You Should Read This: The Democratic Minimum

Paul Campos has a post up at Lawyers, Guns & Money today titled “The Democratic Minimum“, presenting a list of the absolute minimum set of actions that it will take to make America a democracy again.

Clearly, my standards for “minimum” are higher than his.

His minimum is:

The arrest and imprisonment pending trial of Donald Trump.
The arrest and imprisonment pending trial of all major law enforcement officials in the Trump administration, including Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Kristi Noem, and their various minions.
The arrest and imprisonment pending trial of Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller, and Russell Vought.

This is a start, but to be effective you also need:

The impeachment and removal of all Supreme Court justices who voted for the absurdly unconstitutional concept of absolute Presidential immunity..

At a minimum.

But that still lets all the foot soldiers off the hook.

It’s not enough to prosecute the leaders of a coup; at this blog, we consider every individual to be responsible for their own actions.

A minimum also needs a commitment to a comprehensive review of all records to identify every agent of the federal government who accepted and acted on obviously illegal orders, including:

the Defense department, for their actions involving domestic deployments and around Venezuela
DHS and DOJ, for their actions in support of the deportation program
DOGE and everyone else involved in opening federal computer systems to external entities

There is a lot more that needs to be done, of course, but we’re talking about a minimum here.

Anything less than this will be insufficient.

Because anything less than this will leave the perpetrators with the knowledge that the United States doesn’t have the will necessary to prevent another coup attempt.

Just as Biden and Garland’s failure to deal with the previous coup attempt led directly to the current one.