Marjorie Taylor Greene Should Go

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, April 24, 2022

 

Item 1: Marjorie Taylor Greene, the ghastly cretin who inexplicably has been foisted upon this besieged republic by the people of northwestern Georgia, is the sort of self-serving malicious dunce who should be kept as far away from political power as possible.

 

Item 2: What occurred at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was part of an attempted coup d’état — the less important part; the important part was the effort the lawyers were in charge of — by means of which Donald Trump and his cronies intended to overthrow the government of the United States, nullifying the 2020 presidential election and illegitimately installing Trump in the White House after he lost to Joe Biden.

 

Item 3: Items 1 and 2 do not work together quite the way some people would like for them to.

Representative Greene is the subject of an effort to have her disqualified from running for reelection on grounds found in the 14th Amendment, which allows for such disqualification of candidates who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States or who have “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” I do not doubt that Representative Greene is morally disqualified from office, but the question in front of us is a legal one — and we cannot defend the rule of law by abandoning the rule of law.

 

Was the January 6 sacking of the Capitol an insurrection? In the common sense, yes. But there is less of a case that it constitutes an insurrection legally — or, rather, less of a case that this has been established legally.

 

The United States has a federal insurrection statute, and no one involved in the events of January 6 has been charged under it. They have been charged with assault, trespassing, unlawful possession of firearms, theft of government property, and many other things along those lines, instead. In my view, there are very good grounds for treating January 6 as an insurrection under the law — but, apparently, President Joe Biden’s Justice Department does not see things that way. It is very difficult to argue that as a legal matter Representative Greene should be barred from seeking reelection because of her involvement in a crime that — as far as the Department of Justice is concerned — never took place.

 

To my mind, the American criminal trial is one of the human race’s great achievements. It is the gold standard. It is up there with the Bill of Rights when it comes to enshrining the rights and the value of the individual in his relations with the state. This is a remarkable thing that should be treasured, even when it works to the benefit of such a shabby grifter as Marjorie Taylor Greene. If we want to bar Greene from seeking reelection on the grounds that she has participated in an insurrection, then we should charge her under the relevant statute and convict her — or, at the very least, charge somebody. As things stands, not only has Representative Greene not been charged with insurrection, nobody else has, either.

 

The closest we have come to an insurrection case is charging a handful of Oath Keepers with seditious conspiracy. (My friend and National Review colleague Andrew C. McCarthy, who tried this country’s last successful major seditious-conspiracy case, believes that this is the wrong charge. I often disagree with him, but his opinion in such matters is not to be discounted lightly.) They may or may not be convicted on that charge, but it has not even been alleged, much less proven to the satisfaction of a court of law, that Representative Greene was involved in that.

 

This is an ongoing problem in our politics. The American system makes it very difficult to do some things, such as amending the Constitution or impeaching a malevolent officeholder. And so, rather than undertake the hard work of doing hard things, we look for shortcuts. There are many examples of this; an illustrative one is the effort of gun-control advocates to bar American citizens from purchasing firearms if their name appears on a no-fly list or some similar government blacklist, a dishonest and unconstitutional maneuver that would strip Americans of a right explicitly granted by the Constitution without due process — without any process at all. It would be a supreme irony if we took the radical step of interfering with one election in order to defend the integrity of a different election without cleaving tightly to the rule of law as though our national political life depended on it — which it assuredly does.

 

It is still more ironic that what the activists seeking to have Representative Greene disqualified are doing is the mirror image of what Trump and his cronies tried to do: They are putting forward a flimsy and not especially credible legal pretext in the hopes that political sympathizers in a position of power will give them the victory that they have so far failed to win at the ballot box.

 

U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg was right to allow the case against Representative Greene to proceed, because the case Greene and her lawyers made for dismissing it was — this will not surprise anybody who has followed her career — so imbecilic and incompetently conceived that it would be comical were the context not so serious.

 

But on the merits, the case ultimately should be rejected, because it has no firm legal basis.

 

The case does have a very strong political and moral basis. And it could have a legal basis, too, if anybody would bother trying to establish one. So, either charge Marjorie Taylor Greene under the federal insurrection law — or at least start treating January 6 as an insurrection as a matter of law — or defeat her at the polls. The last thing this country needs is another disreputable, sneaky, underhanded, pretextual legal case. The end is a worthy one, but the means would be corrupting.

 

If it were up to me, the federal government would be obliged to buy up real estate all over Leavenworth, Kan., to accommodate all the miscreants involved in this shameful episode. But Attorney General Merrick Garland is, not to put too fine a point on it, a coward who is not up to the job.

 

If we had functioning political parties — and if the Republican Party a.d. 2022 were not the yellowest, most timorous, most gutless, grasping, worthless, indefensible, and chickensh** political organ the world had ever seen — then Representative Greene might be dealt with at the party level. (Given the practical alternatives, that old “smoke-filled room” is starting to look pretty good.) As it stands, the GOP is entirely incapable of taking a stand even for its own long-term partisan interests, with the top party chieftains believing that a big win in November will allow them to brazen it out and memory-hole the role of its leading figures in Donald Trump’s attempted coup d’état.

 

What that means is that this one is on you, people of Georgia’s 14th District. Marjorie Taylor Greene should be removed from office in the regular and lawful way: by voting her sorry ass out of there. The country is counting on your patriotism and your self-respect. Don’t let us down.