When President Trump recently began calling the Ukrainian dictator a dictator elements of both Left and Right in the Washington establishment became quite indignant over it. After all, he is their poster boy for their beloved “foreign aid.” The Ukrainian constitution allows for the suspension of elections during wartime, shouted “The Grate One,” Mark Levin of FOX News. Levin then gave the Ukrainian dictator his full throated support since, after all, a piece of paper written by his government gives him such dictatorial powers, said the self-professed constitutional scholar.
The denunciations of President Trump from the Left for pointing out this obvious fact seem to be infinite. Of course, the same people would also denounce the president if he said that Zelenskyy was a champion of democracy.
But there are constitutions and then there are constitutions. Just because a government’s constitution allows for dictatorship, that doesn’t mean that the dictator is therefore legitimate, moral, or even necessary and that we must obey that Constitution, as Levin the “constitutional scholar” would say. But consider this: The Soviet Union had a fine sounding constitution that claimed to defend freedom of speech, religion, and of the press. Read it at Marxist.com. It was all a farce. Even Levin’s hero, Abraham Lincoln, did not suspend elections during the War to Prevent Southern Independence. He interfered with and rigged them and shut down most of the opposition press, but elections were held.
Lincoln was in some ways the flip side of the Ukrainian dictator. He did behave like a dictator even though there is no such power granted to the executive branch in the U.S. Constitution. Generations of court historians have praised Lincoln (and other presidents) for exercising unconstitutional, dictatorial powers. In his book Constitutional Dictatorship Cornell University historian Clinton Rossiter wrote that “Dictatorship played a decisive role in the North’s successful effort to maintain the Union by force of arms . ... one man was the government of the United States ... Lincoln was a great dictator.” How interesting that a prominent historian would publicly praise the fact that Lincoln destroyed the voluntary union of the founding fathers and replaced it with one maintained “by force of arms” just like, say, the Soviet Union.
Historian James Ford Rhodes wrote of Lincoln, “Never had the power of a dictator fallen into safer and nobler hands.” The people of the Southern states during and after the war would have disagreed with that. James G. Randall, the preeminent Lincoln scholar of the last generation, wrote that “If Lincoln was a dictator, it must be admitted that he was a benevolent dictator.” Levin’s lavish praise for the Zelenskyy dictatorship is reminiscent of such agitprop.
If Marc Levin was an actual defender of American-style constitutional liberty he would have denounced the grubby Ukrainian looter of the American taxpayers instead of defending and praising him. He would have instead cited the famous 1866 U.S. Supreme Court case of Ex Parte Milligan that rebuked the Lincoln dictatorship and his arbitrary and illegal suspension of so much of the Constitution. The justices stated that:
The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and the people, equally in war and in peace, and it covers with its shield of protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of men that any of its great provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of Government.
In other words, the Supreme Court said that it is precisely in times of war that civil liberties must be defended with special vigor. If not, then governments will be given an incentive to constantly create crises, real and imagined, as a means of grabbing more power and stealing more of the people’s wealth and freedom.
Levin’s defense of the Zelenskyy dictatorship — and the Ukrainian constitution itself — are more in sync with the old Soviet constitution than with the American constitutional tradition. And like Leftists in general, in this case he seems to believe that the ends justify the means.
Image credit: Office of the president of Ukraine, via Wikipedia. CC BY 4.0
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