By Daniel Lazare, Weekly Worker

Donald Trump is now a convicted felon, but still looks set to win in November. Daniel Lazare warns that some kind of civil war beckons

America’s long-running constitutional crisis rose another notch last week, when a Manhattan jury found Donald Trump guilty of 34 felony counts in the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial.

“The rule of law being applied to Trump is good,” announced Jacobin, the online magazine that our Jim Creegan once described as the closest thing to a “flagship publication” that the Democratic Socialists of America have to offer.¹

The DSA, of course, is the pseudo-socialist outfit that is desperate to become part of the Democratic establishment, even though 99% of elected Democrats will not touch it with a 10-foot pole. A Jacobin seal of approval was therefore expected, since the magazine is still backing Biden in November despite attacking him on a near-daily basis in the meantime.

But it makes zero sense regardless. One reason has to do with the rule of law itself – a hoary old liberal cliché that takes the relationship between law and political democracy and gets it exactly backwards. Since law is something that “We, the people” use to implement and expand their authority, rule of law is no more coherent than rule by any other instrument or tool – shovels or perhaps darning needles. But popular sovereignty does not mean government of, by and for the law. Rather, it means government of, by and for the people, who then create a legal structure for their own purposes.

But another reason is that the US law is a mess even by bourgeois-liberal standards. Supposedly, the American people are sovereign. That is what the preamble – the famous paragraph that opens with the words, “We, the people” – says. But the rest of America’s sacred constitution says the opposite. It nips popular sovereignty in the bud by locking the people into a governing structure that is effectively frozen in time. Back in 1790, thanks to the complicated amending clause set forth in article V, four out of 13 states, representing as little as 9.8% of the population, could block any constitutional reform sought by the remainder. More than two centuries later, the percentage is down to just 4.4, which means that veto power now rests with just one person in 22 or 23.

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