The extreme right whose icons currently include Greg Abbott, Ken Paxton, Ron DeSantis, and a few other republican nutjobs are showing us their vision of Amerika. Theirs is a secessionist vision – civil war style States Rights arguments with the nullification of federal authority. They have called upon Republican governors to support their insurrectionist ideologies and goals.
President Biden and his administration do not need my advice, of course, but I think that the time for conciliatory words is coming to a close. The President needs to federalize all the states’ National Guard units. He needs to direct them to ignore local commands and respect the national chain of command or face removal from duty and court martial. He needs to put all would-be seditionists and insurrectionists on notice that their continued calls for defiance of Supreme Court decisions will cause the deployment of the FBI and National Guard against them. They will be charged with seditious conspiracy and held over for trial in federal prison. The message should be, “Enough of this horse shit.”
Will this precipitate a shit storm? Of course, it will – just as it did when the National Guard was deployed to address George Wallace and his band of racist bigots who resisted the SCOTUS Brown vs Board of Education decision.
Doing what is right is not always doing what is easy. In fact, it rarely is. Still, failure to stand up to insurrectionists just makes insurrection look like peaceful protest – something protected by the First Amendment. It isn’t, and the visionaries of Amerika need to hear and feel that message clearly. Otherwise, they are just emboldened.