The latest stories suggest that the President wants to amend the Constitution to allow a president to sue anyone he believes has insulted him. At the moment, it's not quite impossible to slander, or libel, a politician, but you have to really try. Presidents have even successfully convinced Congress to pass sedition laws in the past, though never with good results.
Of course, what Trump seems to be proposing is a little different. Sedition is normally thought of as insulting the country itself. It's a bad idea mostly because, as often as not, there's a legitimate grievance involved.
But that's not what Trump's concerned with. He seems to be more interested in getting a law that would allow government officials to sue their critics. That ability has traditionally been limited, with the limits usually extending to candidates for public office, and not just to those actually holding those offices. If it was easy to sue, Hillary Clinton would own several media outlets and the personal fortunes of half my acquaintances.
Of course, people were merely accusing her of murder, treason, and a half dozen other major crimes. Yet she never sued anyone. Accusing your political opponents of being criminals is nearly as old as the country. No one really went after Washington, but from then on presidents were targets.
Trump, on the other hand, is mostly being accused of being an idiot, or acting like a two-year-old. Not that easy to defend against when your first instinct on hearing anything negative about yourself is a twitter blast.
Back at the beginning of his first term, Barack Obama more or less put aside his Blackberry. He did, eventually, take to Twitter once that platform became available, and continues to use it. Obama's tweets, for the most part, consisted of mild national boosterism, and the occasional suggestion that the country might be better off if people would actually work together for the common good. Trump's are mostly, "I really won the popular vote," "Hillary cheated," and "I didn't do that," with a liberal leavening of "so-and-so is a bully," and "I don't care what's right, I won so I should get my way." Of course, Obama is a gentleman and Trump is Gordon Gecko, but in real estate rather than stocks.
Okay, what's this have to do with being right? In Returning, sometime in 2019, enough states are conned into passing "convention of the states" resolutions to convene a constitutional convention. The convention then proceeds to ignore its "official" purpose, which is to propose amendments banning same-sex marriage and abortion, and rewrites the entire Constitution. Among the changes are a unicameral Congress, with everyone serving six-year terms, removing the two-term limit on a president, giving the president the power to create law by executive order, taking the power to declare a law unconstitutional away from the Supreme Court, and adding a new preamble that makes it clear this is now officially a Christian nation, no one else need apply. Part of that was making sure the current constitutional ban on religious qualification for holding office was eliminated.
Potentially, the new Constitution would give America the sort of country that John Calvin would have loved. Or the Pilgrims, who were actually a pretty miserable lot of religious bigots, even if they did generally dress a little better than the traditional Thanksgiving advertising would suggest. If the Puritans and their philosophical descendants had their way, we'd be living in a gloomy, anti-intellectual country.
Not that intellectuals seem to have much place in the current administration. When the chief qualification for heading agencies with a primarily scientific mandate is not believing in science, you can't expect much. If he could get away with it, you can't help thinking Trump would just love to appoint Ken Ham as director at the Smithsonian. Or Jenny McCarthy to run the Centers for Disease Control.
By the time the real action starts in Returning, in 2126, that's more of less what's happened to America. Most people live ordinary lives. The truth is, that's what happens in dictatorships. If you keep your head down and obey the rules, you get along. Maybe you have to be careful what you say, but you get along. They don't round up everybody. They just round up the "trouble-makers." There aren't that many of those, if only because years of careful education have insured that most people believe what they're told. If the Bible suggests that the universe is only 6,000-years-old, and your government assures you this is the case, why would you question it?
After all, the President is a fifth-generation evangelist, so certainly he'd never lie to you. If the President assures you that the reason there are no satellite images of a vast part of Wyoming is because it includes a top-secret military base, then why would you believe rumors they're really hiding a huge concentration camp? Sure, people sometimes disappear, but they just moved away. It's purely coincidental they never write or call.
Now, the reality is that you don't usually get dictatorships through violent revolutions. Spain did, but the Nazis took power in Germany through the normal political process. Truth doesn't matter to authoritarians, because they can make the truth be whatever they want it to be.
I guess I should point out that Returning isn't a political or religious rant. Politics and religion both get sent up, certainly, but mostly it's a bit of space opera, a lot of speculative science, and an entertaining adventure story. And, despite the starship's captain, navigator, and Marine detachment commanders all being women, it's not particularly "feminist," either. The Gehunites got past that stage a long time ago, moving on into what I suppose you could call a humanist phase, where it simply never occurs to anyone to consider sex in deciding who should do what job.
You should read it.
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