Motus Mentis

Things are moving more quickly now. Let’s review the status of our three branches of government:

After Donald Trump’s shocking defeat of Hillary Clinton, the losing side has done everything in its power to delegitimize his administration — from trying to co-opt the Electoral College in the early weeks, to a ginned-up story about Russian collusion, to constant harassment and subversion by the media and the “deep state”, to invoking the 25th Amendment, to an almost-certain prospect of impeachment proceedings if the Democrats can regain control of Congress.

Meanwhile, Congress, besides delegating its legislative powers to unelected agencies for decades now, has devolved into bitter and irreconcilable factions, with a steel-cage deathmatch on every issue it considers. There is no longer any shred of comity or commonality; nothing can be done except by naked party majority. Public approval of Congress is in the teens, and sinking.

Now the battle over the Supreme Court — which has emerged, as I wrote a few days back, as the most important prize of all — has intensified to the point that a Kavanaugh seat will be considered by half the nation to be illegitimate. I have little doubt that an attempt will be made to impeach him; the topic is already in the air. Moreover, if Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court is seen as illegitimate, so will that Court’s rulings, and they will be openly defied. (After all, how many divisions does SCOTUS have, anyway?)

What this means is that all three branches of the U.S. government are approaching a simultaneous crisis. There is no higher constitutional authority to which any appeal can be made to resolve such a crisis. What then? John Locke considered this in his Second Treatise on Government:

And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment. And therefore, though the people cannot be judge, so as to have, by the constitution of that society, any superior power, to determine and give effective sentence in the case; yet they have, by a law antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men, reserved that ultimate determination to themselves which belongs to all mankind, where there lies no appeal on earth, viz. to judge, whether they have just cause to make their appeal to heaven.

The “appeal to heaven” Locke refers to is not prayer. It is war.