THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS NOW OFFICIALLY THE PARTY OF INSURRECTION AND REBELLION AGAINST THE LEGITIMATE GOVERNMENT

we’ve heard for the past few years about the fear of second civil war or major political unrest in the United States. It’s been less clear precisely how something like this would happen. But now it has.

How precisely does a civil war come about? It wouldn’t be a regional war with identifiable front lines, as was the case 160 years ago. Despite the solid blue and red maps shown on TV screens, US politics are highly polarized by region even within most states, with the division being along rural-urban, and even in some states rural/urban-urban, lines.

Something happened in Texas over this past weekend that strikes me as a clear identifier that the far right has already decided they are actively engaged in a civil war as surely as their traitor ancestors were in 1860.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott has made recent moves to try to take ddeclare Texas law superior to United States law as it regards certain aspects of patrol and enforcement along the US-Mexico border. Of course, this is primarily a political move, and well in line with his policy ever since the tree fell on him or producing performative cruelty as public policy. It’s for show. But this past weekend, the cruelty became something more than performative. It became real..

The governor’s actions assert new rights and powers are full of the potential for abuse and possible use as the leading edge of a slow motion insurrection. Things went to a new level this weekend.

On Friday night, US Border Patrol agents were denied access to a portion of the US-Mexico border along the Rio Grande in Eagle Pass, Texas. Migrants trying to cross the river were reported in distress. The access to the Eagle Pass Park along the river, a site where migrants come into the US, was denied to the Border Patrol by members of the Texas National Guard, who physically prevented Border Patrol agents from entering the park and rendering aid. A DHS spokesman told NBC News: “In responding to a distress call from the Mexican government, Border Patrol agents were physically barred by Texas officials from entering the area.”

The result was that a woman and her two children subsequently drowned.

Exactly what the Texas National Guard did to “deny access” to the park has been unreported, but the physical use of weapons cannot be ruled out. If so, this was a confrontation of armed force that is as momentous as that which occurred in Charleston Harbor in April 1961.

Allow me to remind us of the essential technical points involved here.

Constitutionally, federal law is superior to state law. It’s right there in simple-to-understand language in the US constitution. While that fact doesn’t mean federal officials can dictate what state agents can do in every case, it does mean that the authority of the US Border Patrol is superior to any authority claimed by the state of Texas and any organizational body that is a part of Texas government. There is no Texas-Mexico border. There is only the US-Mexico border. Governor Greg Abbott’s claim that he has taken control of the border through his authority to protect the state of Texas has no standing in American jurisprudence. Current law specifically recognizes issues that specifically affect transit across an international border as being a point where federal law and federal agents are supreme.

The fact that three people, two of them children, have died as a result of the actions of agents acting at the direction of Greg Abbott elevates the nature of the offense. Abbott claimed the reason he had not ordered his national guard and Texas Military Department troops to open fire on border crossers was that the Biden Administration would charge them with murder. Given the complete lack of jurisdiction in this matter by any authority of Texas, those troops are now just as guilty of murder by lack of action as if they had opened fire.

That they did so by denying the Border Patrol agents the access to that park that the law gives them is an act of insurrection against the government. Abbott has crossed the line as surely as Pierre Beauregard did when he ordered the cannons in Charleston harbor to open fire on Fort Sumter.

There is a proper response to this illegal action. It is a response that was taken by both presidents Kennedy and Johnson 60 years ago when other Unreconstructed Southern governors attempted to use their state national guard units to defy federal authority to prevent school integration.

National Guard troops can be federalized by the President, and they then take orders from the President, as commander-in-chief, rather than the governor.

President Biden must immediately federalize the Texas National Guard and order them to leave the Rio Grand border region. He must order them to arrest those members of the Texas Military Department who attempt to remain there in illegal usurpation of federal authority, as certainly as the Mississippi National Guard was ordered to arrest any Mississippi agent who attempted to prevent the desegregation of the University of Mississippi, or the Alabama National Guard was ordered to arrest anyone attempting to carry out Governor George Wallace’s illegal, unconstitutional orders and to remove the governor from “standing in the schoolhouse door.”

This act of insurrection by the seditionist governor of Texas is the leading edge of far more dangerous actions and t he rest of the Unreconstructed Confederate traitors of the South are proposing. This little antic led directly to the deaths of three people; Biden would be within his authority to order the federalized Texas National Guard to arrest Abbott if he did not desist his illegal action.

This action is all the more fraught because there is a real possibility of a reelected President Trump nationalizing state national guards with the far darker motives of ordering them to act to enforce his “dictator on day one” executive orders he has announced he would sign.

The White House has been under immense pressure from the MAGA Republicans to offer concessions for “controlling” the US-Mexico border. It was announced ysterday that there is now bipartisan compromise bill for changing policyt at the border that has been approved for consideration in the Senate.

In response to that news, last night House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said that bill is DOA in the House.

Mor importantly, Speaker Johnson said something far more specific and revealing. According to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News, Johnson said he would refuse to bring up the bill in the House and said further that “Congress can’t solve the border until Trump is elected or a Republican is back in the White House.”

This is an act of insurrection as clear as Abbott’s claim of authority for Texas to administer the border with Mexico.

Johnson didn’t say they won’t consider THIS bill. He said the House Republicans won’t consider ANY bill until Trump is elected. “Congress can’t solve the border until Trump is elected.” Johnson is saying openly that the House Republican won’t pass ANY bill until Trump is elected.

In other words, regardless of however out of control the Republicans claim the border is, they want to keep it that way through November in order to use it as a political issue. They are specifically rejecting out of hand ANY bipartisan deal regarding the border.

We are now in a situation where a relatively significant chunk of House Republicans, given that their extremely slim majority is getting slimmer all the time, will not accept anything that deviates from their DOA “border reform” bill. A Republican Party in which power, divorced of any animating policy aims, is stating it will not engage in the normal action of a normal political party charged with leading government in the House of Representatives. Instead, spectacle, the flexing of political muscle in reflexive opposition to any action by the Senate or the White House, and - most importantly - “owning the libs,” is their “policy.”

This action not only takes a position of no compromise on this bill, it makes compromise with Democrats on any issue a capital crime. Just as the Southern slave power - faced with the fact it had lost its governing majority in the election of 1860 - took action to illegally foment rebellion against the national government, the New Confederacy of the modern Republican Party has just declared itself in rebellion against the legitimate action of the national government now.

The politics of resentment that have taken over the Republican Party since Richard Nixon invited the Unreconstructed Confederacy to join the party 50 year ago has now overwhelmed any kind of coherent policy agenda. This is the exercise of power in society, of power for power’s sake, a willing, purposeful breaking of the legislature in performance of that power as surely as was the decision by the Southern enslavers to destroy a government they could not control in 1860.

The extensiveness of the policy rot in the party is perhaps even clearer on the state level, where getting control, holding onto it and quashing anyone who objects always justify the means.

The Repubican Party is no longer an organized political party as that term is understood in our democratic constitutional republic. They are the Party of Rebellion, completely lacking any coherent worldview, where the only goal is to bend the knee to the would-be dictator Trump in the service of overthrowing the government as organized under the Constitution.

There are now two political parties in this country: the party of democratic, constitutional government, and the party of unconstitutional sedition.

Let’s see how far the over-educated, under-intelligent, otherwise-unemployables of the DC Press Corpse have their heads up their ass when confronted by active, actual rebellion of the kind that leads to the civil war they claim to be so concerned about. How far are they going to go in telling us that the problem is not that the Republican Party is now the party of rebellion and insurrection, but that Joe Biden is at fault for failing to recognize the “legitimate concerns” of the rebels.

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