July 22nd 2020

By Joan McCarter

Daily Kos

Impeached president Donald Trump, loser of the 2016 popular vote, has issued a formal veto threat of the National Defense Authorization bill if it includes a provision requiring that all military installations carrying the names of Confederate generals be renamed. In other words, Trump is threatening the livelihoods of currently serving troops in order to protect the memory of dead traitors who fought to destroy the United States. There's nothing this man won't do to prove his racist, white supremacist red, including trying to incite a new civil war by sending federal troops to occupy the nation's cities.

The White House calls the renaming provision "part of a sustained effort to erase from the history of the Nation those who do no meet an ever-shifting standard of conduct." The thing is, treason has always been treason. It was treason in 1865, it's treason now. Then it devolves into some serious bullshit, suggesting that "loud voices in America" will use this provision. They are "demanding the destruction or renaming of monuments and memorials to former Presidents," part of a "new left-wing cultural revolution." Stephen Miller wrote this one, you can tell.

The Senate adopted the amendment, offered by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, in committee on a voice vote, which meant no one in the Republican-majority committee had a problem with it. The Department of Defense itself says, basically, "good idea." Retired military leaders agreed.

The current head of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, called for the base renaming in the strongest terms. "[T]hose officers turned their back on their oath," he said of the Confederate generals whose names are still on the bases. "It was an act of treason, at the time, against the Union, against the Stars and Stripes, against the US Constitution." Treason.

Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley said a few weeks ago that the Senate could override a veto, and that's probably still true. No Republican senator is going to want to be accused of depriving the troops of their pay in the middle of a global pandemic and three months ahead of a general election.

Posted with permission