Over the last seventeen months, it’s become customary for those who disagree with US foreign policy  on the Ukraine war to preface every objection to that policy with at least one, possibly two, disclaimers.

Disclaimer #1: The Russian invasion, they’ll concede, was “unprovoked.”

Optional Disclaimer #2: The Russian invasion, they’ll say, was “unjustified.”

I understand the impulse. They’re trying to preemptively communicate that they are “anti-war” or “anti-intervention” without being mistaken for horror of horrors, “pro-Russia.”

But those disclaimers are neither necessary nor wise.

The Russian invasion was not “unprovoked.”

For one thing, to “provoke” is, per Merriam-Webster, “to incite to anger” or to “arouse to a feeling or action.” Who decides whether Party A has been “incited” or “aroused” by Party B? Party A.

For another, Ukraine, NATO, and the US had been put on notice for quite some time (at least eight years, and actually more like 20) that Russia considered their actions provocative … and chose to continue down the same route rather than backing off or negotiating an amicable solution. The provocations were, in other words, both ongoing and intentional, not just occasional accidents.

To say that an action is “provoked,” though, is not the same thing as saying that the action is “justified.”

You might “incite me to anger” by singing loudly every time you walk past my house, but that doesn’t mean I’m justified in getting out my 12-gauge and sending you to your grave. Cutting me off in traffic may justify a honk of the horn and a selected obscenity or two. It doesn’t justify following you home and burning your house down.

Was the Russian invasion “justified?” I don’t think so, but arriving at that conclusion is not some kind of automatic slam-dunk. Opinions do vary on what constitutes an acceptable casus belli, and on the truth or falsehood of various underlying factual claims.

My own opinion on US meddling in Russian/Ukrainian relations doesn’t depend on an assessment of whether the invasion was provoked, unprovoked, justified, or unjustified, so I don’t need any such disclaimers.

Rather, my opinion is based on the notion that even if the US government has one or more legitimate purposes (in my opinion it has none), those purposes don’t extend to stealing money from you to buy weapons and sending them halfway around the world in the hope of helping one authoritarian gang win a turf war versus another authoritarian gang.

If you think I’m engaging in “moral equivalence,” you’re absolutely right. There’s nothing wrong with moral equivalence statements if the people/actions being described are morally equivalent. Looking at you, Putin/Zelenskyy/Biden.

I’m not “pro-Russia,” “pro-Ukraine,” or even “pro-US.” I’m pro-peace and anti-war. Stick that disclaimer in your pipe and smoke it.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

Former US Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut sat down with Washington Post newsletter The Early, in mid-July to answer questions about the new organization he co-chairs. It calls itself “No Labels,”  and it’s in the process of lining up ballot access for … well, something.

“Democratic strategists and anti-Trump Republican operatives have concluded,”  David Corn writes at Mother Jones,  “that its effort could siphon more votes from President Joe Biden than Donald Trump.”

Cue the Election 2024 season premier of Spoiler Theater!

The TL;DR on “spoiler” worries:

Votes don’t belong to, and can’t be “siphoned from,” candidates. Your vote belongs to you, and only you, until you cast it. Only then does it belong to someone else, and that someone else is the candidate you cast it for. Neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump is magically entitled to it. If you decide to vote Libertarian, or Green, or even write in my name (yes, really), that other candidate isn’t “stealing” your vote from Biden, nor are you “spoiling” the election of Trump.

That said, No Labels is not a typical third party or independent campaign. In fact, it’s not even a campaign yet. Lieberman refers to it as an “insurance policy project” that congressional candidates might use and that could, but won’t necessarily, “be the basis of a campaign by a bipartisan unity ticket that No Labels would offer its ballot access to.”

Who, precisely, is No Labels an “insurance policy” for? It advertises itself as “centrist,” which is code for the existing political and policy establishment.

This isn’t Joe Lieberman’s first “third party” rodeo.

In 2006, after having occupied one political seat or another since 1970, he lost the Democratic primary for re-election to a fourth term in the US Senate.

So he formed a third party to stay in the race. He named it “Connecticut for Lieberman” — rather a Freudian slip, in my opinion. Candidates usually go with e.g. “Smith for California” to pretend that they’re there to “serve” their states. Lieberman’s opinion was, quite obviously, that the great state of Connecticut existed for the sole purpose of providing him with an office, a paycheck, and a pension.

No Labels is pretty much Connecticut for Lieberman writ large. Its purpose is to extort the Democratic Party into sticking to a “centrist” campaign platform: If Joe Biden  colors outside those lines in a “progressive” direction to coalition-build with, for example, a less aggressive foreign policy, they’ll run some half-Republican, half-Democrat “centrist” (prime suspect: Joe Manchin of West Virginia) on their line as a “spoiler” candidate.

They’d rather have a Republican in the White House for four years than a Democratic Party that rocks the policy boat or even, horror of horrors, stops providing cushy Capitol Hill sinecures exclusively to the members of an elite club. No wonder, as Corn notices, that “media reports have identified several major donors with GOP ties.”

But their prospective candidate is still exactly as entitled to your vote as any other, which is to say not at all.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

“Democrats in Congress, the New York Times reports, “are making a fresh push for the nearly century-old Equal Rights Amendment to be enshrined in the Constitution, rallying around a creative legal theory in a bid to revive” it.

Interesting, but what’s so “creative” about “a joint resolution …  stating that the measure has already been ratified and is enforceable as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution?”

On January 15, 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the ERA, crossing the threshold — “when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States” —  for adding an amendment to the Constitution.

It’s over. It’s done. There’s a 28th Amendment, no joint resolution required.

That’s what the Constitution itself says, anyway.

But Congress — the same institution US Representatives Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Cori Bush (D-MO) want to pass the joint resolution — has already proven that it doesn’t care what the Constitution says.

When Congress sent the ERA to the states in 1971, it also  tried to arrogate to  itself the power to set a 1979 deadline for ratification; if the deadline wasn’t met, its proponents would have to start from scratch.

The Constitution delegates no such power to Congress. Which, per the Tenth Amendment, means no such power exists.

QED, no deadline. The amendment HAS been ratified and IS in effect.  It’s long past time for Colleen Shogan, the Archivist of the United States, to do her job (her predecessor,  David Ferriero, refused to do his) and incorporate the 28th Amendment into Constitution’s official text.

But if she did, would it matter?

Time to trot out the Lysander Spooner quote you’ve seen many times if you read my column regularly: “[W]hether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain — that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.”

Constitutionalism might or might not “work” if actually practiced. I think otherwise, but opinions  vary.

The question isn’t that important, though, because constitutionalism ISN’T practiced. Congress, the executive branch, and the Supreme Court ignore the Constitution whenever they find it inconvenient, making it “powerless to prevent” anything.

So why even bother with the ERA? It’s just more verbiage for them to ignore as they please, right?

And if they’re going to ignore its restrictions on their power, why shouldn’t we ignore the orders they shout at us?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter:@thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY