The assassination math

As I write this post, the only person who has died as a result of the Congressional Republican baseball practice ambush is the actual shooter.

In many ways, this is the optimal result - better than could have been hoped for given the circumstances.  Hopefully all of the wounded will pull through and make full recoveries.

But the threat was far more severe than any we have encountered for a long time.

The goal of the shooter was nothing less than destroying the Republican caucus. 

Here in the West, we've grown accustomed to looking at legislative majorities and talking about how they can be altered through election campaigns.

But there is a more sanguinary method to do it, one that dates back to the fall of the Roman Republic.  One need not win elections in order to flip votes; a few proscriptions here, a few assassinations there, and the legislature suddenly does whatever the powers that be desire.

There is a certain irony in the use of Donald Trump as a stand-in for Julius Caesar in the current "Shakespeare in the Park" performance.  Caesar himself understood that votes could be bought with money or force.  Ultimately he paid the price for his abuse of power but his successor learned the lesson well.

Gaius Octavius - later known as Caesar Augustus - knew the value in taming the Senate, keeping its members on edge and allowing them just enough license to feel they were in control of the little things.  But they were still his puppets.

That's because when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he was delivering the death knell to the Republic.  There would be no going back.

The leftist who tried to wipe out much of the GOP caucus was taking the same drastic step.

We can shudder to imagine what would have happened had he succeeded.  What if two dozen GOP members were now dead, and the majority temporarily passed the Democrats?  Would they vote Articles of Impeachment?  Would Congress simply adjourn?

What would the remaining members think?  Would they fear that another assassin might choose to "balance" the chamber by thinning out the Democrat side?

This is where the left's obsession with violence must inevitably lead us.

The Beltway elites may yet have enough of a survival instinct to understand that the "TRUMP IS A NAZI!!!" rhetoric could actually result in their own premature demise.  For a long time they've gotten to play by a different set of rules.  That era is now over.

It's worth noting that in the tense months before the onset of the Civil War, legislators on Capitol Hill armed themselves, sometimes overtly.  One wag commented that the only members without a gun were the ones with two knives.

As it turned out, the halls of Congress did not run with blood back then, but the rest of the country did.

Perhaps today's grim events will cause people to step back from the brink.  Once you've jumped off the ledge, it's too late for regret.

Comments

[Nurglitch]

Just another lone nut like Jared Loughner, Adam Lanza, and Dylann Roof. Like the leftist violence of the so-called Berkeley Riots it wasn't the act of any organized effort of violence like we saw in the Balkans, Rwanda, or currently in the Middle East. Wake me up when a group of gunmen pull off a co-ordinator attack where they're successfully extracted from the inevitable security and law enforcement responses.