by Michael S. Kochin
A coordinated bid to tell troops to distrust their Commander-in-Chief reveals how far some lawmakers will go to erode military discipline and destabilize the constitutional order.
In National Review, Andrew McCarthy has once again taken to the fainting couch. Confronted with the spectacle of Senator Mark Kelly and five other Democratic lawmakers releasing a coordinated video “reminding” the U.S. military to disobey “illegal orders” from President Trump, McCarthy describes the act as “craven” but ultimately dismisses the administration’s response as “military lawfare.”
According to McCarthy, the President’s suggestion of a criminal probe or a court-martial is an abuse of power because the lawmakers’ speech is “legally unimpeachable” political dissent. This is McCarthy at his most bloviating—a confident assertion of legal superiority that collapses under the slightest scrutiny of what is actually built into the Constitution to ensure its survival.
McCarthy asserts that the executive branch has “no business” investigating these lawmakers. He rests this defense on a lazy application of legislative immunity, treating the Speech and Debate Clause as a universal solvent for all legal accountability. But McCarthy, a former prosecutor who should know better, ignores a crucial distinction: legislative immunity is personal. It belongs to the Member of Congress. It does not magically extend to the staffers, the outside consultants, the NGO minions, and the digital strategists who helped coordinate, film, and distribute this stunt.
If this video constitutes a conspiracy to incite insubordination—and let us be honest, telling troops to preemptively distrust their Commander-in-Chief is exactly that—then the immunity of the Senator does not shield the network of accomplices that made the sedition possible. By waving away the possibility of an investigation, McCarthy is advocating for a distinct class of political operatives who are above the law simply because they stand in the shadow of a senator.
Furthermore, McCarthy treats the First Amendment as a suicide pact, arguing that because the video is “political speech,” it is beyond chastisement. This misses the institutional remedy that a functioning republic would demand. A Senate that actually cared about this country and the integrity of its Constitution would not hide behind the First Amendment. It would call Senator Kelly and the other Senate incendiaries to the bar of the chamber.
The remedy for sedition within the legislature is self-discipline. These members should be forced to retract their remarks or justify them under oath. If they believe the President is issuing illegal orders, let them present the evidence. And if they fail to justify their attempt to fracture the chain of command, their expulsion from the Senate should follow swiftly and surely.
It is not, of course, that either of these things is likely to happen. The Justice Department is likely too timid, and the Senate is too partisan. The tragedy here is not just the Democrats’ provocation, but that Mr. McCarthy is putting his mostly dissipated reputation and his fading platform in service of ensuring that accountability does not occur.
McCarthy chides the President for “rattling sabers,” yet he offers cover for those rattling the very foundations of civil-military relations. By framing this as a mere squabble over “norms” rather than a question of loyalty to the constitutional order, he normalizes the behavior he claims to find “unhelpful.”
One has to ask: What in America has gone wrong that Mr. McCarthy does not wish that she or her Constitution survive? When the definition of “political speech” is expanded to include coordinated attempts to subvert military discipline, and when legal commentators rush to shield those attempts from scrutiny, we are no longer dealing with the rule of law. We are dealing with a surrender to the very lawlessness McCarthy claims to abhor.
Michael S. Kochin is Professor Extraordinarius in the School of Political Science,
Government, and International Relations at Tel Aviv University. He
received his A.B. in mathematics from Harvard and his M.A. and Ph.D. in
political science from the University of Chicago. He has held visiting
appointments at Yale, Princeton, Toronto, Claremont McKenna College, and
the Catholic University of America. He has written widely on the
comparative analysis of institutions, political thought, politics and
literature, and political rhetoric. With the historian Michael Taylor he
has written An Independent Empire: Diplomacy & War in the Making of the United States (University of Michigan Press, 2020).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/12/02/principled-cowardice-and-the-seditious-six/
No comments:
Post a Comment