A truly remarkable op-ed published by the Los Angeles Times, entitled “If Trump Wins, A Coup Isn’t Impossible Here in the U.S.” by James Kirchick, makes a point that I have long been making about the United States: that the advent of the U.S. national-security establishment, as a practical matter, operated as a de facto amendment to the U.S. Constitution insofar as ousting a president from office is concerned.
The Constitution is the highest law of the land. It is the document that called the federal government into existence. It delineates the powers that U.S. officials will be permitted to exercise. It controls how the federal government is permitted to operate.
What happens if federal officials don’t like some particular provision of the Constitution? Too bad. They still have to comply with it. It’s the law — the higher law — that controls their conduct.
However, they have an option: They can secure an amendment to the Constitution that modifies or nullifies the particular restriction that they don’t like. Absent that, however, they are required to follow the law of the Constitution.
The Constitution provides the method by which the president is elected. It’s done through the Electoral College. The Constitution also provides for a presidential term of four years.
What if the electorate has a change of heart after a president is elected? What if the president starts doing things that people don’t like? Under the law of the Constitution, that’s too bad. The Constitution provides for only two ways to remove a president from office: by voting him out of office in the next election or by congressional impeachment and conviction for having committed high crimes or misdemeanors.
That’s it. Under the law of the Constitution, there is no other legal way to remove a president from office. Those are the only two ways. The Constitution has never been amended to provide a third way.
But as a practical matter, ever since the late 1940s there has been another way to remove a duly elected president from office, albeit illegal. That’s through a coup engineered by the national-security branch of the federal government — specifically through the military establishment and the CIA.
That’s precisely the point that the Kirchick op-ed in the LA Times is confirming. It points out that if Donald Trump is elected president and begins engaging in shocking or illegal conduct — such as ordering the military to break the law — it might well be necessary for the U.S. military establishment to save the nation by ousting Trump from office.
The popular rubric that is used to justify this sort of thing is, “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” The meaning is that if the only way to save the country is through a military coup, it is incumbent on the military and the CIA do its duty — no matter how distasteful or illegal — by ousting the president from office, either by a direct coup or by elevating the vice-president to the presidency.
What Kirchick and the LA Times are implicitly acknowledging is that the conversion of the federal government to a national-security state in the late 1940s operated, as a practical matter, as an illegal and automatic modification of the Constitution by providing a third way to remove a president from office. That might well explain why every president since John Kennedy has always advocated policies that fall within certain well-understood parameters, ones that do not countenance any fundamental challenge to the existence, power, and authority of the national-security branch of the federal government and that expect gratitude to be expressed for what the military, CIA, and NSA are doing to protect “national security,” however that term is defined.
Recall Chile, where the national-security establishment of that country did precisely what Kirchick is talking about. Faced with a president whose policies, in the eyes of the military and intelligence forces, constituted a threat to Chile’s “national security,” the military and intelligence branch of the national government initiated a military attack on the executive branch of the government, one that left Chile’s duly elected president, Salvador Allende, dead.
What’s that have to do with the U.S. national-security establishment? U.S. national-security officials were the ones responsible for setting the Chilean coup into motion, knowing full well that the president could be killed in the operation.
For three years prior to the coup, U.S. officials were pushing and cajoling their Chilean national-security state counterparts into implementing the coup, telling them that they had solemn duty to save the country from a president whose polices were a threat to “national security.”
U.S. national-security state officials also initiated secret policies intended to bring economic chaos and crisis to the country, so that the Chilean people would welcome the coup when it finally came.
They also conspired to kidnap the head of the Chilean Armed Forces, Gen. Rene Schneider, who believed in following the law established by the Chilean constitution, which provided the same two options for removing a president from office as the U.S. Constitution — electorally and through impeachment. When the kidnapping resulted in Schneider’s murder, U.S. national-security state officials were later found to be covering up their role in the event.
Ever since that coup, which elevated army strongman Augusto Pinochet to power, there have been people within the national-security establishments of both the United States and Chile, as well as conservatives in both countries, who have glorified and justified the coup, notwithstanding its abject illegality. They like to point out that the Chilean constitution was not a “suicide pact.”
When Chilean officials began rounding up tens of thousands of innocent people and began torturing, raping, and killing them, the supreme court of Chile went silent or supportive. If the scenario outlined by Kirchick were to come to pass, no one should expect the U.S. Supreme Court to behave any differently. Ever since the 1950s, the Supreme Court has shown nothing but deference to the authority, power, and influence of the national-security branch of the federal government, including denying judicial relief to Schneider’s heirs as well as the heirs of two Americans who were murdered during the coup, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, through the complicity of both U.S. and Chilean national-security state officials.
For more information on the practical authority of the U.S. national-security establishment to oust a president from office whose policies are considered to be a threat to “national security,” see the following books published by The Future of Freedom Foundation:
The Kennedy Autopsy by Jacob Hornberger
JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne
Regime Change: The Kennedy Assassination by Jacob Hornberger
The CIA, Terrorism, and the Cold War: The Evil of the National Security State by Jacob Hornberger
CIA & JFK: The Secret Assassination Files by Jefferson Morley