Terrorism

2020 Election, Politics, Terrorism

The GOP’s White Supremacy/Militia Problem…

Posted on by mjohnson

You can be forgiven if you missed a story a few weeks back that in more normal times would have received a great deal more attention. The details seem particularly important in Idaho and in the Pacific Northwest, but certainly no political figure in Idaho – or the region for that matter – has been drawing attention to the testimony of FBI director Christopher Wray. 

“Racially motivated violent extremism,” mostly from white supremacists, constitutes a majority of domestic terrorism threats, Wray testified before the House Homeland Security Committee on September 17. The FBI director also said, “We certainly have seen very active — very active — efforts by the Russians to influence our election in 2020,” specifically “to both sow divisiveness and discord, and I think the intelligence community has assessed this publicly, to primarily to denigrate Vice President Biden in what the Russians see as a kind of an anti-Russian establishment.”

The Wolverine Watchmen arrest in Michigan in an alleged plot to kidnap and try for treason Governor Gretchen Whitmer

So, the Russians are doing it again, according to the Donald Trump appointed FBI director, and violence from white supremacist groups is the most serious domestic terrorism threat. 

A few days after Wray’s testimony, and after a whistle blower complaint alleged an effort to cover up another assessment of the danger of white supremacist violence, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released its own threat assessment. “I am particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years,” said acting DHS director Chad Wolf. 

Because Idaho, and the Pacific Northwest more generally, has a particularly long and ugly history dealing with white supremacy let’s focus on what the FBI and DHS say is the single biggest threat when it comes to domestic terrorism – radicalized white guys with guns.

As Seattle journalist Knute Berger wrote more than two years ago in Seattle Magazine: “The Pacific Northwest has long been a sought-after enclave for people with extreme views and utopian, or dystopian, fantasies. On the far right this has included wannabe Nazis, dating back at least to the 1930s, when fascist William Dudley Pelley of the so-called Silver Shirts declared himself America’s Hitler and ran a campaign for president from Seattle in 1936. In the ’80s and ’90s, the Nazi presence emerged with various groups in Washington and what some dubbed ‘the Fourth Reich of Idaho.’”

Most in Idaho celebrated twenty years ago when the neo-Nazi Aryan Nation’s lost a multi-million-dollar jury trial and ended up in bankruptcy. The Coeur d’Alene Press celebrated the outcome as a “victory for justice” that “corrected the misconceptions about Idaho and its people,” but that assessment now seems outdated, if not flat wrong. 

Far right agitator Ammon Bundy who led an armed takeover of a federal facility in eastern Oregon now roams Idaho at will, enjoying support from elected Republican officeholders. Bundy and some of his followers went armed recently to the Idaho Statehouse to intimidate and disrupt lawmakers. They caused physical damage but received only mild rebukes.

In August the Idaho Statesman published a long piece based on “interviews, acquired emails and letters, and a review of social media profiles” documenting the ties of various Idaho GOP elected officials “to groups like the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers and the American Redoubt movement.” The newspaper noted that “Tom Luna, chairman of the Idaho Republican Party, did not respond to requests for comment, nor did many elected officials whose ties to militia groups or extremist ideologies” who were mentioned in the story. 

Washington state representative Matt Shea, a Spokane Valley Republican and a leader in the so called Patriot Movement who has his own ties to Idaho Republicans, eventually decided not to seek re-election this year after it was disclosed that he “planned, engaged in and promoted a total of three armed conflicts of political violence against the United States Government in three states outside the state of Washington over a three-year period.” 

Former Washington state Representative Matt Shea and some of his followers

Now comes news that a militant group – the Wolverine Watchmen – plotted to kidnap and try for treason the governors of Michigan and Virginia. The FBI broke up the plot and indicted six men. “The Wolverine Watchmen are not a Second Amendment militia or constitutional patriots in any sense of the word,” says John E. Finn, an emeritus professor at Wesleyan University who has studied these groups. “If they are guilty of the charges brought against them, then they are terrorists.” 

