SEVERAL THINGS

There are several matters of great importance on which I should like to comment, but first let me try to clear up this matter of the reductio ad absurdum argument. A reductio is, strictly speaking, a logical argument that proves a proposition by assuming the negation of the proposition and deriving from it a contradiction. One then invokes the law of the excluded middle to conclude that the original proposition has been demonstrated. For example (I get this from Wikipedia), one proves that there is no smallest positive rational number by assuming the negative – that there is a smallest positive rational number – and then dividing that by two, thereby arriving at a smaller positive rational number. The term is also used to apply to arguments in which one assumes the negative of a proposition and then derives silly or foolish or patently unbelievable conclusions which, however, are not contradictory.  Nothing in Marc Susselman’s argument about evolution strikes me as having the form of a reductio in an interesting sense.

 

Now on to matters of greater importance.  The three subjects that have dominated the news for some time now are the Covid pandemic, the January 6 insurrection, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Like other news junkies, I spend a great deal of time each day reading or listening to the latest news with regard to these three crises, and although I am no kind of expert on any one of them, I have developed opinions about the second and third that it might be of some interest to share with the readers of this blog.  I will discuss the second today and try to say something about the third tomorrow.

 

Let me begin with the January 6 affair. Like everyone else, I watched it unfold in real time, as the saying goes.  Even though there had been months of reporting about the efforts of Trump and his supporters to challenge the results of the election in several different states, it was perhaps natural at first to imagine that the assault on the Capitol on January 6 was the culmination and indeed the centerpiece of those efforts. A great deal of effort has been expended trying to blame Trump for the violence, and there is no doubt that he welcomed it and enjoyed it, but it does not seem to me that his heated rhetoric in the speech at the Ellipse constitutes much in the way of evidence of legal liability, since that kind of language is so common in political discourse.

 

What really fascinated me were text messages that were revealed to have been sent by people like Sean Hannity begging Mark Meadows to get Trump to call the violence off since it was screwing up the plan. Eventually we learned that there was in fact a serious, coherent, marginally plausible plan grounded in the Constitution to overcome the result of the election. As we all now know, the plan, which had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol, had three parts: first, to have a number of key states send alternative slates of Trump electors to Congress; second, to have Mike Pence decide to set aside the competing slates from those states as contradictory, leaving no candidate with a majority of the electoral votes; and third, in accordance with the specifications of the Constitution, thereby to throw the election into the House of Representatives where, each state voting as a unit, Trump would be re-elected president.

 

This was not a crazy plan, for all that it would have meant the end of constitutional democracy in America. It depended, so far as I can see, on three things: first, that the Vice President would go along with the plan; second, that the entire Republican majority in the Senate would vote to support the Vice President’s action, thereby producing a standoff between the Senate and the House leading to the vote by states in the House; and third, that the Supreme Court would decline to step in and sort the matter out, on the quite defensible ground that the Constitution left the matter to the action of the House.  The violence in the Capitol was, if anything, counterproductive, or so it seems to me. It made it less likely, rather than more, that the Vice President would go along with the plan and that the entire Republican Senate bloc would vote for it.

 

I think we are about to get a more detailed and circumstantial account of the entire business from the House committee than we ever could have hoped for. So far as I can see, the only element in the entire plot that clearly breaks some laws is the written assertions by the alternate electors of six of the seven relevant states that they were “duly elected.” I hope each of those individuals gets the book thrown at him or her, along with all the co-conspirators who put them up to it. But I do not think there is much hope that Trump himself will be hauled into court on the matter.