An IEB op-ed — by Greg F.
What is going to happen to the United States if we are unable to stop the full-scale right wing takeover and mass purges? Our expectations of what is normal democratic governance are no longer operative at the national level. Many politicians and many people have not awakened to this fact yet — and millions are in the thrall of Fox News and worse propaganda. Trump‘s cabinet nominees, Elon Musk taking over the Treasury and other federal departments, and the Republican Party’s full complicity are enabling this to happen. These are clear indications that everything that we have previously assumed to be true of our democracy has changed irrevocably. Our elected representatives have failed us by and large, the Supreme Court is corrupted, and the mainstream corporate media have been neutered.
This is an extreme crisis, a very dangerous period of time. We are no longer operating within the constitutional framework that has been handed down to us, that has evolved through great struggles over the many years that the United States has existed.
So, where do we go??
One possibility to watch, as this crisis develops, is that the many (primarily Democratic) states who do not agree with this executive coup and do not want to be subject to dictatorial rule — including California, Illinois, New York, Oregon, Washington, Maryland, the New England states — may form some form of interstate compact to safeguard the constitutional order.
As a federal republic, residents of all of the states are fully integrated into the operations of the federal government. While each state has a certain amount of sovereignty, they also maintain many connections to the federal government and are constrained by these connections. When federal laws conflict with state laws, federal laws preempt state laws. Everybody pays federal taxes, we use the Postal Service, and we have many other sources of national funding. We have a military, we have veterans, labor and education departments, research funding, healthcare, roads and critical infrastructure, student loans, business and housing loans, weather forecasting, disaster relief and many other things that are federally operated. We are deeply entangled in the national political and economic web.
To oppose the authoritarian regime in Washington, we may need to increase the sovereignty of these states. This may become an absolutely necessity — to create a bulwark to protect basic human rights and democratic freedoms — as the federal government, now captive to oligarchs, rampages against vulnerable populations and attacks the rights of the people, steals their wealth, erects a fascist state religion masquerading as Christianity, and instigates wars against our allies.
Some form of interstate compact would serve as a counter-measure to what Trump is doing — so as to preserve the cause of helping the American people, at least in the Democratic-controlled states in the compact. It would be in sharp contrast to the largely Republican MAGA-controlled states that are denying basic human rights, failing to protect the environments and obliterating all checks and balances on the oligarchs who are stealing our people‘s wealth and ripping peaceful immigrants from our communities.
Some major split seems to be increasingly likely at this point. The question is: What are the states that have Democratic-controlled governments going to do? And what are we going to do within our communities, wherever we live? We would not want to abandon our fellow Americans living under Republican domination. Can we better serve all of the American people as a separate entity — or should we stay together? I don’t have answers yet — but I’m asking questions that are already on the many of minds of many of us.