It requires minimal dot connecting to trace the arc of presidential pronouncements – “You also had some very fine people on both sides,” Donald Trump said after the white supremacy march and deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 – to the vast increase in right wing and often white supremacist violence. The president has also repeatedly vilified Muslims and people of color, including many elected officials.

You have to wonder why it’s become so difficult for Republican elected officials to connect these dots and avoid the “both sides” whataboutism argument about these threats to democracy and order. Idaho congressman Mike Simpson fell down this rabbit hole this week in an interview with Idaho Public Television’s Marcia Franklin. 

Do you condemn white supremacy, Franklin asked Simpson? “Absolutely, absolutely,” he said, before instantly pivoting to a full-on attack on the Black Lives Matter movement and “these people” who “are out burning down our cities and stuff, that’s a problem.” 

It’s possible, indeed intellectually honest, as Simpson must know to condemn the senseless property damage of protests in Portland and elsewhere and still acknowledge that there is a profound and long overdue racial reckoning taking place in the United States. You can condemn violence, including white supremacist and “militia” violence, and still believe that racism must be addressed. No once, even in passing, did Simpson make the connection. 

Franklin twice asked the 22-year House member if it was possible Donald Trump had contributed to “this type of rhetoric and behavior.” Simpson, with more than a minor pained expression on his face, said, “I don’t think he is.” 

Then he again immediately shifted to Trumpian talking points, amplified a Fox News conspiracy theory and mispronounced the name of the woman of color running for vice president. 

“I think what emboldens these people is when they get arrested and then you have the potential vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, and her, some of her campaign staff putting, and encouraging other people to put funds into a fund to bail these people out that are out burning down out cities, and stuff, that what encourages these people. You have to stand up to these people.” 

For the record that is a gross misrepresentation of Harris’s action, but the real point is you have to stand up to these people – unfortunately these days that means a Republican like Congressman Simpson.  

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Additional Reading:

A few stories I’ve found of interest this week…

How Dr. Birx Screwed up the CDC

Science magazine had a detailed story this week about how Dr. Deborah Birx, the head of the White House task force charged with leading the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, undercut the work of the scientists at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

President Donald Trump watches Dr. Deborah Birx address a news conference at the White House in Washington, Tuesday, March 17, 2020. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

I know it’s a lot to ask, but it would be nice if someone in at the highest levels of the federal government really had a plan to get us through this crisis.

“When Birx, a physician with a background in HIV/AIDS research, was named coordinator of the task force in February, she was widely praised as a tough, indefatigable manager and a voice of data-driven reason. But some of her actions have undermined the effectiveness of the world’s preeminent public health agency, according to a Science investigation. Interviews with nine current CDC employees, several of them senior agency leaders, and 20 former agency leaders and public health experts—as well as a review of more than 100 official emails, memos, and other documents—suggest Birx’s hospital data takeover fits a pattern in which she opposed CDC guidance, sometimes promoting President Donald Trump’s policies or views against scientific consensus.”

Here’s a link to the piece.

Can We Do Nuclear?

Do you believe the climate is changing? That fossil fuels contribute? What do we do to power a modern industrial economy and still respond effectively to the climate crisis?

Many people are saying, even some environmentalists, that we must double down on nuclear power. But, what about the waste? What about the dangers?

“If we cannot make headway on nuclear power — and do so democratically — there would seem to be little hope for similarly complex challenges: climate change, artificial intelligence, collapsing biodiversity, sending humans to Mars. We must end the nuclear stalemate. Whether we can is a crucial test for democracy, and for humanity.”

A provocative read here.

Black Swans, Slim Chances, and the 2020 Presidential Election

An always worthwhile read from Rebecca Solnit.

“The tricky thing about hope is to not confuse it with optimism. Optimism is confidence that you know the future and it requires nothing of you. It’s a mirror image of pessimism, which likewise assumes it knows the future, only pessimism’s future is dismal and not up to us either. Hope is a sense of possibility within the uncertainty of a future that does not yet exist, but that we are making by our actions (and yeah, those we loathe and oppose are making by theirs: case study, the ramming through of Amy Coney Barrett’s supreme court nomination and all that voter suppression).”

Read the entire piece.

