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Read The Letters That Outgoing Presidents Have Written To Their Successors
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Jan 20, 2021 @17:34 PM
Ours has always been a fragile democracy all democracies are but over the last four years, its fragility has become ever more apparent by the day. You need look no further than The Atlantic s November cover story by Barton Gellman, published just yesterday: it s titled The Election That Could Break America. Fragile things can and do break, after all.
The story largely concerns one of the great hallmarks of our system of government, the peaceful transition of power from one president to the next. A hallmark though it may be, it has never been guaranteed. Our Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it, the legal scholar Lawrence Douglas writes in his book Will He Go? about the 2020 election.
The Atlantic
America’s Second-Worst Scenario
So far, cumulative acts of civic virtue have saved the republic. But the constitutional order is still in danger.
Updated at 7:18 p.m. ET on January 17, 2021.
The next time an insurgent mob arrives to sack the Capitol, if one happens to try between now and Inauguration Day, mere strength of numbers will not overwhelm the defenses. In the 10 days since the January 6 assault on Congress, the Secret Service has overseen the establishment of an instant “green zone,” fortified by eight-foot steel barriers and patrolled by some 20,000 National Guardsmen. Those are real bullets in the magazines of their Army-issued M-4 assault rifles, not at all the standard gear for maintaining civic order.
IDEAS
An Amherst professor predicted exactly how Trump would try to overturn the election. Now he fears for 2024
Lawrence Douglas says the American electoral system is still vulnerable to subversion.
By David Scharfenberg Globe Staff,Updated January 14, 2021, 2:58 a.m.
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Weâre almost there.
Democracy, it seems, has held.
But in the run-up to the election, there was real doubt about whether weâd get to this point â whether weâd manage to uphold the centuries-old tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.
Lawrence Douglas, professor of law, jurisprudence, and social thought at Amherst College, raised some of the sharpest warnings about what could go wrong.