Constitutional Crisis? We're in One And Have Been For Going On Half A Century

The other day I made a promise to myself that if I read someone wringing their hands over an impending "Constitutional Crisis" being officially begun when Trump fires Robert Mueller that I'd point out that our Constitution has been in crisis ever since Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon.  It was that fixture on PBS establishment political talk shows, the LA Times reporter Doyle McManus who set this piece off.

Since the criminality of Richard Nixon*, Reagan mounted Iran Contra, George H.W. Bush incited Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait so he could have what he hoped would be a politically advantageous and short little war, the Supreme Court handing his son George W. Bush the presidency as part of a putsch engineered out of the state of Florida governed by Jeb Bush and the catastrophic wars that Bush brought., now, as a result of another anti-democratic election result, we have what might be the most corrupt and criminal presidential regime of them all.

We have been in Constitutional Crisis that entire time and the real means of preventing another flare up has not been done because the Constitution and the media and the billionaire class and Republicans on the Supreme Court and in state houses and governors residences around the country would prevent the basic changes needed to prevent another.  They have not abolished the electoral college, they have not protected the integrity of elections and the equal right to vote, they have not required that the mass media - the only really effective political media, now - doesn't lie and distort and propagandize for the shadowy but real government of the billionaires.  It hasn't even been possible, in 2017, after the sordid history which has brought us here today, made it impossible for a Donald Trump and his sleazy rich lawyers to ask if he could pardon himself.

*  Remember, the Nixon crimes that are covered up, the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia and Laos, the Reagan ones of the terror campaigns in Central America he funded illegally, the most serious of crimes done by American presidents done with the military and para-military terrorists, many trained by the military in Georgia, are not to be mentioned.  No matter now many hundreds of thousands, eventually millions, die as a result.

Update:  Would you want to bet your life on today's Supreme Court NOT saying that Donald Trump has the power to pardon himself, turning the president into an absolutist monarch?  I wouldn't bet on it doing the right thing.  Not with Gorsuch having been put there by Trump, through one of the most blatant abuses of power in our history by Mitch McConnell, aided and abetted by his fellow Republicans.   I don't see much in the way of any Republican resistance to Trump, certainly nothing from the leadership in what is supposed to be a check and balance in the legislature or the Supreme Court. That's all gone to hell.

There's a reason that the really serious crimes by presidents - the invasion of Cambodia, Watergate, Iran-Contra, lying us into the invasion of Iraq with its massive cost in lives, and now the lavish corruption of the Trump regime - come regularly within Republican presidencies, it is because it has gone from a party of the center right to the party of overt fascism over the past fifty years.  It has happened here. Only, up till now, it hasn't been happening here.