Thanks for following along here. Be well.

Al Gore, Baseball, Politics, September 11, Terrorism, Vice Presidents

Isn’t It Rich

Posted on by christian

Al Gore, the former vice president who but for the vote of one Supreme Court Justice would have captured the American presidency in 2000, is now “Romney rich,” so dubbed by Bloomberg News. Losing the White House does have its upside, I guess.

Bloomberg estimates that Gore may now be worth $200 million after selling his 20% share of the not very successful Current cable TV operation to Qatari-owned Al Jazeera for a cool $70 million. (Apparently a Gore strange bedfellow, Rupert Murdoch,  actually helped ensure that Al would get his big pay day by guaranteeing that Current would, despite awful ratings, stay on Murdoch’s DircTV,  a decision estimated to have been worth $200 million. Wouldn’t you like to have heard that conversation?)

Gore also made what appears to be a $30 million haul by exercising options on the Apple stock he accumulated while serving on the tech giant’s corporate board. “That’s a pretty good January for a guy who couldn’t yet call himself a multimillionaire [based on 1999 and 2000 disclosure forms] when he briefly slipped from public life after his bitterly contested presidential election loss to George W. Bush in late 2000,” writes Ken Wells and Ari Levy of Bloomberg.

Goodness knows I don’t begrudge a big pay day for a Democrat – or Republican or Libertarian, for that matter – although the stock options that Fortune 500 companies lavish on very part time and mostly very disengaged directors is one of the dirty little scandals of American capitalism. And come to think if it shouldn’t every liberal activist aspire to have Rupert Murdoch’s ear for heaven’s sake? Rather what has always bothered me about Al Gore, and this I suspect will be the flavor of the reporting on his vast new wealth, is that he has always struck me as being one of those people in public life who is not comfortable in his own skin. He is not exactly what he appears to be and what he appears to be is, well, confusing. Begging the question then – who the heck is this guy?

Is he the climate change crusader who shared a Nobel Prize for focusing attention on that issue? Or is he a big-time Silicon Valley communication and high tech wheeler-dealer who can romance the California corporate crowd and Rupert Murdoch? Or is he the guy who once and very questionably raised campaign money at a Buddist Temple, but now says “our democracy” has been hijacked by big and secret money? And what about the big houses and bigger carbon footprint? And did you, a guy passionate about global climate matters, really need to sell your TV network to a bunch of oil-rich princes in the Middle East?

In their wonderful little book The Prince of Tennessee – subtitled “The Rise of Al Gore” – writers David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima detail young Al Gore’s early days as the son of a Senator – Albert Gore, Sr. – who spent many of his formidable years growing up in Suite 809 atop the Fairfax Hotel on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C.   Today the hotel’s website touts the place’s history. “Prominent tenants included a young Al Gore, Jr., Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge, Admiral and Mrs. Chester William Nimitz, and Senator John L. McClellan. A young George H. Bush and his parents, Senator and Mrs. Prescott Bush, also made The Fairfax their home when in town.”

“If this experience made him different from you and me, to borrow F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phrase, it was not from being rich, but rather from being apart,” Maraniss and Nakashima wrote in their book published in 2000. “[Gore] grew up in a singularly odd world of old people and bellhops, separated from the child-filled neighborhoods of his classmates at St. Albans and further still from his summertime pals at the family farm in Tennessee.”

Gore’s only sibling, sister Nancy, was a decade older and Al grew up mainly with himself. It doesn’t take a Fitzgerald-like imagination to picture the young Al reserved and proper, typically hanging around not with his teenage friends, but with the old and stuffy Senate friends of his parents. On such occasions you’ll not be surprised to know that Gore was described as “a perfect gentleman.”

The description of Gore in The Prince of Tennessee, which I suspect will be the best insight we’ll ever have to the man who came so close to being president, is of a “serious and earnest” guy “always striving to do right, but at times [revealing] flashes of a more complicated struggle within, his stoic front masking a hidden artistry, sarcasm, and loneliness.”

