The definition of insurrection is a violent attempt to overthrow existing authority, so an insurrection from the existing authority contains a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. Then again, we are talking about Donald Trump.
J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois just said, "The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is no joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won't be intimidated by a wannabe dictator."
To this Trump replied: "Chicago is about to find out why we call it 'The Department of War.'"
So, now, this could get interesting.
Mad Dog thinks of the conflict between Lincoln and the state of South Carolina. When he sent provisions to Fort Sumter, the locals fired on the fort and laid waste to the defenders.
Lincoln, of course, did not want to precipitate a civil war. He had no need to demonstrate his manliness. He was a rail splitter and muscled and sinewy, and he had briefly served in a local war. But in our current President we have a man with heel spurs and the Big Truck/Small Penis syndrome clearly manifest, so anything is possible.
Of course, mention always gets made about Eisenhower sending in the 101st Airborne to escort Negro girls into White schools, past the jeering mob in Little Rock, and Kennedy shoving George Wallace aside in Alabama, with the National guard, but the only thing those histories share is the use of federal troops to over ride local resistance--but this was local resistance which was behavior which violated federal law, namely the Constitution, which is not in play in Chicago or California or DC. Trump never justified the use of federal troops to uphold a particular federal law or the Constitution--he just said there was (imaginary) carnage in the Blue cities and he says he does not like Democratic mayors and governors in states that did not vote for him, and he has said he likes National Guard units from states which voted for him by 47 points. So he is using people he likes to hold guns against people who don't like him and who he does not like. So the comparisons are pure sophistry.
Ideally, Governor Pritzker has been talking with Governor Newsom and with the governors of Washington state, Oregon, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut and Maryland. But that's ideally. And this is not an ideal world.
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| Actual, Real Hero |
What can these governors do?
Mad Dog does not really know the options, but conceivably, if the state National guard units are under the power of the governors, all of them could deploy their troops to be ready for the Department of War to deploy the federal troops and then we will really see just how tough Trump is.
Is he TACO Trump or Trump of his own dreams?
Push could actually come to shove.
Nobody has yet shown that sort of nerve, on either side.
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| Trump Play Actor Hero |
But we live in interesting times.
And Mad Dog the President can federalize the guard as he did in Los Angeles. Both Eisenhower and Kennedy did the same thing to deprive the Governors in both cases of their ability to obstruct the enforcement of federal law. Again you appear to be siding with southern segregationists which is understandable given that the overwhelming majority of homicide victims in Chicago are African American,
ReplyDeleteMad Dog,
ReplyDeleteDid you ever imagine that any President, including the bloated fascist currently in the Oval Office, would write “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.” and then threaten the city of Chicago? Every other day one thinks this must be rock bottom, but how low Trump will go is limitless…You know all of this is not going to end well. It will be Kent State all over again- we know it and are powerless to stop it…Well, maybe Pritzker has something up his sleeve..
Maud
In 2024, the CPD recorded 591 homicides, a term which includes both murder and manslaughter.
ReplyDeleteThe FBI has a lower number for last year of 461, which crime analyst Jeff Asher says is because the CPD has under-reported the number of homicides to the agency in recent years.
It was the highest number of homicides of any US city last year, recorded by the FBI
Pritzker allowed rioters in 2020 to terrorize children being treated for cancer in a Ronald McDonald house.
ReplyDeleteChicagoans suffered 28,443 violent crimes during 2024, with cases of aggravated assaults rising to the highest levels in two decades, police data shows.
ReplyDeleteCity residents reported 1,614 fewer violent crimes last year than in 2023 as cases of homicide, robbery and criminal sexual assault declined. Violent crimes have been trending upward for the past decade.
Arrests were made in about 1-in-7 violent crimes. The arrest rate has been trending down for 20 years.
Hopefully Trump will federalize the guard and restore lawful order to Chicago saving thousands of lives from failed leftist policing that has caused thousands of deaths over the last decade. Those of us that care about the poor and our fellow citizens support such actions.
ReplyDeleteMs. Maud,
ReplyDeleteThe Mayor of Chicago said, "If reducing crime and shootings were easy, we'd have done it long ago." He says he lives in one of the wards where crime has been most intransigent and one murder is too many, but crime, murder, shootings are all down, as a general trend. Nobody really knows why, but most crime has to do with poverty and a population of young men.
Armies on the streets can enforce a certain type of order, as happened in Ireland during the Troubles.
But armies and paramilitaries are not the solution to ghetto type crime.
Mad Dog