Friends of Padre Steve’s World,
Today President Trump went on his usual manic Monday torrent of attacks on his political opponents real and imagined but today was fascinating because he accused Democrats who attended the State of the Union Address who did not applaud his during that speech of “treason.”
Now treason is an exceptionally strong charge with a very high bar of proof required to convict for it is a capital offense for which the death penalty can be applied. The charge is so severe and capable of misuse by capricious and partisan politicians that the Congress placed a definition of it in the Constitution as a wall against such accusations.
By Section 110 of Article III. of the Constitution of the United States, it is declared that:
“Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open Court. The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason.”
If the President was capable of serious philosophical, ethical, political or legal thought; or had maybe read the Constitution, the Federalist Papers or simply studied the history of the United States rather than imbibing himself on television and movie myths he might not have made this accusation. He could have done other things to malign their behavior.
He could have accused them of being petty or unbecoming, even partisan and mean. After all quite a few people in the GOP, the mainstream media, and even a couple of Democratic Senators accused them of acting petty. I even criticized them over the issue on social media because I thought they were acting too much like the Republicans did while Barak Obama was President. Thank God none of them yelled “YOU LIE!” like South Carolina Republican Congressman Joe Wilson did to President Obama in 2009 when he was addressing a joint session of Congress on Healthcare.
I mean the tradition of the members of the opposition party sitting on their hands and looking morose during the State of the Union or other joint session of Congress goes back decades with only occasional excursions into bi-partisan love-fests. Now these political love-fests usually only occur in times of national emergency and last until the crisis is over or the next election cycle, whichever comes first, which most of the time is usually the latter case.
But the President chose to accuse them of Treason, a capital crime because they didn’t at least feign adulation for him. President Trump’s actions remind me of James Madison’s words in Federalist 43 where he wrote:
“As treason may be committed against the United States the authority of the United States ought to be enabled to punish it: but as new tangled and artificial treasons have been the great engines by which violent factions, the natural offspring of free governments, have usually wreaked their alternate malignity on each other, the Convention has with great judgment opposed a barrier to this peculiar danger by inserting a Constitutional definition of the crime.”
Not clapping during a Presidential address is not a crime, neither is calling the President a liar as Joe Wilson did to President Obama in 2009. One may argue the politeness, the appropriateness, or even the classiness of such behavior, but only a man consumed with his own importance that has a very thin skin would actually speak the word Treason because he didn’t get the clap from the opposing party. After all the President was the one who dodged the draft with five deferments and later told Howard Stern that sex in the 1980’s was like Vietnam. The President told Stern: “It is a dangerous world out there. It’s scary, like Vietnam. Sort of like the Vietnam-era. personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave soldier!” How proud he was to avoid the clap back then and now he wants it from his opponents. It’s preposterous, maybe someone in his retinue should give him the clap so he’ll stop accusing opponents of the kinds of treason that Madison wrote so eloquently.
So until tomorrow,
Peace
Padre Steve+
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