In a lengthy profile in the current New York Magazine Gore is described as having been devastated by his lost in 200o to George W. Bush.  “For two and a half decades, he was on a trajectory that was supposed to end in the presidency,” according to Carter Eskew one of his closest advisers. Now Gore awkwardly attempts to hide what must be the lingering hurt and regret with a throw away line that, when delivered in his stiff and not quite believable way, sounds rehearsed as if it had been tested in a focus group. “I used to be the next president of the United States,” he says always followed by a laugh.

With that line everyone thinks Gore is referring to his less than 600 vote loss of Florida and the White House 13 years ago, a loss ratified by five votes out of nine on the Supreme Court, but one wonders if he wasn’t also thinking of his first campaign for president in 1988. Unprepared, unimpressive and uninteresting in the first go round, I’ve always thought it was interesting that the young Senator from Tennessee wasn’t an important or compelling enough character to be featured in what is now widely considered the best campaign book ever written – the late Richard Ben Cramer’s classic What It Takes. Perhaps Cramer concluded that compared to his nuanced and broadly sympathetic treatment of Bush Senior, Bob Dole, Mike Dukakis, Joe Biden, Dick Gephardt and Gary Hart, that Al Gore just didn’t have what it takes. Speaking of strange bedfellows, remember that current Texas Gov. Rick Perry endorsed Gore in his 1988 race for the White House. You can look it up.

It is a rich irony that Gore got to the White House, as close as he would come anyway, thanks to the endlessly interesting and frequently bigger than life Bill Clinton, who picked him as his running mate and was always too comfortable in his skin. Gore, to the astonishment of most political pros, almost completely shunned Bubba when it fell his turn to seek the presidency, but that is political psychoanalysis for another day.

One gets the soft focus impression that Al Gore feels he no longer needs to explain himself even if he could. But in fairness to the man without a shadow, who do you know who is worth $200 million who worries about what others think of them or feels compelled to explain? He’s reached the point where money makes explaining unnecessary and unimportant. Gore, once so close to the ultimate brass ring, has come full circle. He really is different from you and me and always has been. Now he doesn’t have to be anything but different. When running for public office he tried out a variety of roles – New South populist, then New Democrat moderate and in his campaign against Bush a fire-eating, class warfare espousing champion of the little guy. None of the roles was entirely believable because the actor wasn’t convincing. John Wayne and Bogart were comfortable in their skin. Not everyone is.

In thinking about Al Gore, the new multimillionaire packing around a bundle of contradictions inside his checkbook, it’s tempting to recall the last line from Fitzgerald’s best book because there is a quality to Gore that indeed seems “borne back ceaselessly into the past,” a past that was never quite real and now is never over.

Yet, the better Fitzgerald line is this one from Gatsby and you can almost hear the man who once was “the next president of the United States” say it: “You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”

 

Intelligence, Oil Spill, September 11, Terrorism

KSM’s Circus

Posted on by christian

Justice or a Show Trial?

Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s attorney has his hands full.

Idahoans who know Boise criminal defense attorney David Nevin, a quiet, well-spoken, extremely thoughtful fellow, will instantly identify with the challenges he confronts in a courtroom in Cuba as he attempts to mount a defense for the world’s most notorious terror suspect. Nevin, a University of Idaho law grad, would be the first to acknowledge that the sense of fairness that is supposed to be at the heart of our adversary-based judicial system, coupled with a commitment to the “rule of law,” is at the very core of what Americans mean when they think about the concept of justice.

Yet, the circus-like atmosphere that prevailed last Saturday during the long awaited arraignment of KSM and three other defendants seems to have little to do with the American system. “The system is a rigged game to prevent us from doing our jobs,” Nevin complained at the end of the 13 hour proceeding last weekend conducted before the military commission that will, probably years from now, put Khalid Sheik Mohammed on trial.

Specifically, attorneys for the terror suspects can’t have anything like a normal attorney-client relationship with the men they are supposed to be representing. Everything that KSM says, even to his lawyer, is apparently being considered by the government to be a state secret. And torture, specifically the allegation confirmed by the CIA that KSM was waterboarded 183 times, and that torture may have led to a confession is, so far, off-limits in the proceedings.

