The Capitol
In the winter of 1977 I worked in Congress. I was just twenty years old, attending American University on their Washington Semester Program. But I was also a paid intern with Congressman Tom Luken of Cincinnati. I spent that winter and spring learning the “inside jobs” of a Congressional office: answering phones and mail, researching legislation and doing the most important work, constituent service. It was heady stuff, with the words “this is Congressman Luken’s office” opening doors that were slammed closed on “regular folks”.
It also gave me some license to roam the Capitol Building. The Capitol is much like a giant hospital. Sure there’s the main building, the actual Capitol with the iconic dome. But there are buildings spread all around “the Hill”, mostly office buildings for the 535 Congressmen and Senators and their staff as well as all of the Committee staffs, research support staffs, and the people who actually made the building run. Tunnels and subways connect the main building to all of the others. It’s a huge web that you can get lost in just as easily as finding your destination.
Snow Blind
In that February I took a weekend to visit some friends in Pennsylvania. They lived in a town called Mahoopany, just up river from Tunkhannock and Scranton in the Northeast corner of the state. It was normally a four-hour drive, and I jumped into my 1967 Volkswagen Squareback and headed out of town into Washington’s Friday afternoon traffic. The route worked its way north, into Pennsylvania, and into the mountains above Harrisburg. And I drove right into a mid-winter blizzard.
I was twenty, invincible in my rear-engine and rear-wheel drive Volkswagen; Crosby, Stills and Nash blasting from the speakers. I soon found myself far ahead of the trucks, driving through deep unplowed snow. It became difficult to find the road. I picked my way up the mountainside carefully, going until I felt the road go soft under my hands, then dragging the “Squareback” back to the center in an “anti-submarine” maneuver. There were no guardrails, no visual cues as to where the road edge ended, and the mountainside began.
Looking back on those hours in the mountains, it wasn’t the smartest thing I’ve ever done. My white Squareback would have blended away into the snow-covered mountainside if I careened off the edge. They wouldn’t have found it, or me, until the next thaw. But I managed to avoid the fall, and arrived at my friends in Mahoopany full of pride deep in the middle of the night.
Precedent
From the beginning of the American experiment in government, we depended on “guardrails” to maintain our Democracy. President Washington realized that the Founding Fathers couldn’t write a “law” for every possible contingency. So he was acutely aware that each of his actions as President established the precedent for the future.
The most obvious example of that was choosing to serve only eight years as President. Washington could have stayed for life and few would have complained. But as Lin-Manuel Miranda so eloquently recognized in Hamilton, Washington realized that he needed to establish the final precedent of voluntarily leaving, of making Presidential power only temporarily linked to a person, rather than the office. He needed to “Teach Them How to Say Goodbye”. It wasn’t a “rule”, but it was the norm, the guardrail of American government: until it wasn’t.
That lasted for one hundred and forty-two years, until Franklin Roosevelt chose to drive through that guardrail and run for a third term in office. After he died in office in his fourth term, that guardrail was erected in law, the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution.
And we have depended on other unwritten guardrails to maintain our Democracy. As hard as it was to accept it, our Presidents honored the will of the people and transferred the power of their office when their time came, even when they suffered electoral defeat. The modern “one termers”, from Herbert Hoover to Jimmy Carter to George HW Bush, made sure that the next President had every opportunity to succeed, even though they were electoral rivals. They followed Washington’s precedent, and put the nation before their own ambitions. That worked: until it didn’t.
No Guardrails
There are no guardrails for a President who refuses to accept electoral defeat. We have no precedent for a leader who calls on the people to come to Washington and “…be there, it will be wild”. And when he vented to them for seventy minutes on the Mall yesterday, they followed his suggestion to “…go down to the Capitol and cheer on our brave Congressmen and women”. They knew why they were there: because “…we will fight…we will never give up, never concede (to the) Democratic explosions of bullshit…” (US News).
Reverend Al Sharpton, a civil rights leader who has organized many marches on Washington, DC, recognizes the power of his words on the National Mall. He knows that if he incites his crowd to commit crimes, he would be held responsible for their actions. But he also knows how to maintain control of the ten of thousands who came to support his cause. He wants them to be a symbol of support for change, not for destruction.
And so does Donald Trump. He knows exactly what he was inciting his followers to do. It shouldn’t be a surprise that thousands followed his command: they marched down to the Capitol and they didn’t give up until they got inside and stopped the, “Democratic bullshit”.
There are thousands who didn’t defile the Capitol, and who peacefully protested for “their” President. But anyone who watched what went on yesterday recognizes that it wasn’t just an “aberrant few” who smashed their way into the sacred halls of Congress, and stopped the Constitutional process of certifying the Presidential election. It was “the mob”, incited by the President and by months of “fake news” designed to convince them that their “will” was being thwarted by political “elites”.
Off the Road
Yesterday afternoon our government felt like it was off the road in the blizzard, teetering on the edge of crashing down the mountain. It would only take a few of the pipe bombs and Molotov Cocktails that were hidden away in a nearby car (WUSA) to make yesterday’s invasion so much more than just “touristing” in the legislative chambers. Our Democracy was at the edge. And there were no guardrails.
What can we do? There are some physical guardrails now: literal barriers of National Guardsmen and Police to stop the next mob heading down the Mall. But the answer isn’t more police. The man responsible for “lighting the fuse” should be held to account for his actions. President Trump has twelve days remaining in office. That’s twelve days for the Republic to “survive” without guardrails.
Or it’s twelve days to send our Nation into chaos.
