First, a disclaimer, and perhaps even an apology. Part of the raison d'être of PolicySphere is to eschew what some might call "regime questions", abstract and theoretical questions about the state of the current regime. As important as those may be, we believe that too much focus on such philosophy detracts from something that is also fundamental: the design and implementation of policy. By nature and inclination, right-wingers love to talk about the former and are sometimes inclined to wave away the importance of the latter. But the latter is still fundamentally important: why are we in this, if not to actually deliver concrete outcomes, whatever those may be, in the real world, to real existing people? And doing that requires, not just an understanding of timeless abstract truths about the world, but also an understanding of, well, policy.

So, a disclaimer and an apology: today we will discuss a "regime question", and that is outside our remit.

Sometimes, even if you may not be interested in the regime question, the regime question is interested in you…

You may have seen that certain members of Congress and Senators of the Democratic Party have put out a video in which they urge members of the military and of the intelligence community to refuse to obey any illegal orders given to them.

It is hard to see such an invitation in a non-sinister way. That members of the uniformed branches should refuse to obey facially illegal orders is taken for granted. Therefore, taken at face value, the video is simply expressing a tautology. Since it must not be expressing a tautology, it must be expressing something else: namely, an encouragement to refuse to obey even presumptively legal orders.

But still, one might dismiss this as the kind of grandstanding we have seen since 2016. Some pointless political communication aimed at the "Resistance" wing of the Democratic Party. (Though even then, such apocalyptic communiqués, after the murder of Charlie Kirk, must be seen as incitements to political violence.)

Then, the other shoe dropped: on Meet the Press, Senator Mark Kelly, one of the authors of the video, clarified his meaning. Namely, that if and when a Democratic administration is back in office, they will prosecute people for following orders retrospectively deemed to have been illegal. We have moved from incitement to threat.

The instruction is not "Don't follow illegal orders"; it is "We will decide which orders are illegal when we're back in charge so you better just not follow any of Trump's orders, or else you might be prosecuted."

Of course, given the vagueness about what constitutes a "legal" order and given the broad prosecutorial powers of the Federal government, this threat is simply a threat to destroy people's lives.

Furthermore, the intended purpose of the threat is to simply make the normal operations of the Federal government impossible. If every member of the uniformed services was under a cloud of potential politically-motivated prosecution after the fact when asked to carry out every order, the end result would quite simply be chaos and the impossibility to operate the government

In such a scenario, "policy" stops mattering.

In such a scenario, we are indeed forced to ask "regime questions", since it quickly becomes apparent that it is impossible to operate a "constitutional republic" in a world where each party is determined to politically prosecute its predecessors after each election. The parallels to third world banana republics, or to the late Roman Republic, are so obvious that it would be an insult to the reader's intelligence to belabor them.

If there is a solution to this problem that preserves the Constitution, then it must be such a vigorous response by the current administration that this particular genie is shoved back into its bottle for as long as possible.

This is where we are.

Your correspondent simply wanted to note it.

Your regular programming resumes tomorrow.