents, simply because they are their political opponents, or ruled against them in court, investigated you for possibly being involved in illegal activities, or even breaking the law. 

If you are a Conservative, you are not intentionally breaking the law to begin with. No one is perfect, but these MAGA folks talk about breaking laws, like Ronald McDonald talks about cheeseburgers: it's an everyday activity for them that they can't get away from. .

So of course MAGA is not conservative. They are not "Make America Great Again" either. There's a real limit to how much someone can talk about how great their own country is, before it becomes counter-productive and you are like a general manager of a sports franchise, who's just won a few championships and you are now thinking this is as good as you'll ever be. So you lose the incentive to improve and be better. 

But the average American would probably tell you back in 2015-16 and even before that, well before Donald John Trump even represented a threat to becoming President of the United States, that America was not just a great country, but probably the greatest in the world. As much as MAGA talks about American patriotism and being American patriots... they are not calling themselves  MAGA, if they already thought America was great. I mean, isn't that obvious? If you think America is already great, then what's the need to call yourself "Mage America Great Again"? 

It's hard to treat MAGA seriously as a political movement because a lot of their members look completely unserious. You don't believe me, attend a CPAC conference at some point. What they really look like to me in a political sense... they look like whacked out hippies, (no offense to whacked out hippies) who ran away from home, ended up on a beach somewhere, got drunk and high for weeks and were never able to return to mainstream American society, mentally.

But somehow MAGA physically made it back to American mainstream society, but only to find themselves seeing an America that's completely foreign to them and wondering what the hell happened to their country, before they ran away from home. And they are the people who think they'll bring their America back. 

But as my colleague Kire Schneider wrote yesterday: 

"If you are Kamala Harris right now... I doubt she's home right now with her husband Doug laughing their heads off (to keep this clean) at the American voters. At least, the American voters who were too dumb, too blind, too death, (perhaps they flipped a coin in the voting booth to decide who to vote for in 2024) or simply don't give enough of a damn about the United States, to make an intelligent decision in who to vote for. But only because I believe she loves her country and is still willing to do everything that she can to make America as great as it can be... 

From The New Democrat

And this is who 49% of the American voters who actually gave enough of a damn about American democracy, to get to the polls, voted for in 2024. Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. And that was enough for him to win the Electoral College. 

So now the rest of the country, including the people who love America, need to do what we can, what is left for us to do, which is really just using our First Amendment rights to talk about how dangerous this whacked-out from the 1950s, (if not 1800s) far-right political movement is, that's not just an insult to American conservatism, but the American form of government. As well as relying on the Federal courts, to hold this President and his movement accountable. And hope American voters wake up in 2025-26 and give this movement and President what it deserves, which is a real check on their abuses of power. 

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