Jeff Sessions and Rick and Bubba's threat to the Constitution

      NPR has been solid there last several days explaining for anybody who wants to hear, the threat of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Rick and Bubba and Cliff Simms to America. But folks in your world and mine have to pay attention instead of letting the village idiot carry the ball. In my world that would mean Martha and Thomas Barksdale, Gloria Morgan, James Payton, Jeff Graves, Tara George, Susan Weaver Morgan and her Mother Peg have to be more active. They have to act on what they know in their gut is the corrosive fluids let loose by the Trump administration, some of it in the name of Jesus Christ they have blasphemed. They have to recognize the difference between Casey Mattox and Cherilynne Crowe and they have to make it plain.

      Here is some beautiful basic insight from Jeffrey Rosen this week on NPR about the aspects of the Constitution Jeff Sessions fails to understand.

     Jeff Sessions is no Frank Johnson and as Rosen says, Madison would be appalled at policy by Tweets as is the Trump mode:

    Quoting:


           What are you most concerned about constitutionally right now? You're a constitutional scholar.
ROSEN: In one sense, all the constitutional conflict is maybe bad for the country but good for constitutional debate, which is what we exist at the National Constitution Center to host, trying to create a measure of public reason and resurrect the public reason that Madison thought was necessary for public - for democracy to survive. So if you ask what I'm most concerned about, I think it would be the death of that public reason.
If we really do live in a post-fact society and if we're so much in our filter bubbles and echo chambers that citizens can't converge around a common understanding of facts, then we can't sustain the public reason and civil discourse, which includes constitutional discourse that Madison thought was necessary for the republic to survive. The framers were cynical about the future of democracy. They studied failed democracies like Greece and Rome. They read Demosthenes.
They designed a constitution on the assumption that democracy might well deteriorate into demagoguery. And they created these complicated systems in order to filter the will of the people from being directly expressed. So all of these new media technologies, the idea of presidents tweeting directly to the people would have appalled Madison, who thought that direct communication between representatives and the people was the main potential source of tyranny to be avoided.
All of these filtering mechanisms are being undermined by technology, by reforms over the years, by the growing populist forces that are sweeping the world. And maintaining these Madisonian values in the face of these populist forces is something that I think liberals and conservatives increasingly should converge around.
GROSS: When you use the word populist, what do you mean?
ROSEN: Direct expression of the people's will. So Brexit is a populist referendum. You decide a huge constitutional question with one vote. The framers would never have allowed that.
GROSS: Why not?
ROSEN: They believed that you had to filter public opinion so people had time to deliberate. Only after passing through lots of different bodies and tests and checks could representative bodies or constitutional conventions be entitled to speak in the name of we the people. The people's constitutional views are supposed to be their most thoughtful, deliberative, deeply considered views completely separate from the temporary passions of the moment that can be measured by referenda or even by ordinary laws. So the whole constitutional system is designed to avoid spot votes and quick decisions and to ensure deliberation and public reason.
GROSS: And tyranny of the majority?
ROSEN: And tyranny of the majority, absolutely. And tyranny of the minority, too. The framers are concerned both about majority and minority faction. And a faction is any group of people, whether a majority or a minority, that binds together to threaten liberty and to threaten the interests of the people. And it can be mobs online, and it can be expressed in laws. And the framers designed the system to ensure that those forms of tyranny could not survive.

    End of quote. Yesterday Sarah Posner in easily googled interview held forth on that American Bastard Steve Bannon and his seduction of the Christian right which was already fucked up. Bannon named Jeff Sessions as the founder of the Nationalist movement which placed Trump in the White House.

   Alabama is ground zero for Posner's concerns in the world of Rick and Bubba and Crawford Broadcasting, Church of the Highlands and Cliff Simms.

   Is Richard Shelby, the legend of the University of Alabama paying attention? What about Nick Saban and Greg Sankey and Paul Finebaum and Greg McElroy?

    Ive read Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land. I get it. But Donald Trump is not the remedy and the informed conversation must take hold and very soon.