“The government wants to kill Mr. Mohammed to extinguish the last eyewitness to his torture,” Nevin said, as reported by McClatchy’s Carol Rosenberg.

Nevin is living out the highest calling of the American criminal justice system; the notion that everyone – even the man accused of plotting to bring down the twin towers – deserves a fair trial, a chance to hear all the evidence against him and to introduce evidence, including evidence of torture, if it may help his defense. The trouble for Nevin is simply that he’s been asked to supply an adequate defense for his client in an environment of secrecy and possible torture, while the awful wounds of 9-11 still haven’t begun to heal.

Here’s the real rub: the government of the United States wants to bring these guys to justice – we all do – but for largely political reasons has determined it cannot trust the normal, open American judicial process to work as it should. A decision by Attorney General Eric Holder to conduct the legal proceedings in a New York federal courtroom ignited a firestorm of protest, the Congress got involved and the Obama Justice Department backed down. The military commission with its secrecy, determination to protect “state secrets” and Kafkaesque rules is now what David Nevin and the other lawyers at Gitmo must deal with.

One of the toughest critics of the Gitmo process is the now-retired Air Force Colonel and one-time terrorist case prosecutor, Morris Davis, who resigned his commission and retired rather than go along with a Pentagon ruling that waterboarding was permissible in dealing with terror suspects.

“After a decade of starts and stops and revisions and failures, the system is already presumptively discredited,” Davis said in an interview recently with the Los Angeles Times. “That the apologists for the commissions say they are essentially the same, or virtually the same, or nearly the same as federal court — the fact that they have to put a qualifier on it proves it is not the same.”

Davis predicts that KSM will eventually be executed, a martyr’s death he wants, after wringing the maximum propoganda value from the proceedings. “If we execute him, we will be giving him exactly what he wants,” Davis said.

Our government’s zeal to protect secrets almost always leads to bad outcomes. The desire to protect the secrets tends to pervert the very process that the secret allegedly protects. In the Gitmo cases, the most likey outcome is conviction of KSM and the others for the unspeakable crimes of September 11, 2001 and, while that might feel like justice it also might look to the rest of the world as an outcome derived by means of a distorted and unfair process.

The fundamental strength of the United States, including a justice system that has rules, procedures and methods to protect even the guilty, ends up looking to our enemies like an updated Stalin-era show trial. If the 9-11 mastermind is guilty – and I have no doubt he is – then show the world the evidence in open court. Try him as the suspected criminal he is, not some super human hoarding great secrets, and use the strength of the American justice system to show just what kind of man he is.

We must have a system of justice that is better than those individuals to whom we apply it. It’s doubtful these commissions will pass the test of history and let’s hope we don’t regret that failure to live up to our own best standards.

 

American Presidents, Obama, Oil Spill, Terrorism

Slippery Slope

Posted on by christian

The Ultimate Act of the Imperial Presidency

At least since 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt actually suggested in his first inaugural address that he might need to ask Congress for what he termed “broad Executive power to wage a war”  in order to respond to the economic ravages of the Great Depression, every president – every president – has sought to expand, and has expanded, the authority of the nation’s Chief Magistrate. FDR’s critics suggested he really wanted dictatorial powers or, seemingly more benignly, a vast concentration of power in the hands of the president.

In terms of threats to the Republic and erosion of the basic strengths of the founding document, the steady, unchecked expansion of presidential power dwarfs any other complaint the Tea Party or anyone else has about the country slipping from its Constitutional moorings.

While the impact of Roosevelt’s accumulation of presidential power is still widely debated – it’s clear FDR stopped short of becoming a dictator – there is no doubt the modern presidency vastly expanded in scope from what the founders envisioned during his presidency. FDR set the country, and the White House, on the course to what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. came to call “the imperial presidency.” There has been little let up since.

Harry Truman in 1952 nationalized the steel industry, or tried to, and Dwight Eisenhower planned and John Kennedy implemented, in perfect hindsight, a crazy plan to invade Cuba.

