You can’t wipe shit with more shit.

Since the Constitution is already shredded, fake crap, Trump can’t wipe his ass with it. Poor Democrats: no constitution, no crisis.

The fourth amendment, first amendment, treaties, war powers, civilian control, fourteenth amendment…

Trump’s Attorney General is ignoring a congressional subpoena. Trump is refusing to turn over documents to Congress. There is no doubt that Congress has authority over these matters according to the US Constitution. Therefore, we have a genuine constitutional crisis.

Wrong.

We don’t have a constitutional crisis. Trump can take the constitution then use it to wipe his fat ass on a golden Rococo toilet seat in a tacky mansion in a soon to be underwater amusement park on July 4th in front a screaming crowd of Nazis and we would not have a constitutional crisis.

How’s that?

You mean the president can ignore Congress, take a dump in public, have excruciatingly bad taste, be fat as a blimp, dumb as pancake and crooked as a two-legged chair, plus the paid agent of Russia and not using a condom with a prostitute in the weeks after his wife had a baby and we don’t have a constitutional crisis?

Yup.

No constitution, no crisis.

You mean the founding fathers, wearing wigs, getting states and cities named after them, selling slaves, murdering Indians, did not establish the most perfect form of republican democracy the world has ever seen, a perfect system of checks and balances that works like clockwork, more or less, right but until May 2019?

Exactly.

The constitution is a mirage. There is no document governing the way the state exercises power and elites know nothing of the rule of law. Non-elites live in a world governed by the rule of law so long as they do not challenge the elites who live above the law. What the constitution says in black and white has zero, nothing, to do with how power works in the United States.

If the constitution is a joke, you can’t have a constitutional crisis. The United States does not operate under any functional system of law. I will now prove that statement to be true.

Check it:

When Edward Snowden leaked documents demonstrating that the NSA could read anyone’s email at any time, that information alone would render the Fourth Amendment void. You do not have a right to your letters and papers if a spy agency can read anything you have ever sent to another person prior to the distribution of encrypted communications and perhaps even afterward.

That would be bad, no Fourth Amendment, but the principle of civilian rule — that the politicians, and not the military run things — was also undermined by the Snowden leak. When James Clapper told Congress that the NSA does not read the world’s email (including members of Congress by the way) he lied. Congress didn’t act. By letting the head of an intelligence agency lie to Congress about the universal and complete abrogation of the right to privacy from the government, the entire principle of civilian control was revealed to be a facade.

If Julian Assange goes to prison or is otherwise illegally detained for journalism, how significant is the First Amendment? If the police can pull you over and shoot you with no repercussions, what do all the judicial protections in writing matter: cruel and unusual punishment, trial by jury, Fifth Amendment, etc.?

The founders, bless them, considered treaties extremely important. Language on treaties is quite specific and prominent in the US Constitution. Yet, the president signed and the Senate duly ratified the Convention against Torture in 1987 and is absolutely the US law, equal to anything passed by Congress or signed into law by the president or based on a ruling by the Supreme Court. Yet, the US did not prosecute anyone for torture under George W. Bush. So, laws are not enforced and the United States does not comply with its domestic law or honor its international treaty obligations.

Congress has the exclusive right to declare war under the Constitution. When in the history of almost continual warfare over the past 50 years were these required constitutional steps followed?

It entirely unclear that Congress has the power to eliminate the CIA, or cut funding to the NSA or the US military in general. What would happen if Congress abolished the CIA and the president signed the law? Would the CIA disappear?

The FBI murdered Fred Hampton. Cointellpro was a thing. There was never any wholesale accounting and correction of this institution which continues to operate out of the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington DC.

If the president directed the FBI to target rich bankers, or racist police chiefs, or corrupt FBI agents, would the president’s order’s be followed? You think they would obey? Or are our federal agencies staffed by people who actually think they are above the law? We could find out, of course, by electing people to office who are not the bootlickers of the oligarchs… but we may never find out in so clear a way.

Here, in this essay, I am just scratching the surface of the reality of how power actually works in the United States. We can all know, if we want to know, that the banking “bailout” of 2009 was a terrific crime. We can know, if we want to know, that there was never any moral or strategic reason to kill millions in Vietnam and Iraq. We can know, if we want to know, that 400 years of white supremacy is not a something that happened in the past and then Martin Luther King had a dream and it’s all on the mend. Our non-constitutional government is a real problem for this planet here and abroad.

A court in Guatemala found American official complicit in genocide. That was no constitutional crisis for any elite group in America, so Eliot Abrahams is back in power today.

More than 1000 people have been released from prison due to DNA evidence proving their innocence, yet there was no constitutional crisis about the fact that maybe 100,000 more innocent people could easily be freed by concerted action from a just government. You would think innocent people routinely imprisoned might be some kind of hint of a crisis in criminal justice, but apparently, two million prisoners, maybe 5%-10% innocent of the charges handed them in court, is not a crisis.

1,500 people a year are killed by the police in the United States. Of course, there are legitimate cases of self-defense in this mix, but if you think the police arbitrarily executing people in the street is not a crisis but a toilet-paper/subpoena vortex in the New York Times is a crisis, you might be suffering from bootlickerism.

If primary elections do not have to follow any internal bylaws and are private affairs, as the court ruled in the DNC lawsuit, then the two candidates from which the people can choose can be corporate cronies. Plus gerrymandering, money in politics, corporate control of the media, etc: American elections do not meet accepted international standards of fairness and would be dismissed as arbitrary in an emerging democracy somewhere in the Middle East or Africa or Eastern Europe or something.

Yes.

Yes, Congress has the right to read the full Mueller report. Yes, Congress can order the release of Trump’s taxes. If Congress calls, the Attorney General of the United States must testify.

But…

But if an open court establishes that your government is complicit in genocide, as an excellent and open process in Guatemala has so determined, and you ignore the findings of a legitimate and internationally recognized court in a country with good relations with the United States, then you lose the right to call “crisis” when you don’t get your paper.

Trump can keep his paper. Trump can shred the constitution. I said he could wipe his ass with the constitution above, but that’s impossible.

You can’t wipe away shit with more shit. To wipe his ass with the constitution, there would have to be a constitution with which to ass wipe. There is no such document.