Like I said a year ago today, it was treason.
It's really hard to say things have gotten better. I didn't expect them to; I didn't really hope they would, not in what is (for electoral politics) a very short timeframe, because a quick change "for the better" would not last. The Church Committee (which, fortunately, has less to do with organized religion than its name makes it seem… but not nothing, especially if one reads between the lines of both its report and some of the publicly released material it reviewed) took over a year to issue its report, and then it took two years after that for any legislation.1
One could legitimately argue that reexamination should have started as soon as The Orange One rode down that damned escalator, but it didn't. And even that is really just picking a different straw on the camel's back; the real villain of the piece is the overt equation that the act of spending money equals — is — expressive conduct constituting political speech. Because it doesn't, and can't, if not everyone can do so; demanding proof of such "equality" by demanding that some of the rent money go to politics instead of the slumlord, so as to validate the money going to politics from those whose rent is completely covered by trust funds, is just a little bit too far. It's something else; something not anticipated by the Founders, and therefore not amenable to either any variety of "originalism" or any invocation of tradition and acceptability as measured by past actual conduct. After all, "dead voters in Chicago/Kansas City/New York/Philadelphia" was both "traditional" and "acceptable as measured by past actual conduct." So, too, at the time of the Founding, was the concept that "only propertied white men can vote."
Regardless, one year ago there was treason on national TV and on [anti]social media for everyone to see. The broadcast certainly makes meeting the "two witnesses" requirement rather trivial — even if it was, in the end, all about "proving" that the sociopathic-narcissist-in-chief wasn't a "loser", since his ego can't handle that. And, for that matter, neither can his treason: The entire point of representative democracy is that we embrace dissent, that we give "the losers" a voice.2 Worse yet, the entire Heffalump enterprise is starting to look more and more like theocracy, more and more like a religious test prohibited on its face by the Constitution. And that, in itself, is not treason; it is merely insurrection and rebellion, sufficient to require consideration (at the least) of the Fourteenth Amendment's Disqualification Clause as to not just the Orange One, but to those who fomented the insurrection and rebellion… including more than one member of the Congress, including more than one licensed attorney who persisted in misuse of the courts to attack the election without a factual basis for doing so.
I'd make some sarcastic remark about "childish crybabies," but one doesn't ordinarily give "childish crybabies" firearms and allow them to trample elected officials and grant them a permanent platform for further self-serving ranting. OK, one doesn't do so in civilization (<SARCASM> which, based on both public statements and who gets elected to office there, obviously excludes Texas, Missouri, and Georgia's 14th Congressional District </SARCASM>… except that that pesky representative-democracy principle of "embrace dissent," together with the concept that "the individual's worthiness as a human being is not congruent with the individual's political preferences, however strongly influenced," sort of makes that bit of sarcasm self-defeating <SARCASM> — except, perhaps, as to the KKK and NRA, since I know one worthwhile human being who's a member of the Federalist Society but not either of those organizations, although he's left the Heffalumps </SARCASM>).
Notwithstanding any digressions, or pontification, or acceptance that I have only an incomplete factual record: It was still treason. Treason that directly insults every veteran who ever put his/her/their butt on the line to protect, ultimately, representative democracy and the right to vote.
- Kneecapped, mealy-mouthed, thoroughly coopted and agency-captured legislation, but we'll leave that inside the Cone of Silence. As we will the following nearly-half-century evasions thereof. And we'll just entirely ignore the disturbingly parallel history of the Boland Amendments and their history of violation, while desperately pretending that that doesn't shed further light on the underlying principles in this screed.
- What this says about the "Hastert Rule" and filibustering nominees and legislation on (im)purely partisan grounds shall be left for another time, another couple hundred footnotes, another obscure publication that won't be made available to those who most need to read it due to nineteenth-century publishing memes.