Lyndon Johnson put the patina of legality on the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964 that gave him license to expand the American war in Indochina with a formal declaration of war. As we now know the resolution provided the Executive Branch with a “legal” fig leaf to expand the war on LBJ’s own motion, which, of course, he did. It’s worth noting that this particular expansion of presidential power took place during an election campaign.

Later in the 1960’s, Richard Nixon expanded that awful war into Cambodia and attempted to do it secretly. Ronald Reagan traded arms for hostages, secretly in the 1980’s. George W. Bush, history will record, used the full and always expanding power of the Executive Branch – including cherry-picking intelligence – to make the case for the invasion of Iraq. The march goes on.

Mostly lost in the daily drama of the Republican presidential campaign, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and the on-going economic slump is what may turn out to be one of the most profound expansions of presidential power ever.

On October 14, 2011, the President of the United States of America authorized an unmanned drone strike designed to kill an American citizen living in Yemen. It worked. New Mexico-born Anwar al-Awlaki, usually described as a radical Muslim cleric, died in the strike in a remote corner of the Middle East along with several other alleged Al Quada operatives. Killed along with the cleric was his Denver-born teenage son, 16-year-old Abdulrahman bin Anwar Al Awlaki.

The Obama Administration has justified the killing of U.S. citizens – the real target was the elder al-Awlaki – by producing a still secret legal memorandum that was detailed, to some degree, in a New York Times article on October 8.

The Times reporting noted: “The secret document provided the justification for acting despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis. The memo, however, was narrowly drawn to the specifics of Mr. Awlaki’s case and did not establish a broad new legal doctrine to permit the targeted killing of any Americans believed to pose a terrorist threat.”

Narrowly drawn. Just broad enough to justify, with no formal legal process, no second opinion, no public accounting and in apparent violation of exisitng law, the killing of an American citizen.

The Times noted in a subsequent editorial that the Obama Administration has refused to release the legal analysis or even admit on the record that the analysis exists. There is no information available on how the administration chose the target or why.

OK, I hear you: this guy Awlaki was holed up on Yemen plotting attacks against the United States. Apparently he couldn’t be captured. What are supposed to do – let him wander around presenting a danger to us?

Legitimate questions all that the administration should be answering, but as we prepare to grant the benefit of the doubt to the president in this dangerous times, consider this one chilling line from the Timeseditorial: “The decision to kill Mr. Awlaki was made entirely within the executive branch. The memo was not shared with Congress, nor did any independent judge or panel of judges pass judgment. The administration set aside Mr. Awlaki’s rights to due process.”

It’s been said that hard cases make bad law and this is a hard case. Awlaki was a bad guy and maybe the country is safer without him. Still the plain and honored language of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution helps define the American system of justice from so many others in the world that we rightly and regularly condemn. Amanda Knox’s experience in Italy comes immediately to mind. America, it is said, is a nation of laws. The rule of law matters. The Constitution matters.

Just to refresh your memory, the 5th says: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.’

Due process of law is a fundamental tenant of American jurisprudence. It can’t under any circumstances be simply dismissed,  and secretly so, by two lawyers writing a memo somewhere in the Executive Branch.

Gerald Ford was the first American president to explicitly say our country would not engage in assassinations. American involvement – make that leadership of – efforts to kill Fidel Castro, in part, prompted Ford’s Executive Order. The logic is pretty simple. We target someone for death and the bad guy’s friends are likely to retaliate, which is, of course, exactly what is being threatened.

Without some mechanism, outside the hands of a secret group inside the Executive Branch of the federal government, able to judge the wisdom, necessity and legality of such drastic action, we are left to entirely take the word of the president.

The framers wrote the founding document knowing that the sainted George Washington would be atop the Executive Branch of the federal government. They wrote in protections like the Fifth Amendment precisely because the American system was built on laws, not men. Even Washington’s rectitude wasn’t adequate for those founders to give too much power to any one man.

Congress is, at least in theory, a co-equal branch and should have been since the 1930’s pushing back against more and more power in the hands of the president – every president. Does anyone there care to even ask the question: can a President of the United States really order a killing without so much as even asking around?

Every expansion of presidential power beyond what the Constitution provides is another foot down on the slippery slope. That slope is steeper by the day.