Between us we have served for seven decades, mostly in elected federal office, through Watergate, the post-Vietnam anti-war demonstrations, years of civil rights marches, Iran-Contra, debates over voting rights, the post-9/11 surveillance debates, and two impeachments.
Political prisons, a domestic army, control of the military’s legal apparatus, the seizure of voter rolls, and much more presage the potential declaration of a national crisis and the implementation of various of the President’s Emergency Action Documents. These are among the many individual actions and plans of the “rolling coup” that is currently underway.
What makes this a “rolling” coup rather than a sudden one is that each part of the mechanism was built individually; each in isolation appeared to serve a defensible purpose, and no single step was dramatic enough to trigger unified institutional resistance.
What is happening is clear. The question is whether enough of us will face the uncomfortable prospect of the destruction of our democracy. Unless we begin to act with resolve, fortitude, and clear-eyed commitment to our democracy, a future election will be lost, and our democracy will likely be destroyed by a presidential declaration of a national emergency.
— “The Rolling Coup,” by former U.S. senators, Richard Gephardt (D-MO) and Timothy Wirth (D-CO)
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