Not a Nation of Laws but a Confederacy of Carbuncles
If facts mattered, we’d live in a very different world.
By Jeffrey Dorchen
‘Member moral clarity? That was pretty dope.
I’m not sure how, but Steve Bannon – after whom, for some reason, Phillip Roth named his novel, The Human Stain – managed to push his foul breath through the festering cluster of cold sores he calls a mouth to form words to the effect of: “We’ll have ICE at the polls.”
He wasn’t talking about the North and South Poles. Ice at those poles is under attack as if it were doing South and Central American Death Squad style disappearances on the streets of Minneapolis. No, he intended to make people afraid to vote this coming November, which otherwise promises to be a massive midterm slaughter of MAGA due to their miserable mismanagement of federal, state, and local institutions, and their obese thievery of public monies for the benefit of their child-rape-purveying billionaire paymaster.
The specific people Human[1] Stain means to intimidate with his pus-flecked blather are people who have either immigrated to the United States or somehow vaguely resemble such people to the heavy-lidded eye of an undiscerning, dull-witted, mouth-breathing, masked, Kevlar-bundled, camo-bedecked, federally deputized thug. A little camo Kevlar bundle of boneheaded thug. These are the vigilant centurions reenacting Nazi or Stalinist or Peronist or Khmer Rouge-like abductions in neighborhoods in primarily blue cities. And their targets are rarely if ever legitimate, and never those actually responsible for the dysfunctional fecal-ball fight that is our broken society.
Steve Bannon styles himself some kind of Leninist, if you can call skin blemish constellations a style, and if by Leninist you mean the policy apparatus that put down popular left-anarchist uprisings against the authoritarian vanguard in post-revolutionary 1920s Russia. Mister Vladimir Blemish – Premier Vladimir Ill-Itch Blemish – wants to make anyone who could be taken for a person of foreign birth think twice before going to a polling place to cast their vote in the aforementioned expected massacre of MAGA this coming November.
United States Criminal Code, Title 18 – Crimes and criminal procedure, chapter 29, Elections and political activities, section 592, Troops at polls, finalized in 1948, though codified from various previous US laws dating back at least a century and change, makes it a crime punishable by 5 years in prison, and/or a fine, but also a ban on serving in public office, for anyone in civilian or military authority to deploy troops to voting places. So what Bannon suggests is –no surprise – against well-established federal law.
Bannon is a notorious criminal, like his favorite president, and the only reason he isn’t in prison now is a presidential pardon. Yes, like many a violent felon, embezzler, Ponzi schemer, drug lord, rapist, or rape victim procurer and trafficker, he was set free after having been convicted of his crimes by a jury. Trump isn’t the only president who’s contrived such ill-advised liberations, but he definitely holds the quantitative record, outstripping the rest of the pack by several orders of magnitude.
18 U.S. Code § 592 reads thus: “Whoever, being an officer of the Army or Navy, or other person in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States, orders, brings, keeps, or has under his authority or control any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both; and be disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust under the United States.
“This section shall not prevent any officer or member of the armed forces of the United States from exercising the right of suffrage in any election district to which he may belong, if otherwise qualified according to the laws of the State in which he offers to vote.”
The word “any” is doing the job of a supporting wall in this particular regulatory edifice. Hell, it begins with “whoever,” which is merely a personal pronoun form of “anybody.” Likewise with “or other.” “Whoever, being an officer of the Army or Navy, or other person in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States…” Whoever. Anybody in military or civil office. Get it?
Anybody in office, whether drain commissioner or President, who “orders, brings, keeps, or has under his authority or control…” something. What? Machines? Animals? Foodstuffs? Croquet attire? No, “any troops or armed men.” Federal troops? No, “any troops.” Uniformed troops? “Any troops or armed men.” A posse. A mob of Israeli soccer hooligans waving schnitzels. A phalanx of Gordon Ramseys in high dudgeon wielding spatulas. “Any troops or armed men.” I suppose a kindergarten originalist like Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito would disqualify a throng of armed women, such as, hypothetically, their wives carrying Gadsden flags on pikes. “Any.” It’s so simple, even the meth-addled right-wingers on the SCOTUS couldn’t misinterpret it without drenching their robes in perjury-sweat.
Any official — civil or military — who incites any type of armed mob. Any official who orders or authorizes any official or unofficial team. Anyone causing armed troops to go to a polling place unless to repel an armed invasion. Armed invasion, so that can’t even be creatively interpreted to mean hijab-wearing fashionistas with chunky handbags and otherwise unarmed. Armed invasion, okay, but that’s it.
Of course, Bannon is just flooding the zone with Hershey slurry, as is his avowed way, as is the avowed way of everyone in or supporting the current regime. And, laws or no laws, we all know that legality and the constitution mean nothing to this regime, even when one or more of them quotes one of the items in the Bill of Rights the way they might twist a Bible verse to their own sick, arcane purposes.
Jeff Dorchen is an LA based writer, co-founder of Chicago's Theater Oobleck, contributor to the This Is Hell! radio show/podcast, with writings at Right Twice A Day.