AOC and the Looming Constitutional Crisis

Summary:  America could soon face a constitutional crisis when and if Democrat Socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez come to power in Washington.  The left’s intentional disregard for the Constitution would inevitably lead to a clash with Red State governors, law enforcement, and–most frightening of all–the military.

Is America facing a constitutional crisis in the near future?

In 2008, Barack Obama was “The One”.  He charmed a nation and inspired a generation of young voters.

In 2024, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) may be the heir to Obama’s legacy.  As Joe Biden’s re-election prospects dim, rumors of an AOC presidential candidacy are beginning to swirl.

Three high-profile campaigns by fellow Socialist Bernie Sanders paved the way for AOC.  Over the last decade, Socialism has gone mainstream in many corners of America. The left has unfinished business in Obama’s quest to “fundamentally transform America”.

OK, Boomer.  It’s time for you geezers to step aside.  Make way for AOC, and prepare for a constitutional crisis.

The aging octogenarians who lead the Democrat Party will soon exit stage left, giving way to a new generation whose vision of America stands in stark contrast to the ideals of limited government established by our Founding Fathers in the Constitution.

While conservatives cry foul over government overreach—particularly abuses of power by unelected bureaucrats in the so-called “Deep State”—AOC and the left assert that DC is not doing enough.

AOC’s agenda calls for unlimited federal power, unrestrained by constitutional checks and balances.  She wants to end the filibuster in the Senate, pack the Supreme Court with left-wing justices, and implement massive environmental and social programs requiring an unprecedented centralization of power in DC.  Her cavalier disregard for the Constitution would almost certainly lead to a constitutional crisis.

The radical AOC agenda is already being pushed by “progressives” in Joe Biden’s administration.

Many elements of AOC’s agenda are already being pushed by the Biden White House.  They are waging war on fossil fuels, leading to painfully high energy prices. They spent trillions of dollars on “emergency” COVID relief, resulting in the highest inflation rate in 40 years.  They ignore immigration laws, allowing a flood of illegal immigrants and handing control of our border to human-trafficking drug cartels.  And they collude with Big Tech to monitor and manipulate the flow of information, even attempting to create the equivalent of a Ministry of Truth to censor “disinformation” from their ideological opponents.

These policies are increasingly unpopular and directly contributed to the Republicans’ reclaiming the House of Representatives in the midterm elections.  But the United States remains more divided than ever, with a growing segment of the population—concentrated on the coasts and in major cities throughout the country—falling under the spell of Socialism.  Decades of indoctrinating American students, bolstered by a left-leaning mainstream media and their allies in Big Tech and Hollywood, have produced a voting block that may soon bring Socialists to power.

The allure of “free stuff”, “social justice” and “equity” is attracting more and more hoodwinked voters who are unaware or unconcerned that Marxists killed perhaps as many as 100 million people over the last century.  Socialism is a big lie, sold with false promises.  As President Gerald Ford warned us, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”

We have heard these utopian dreams for years, but young Gen Z and Millennial types seem especially receptive to Socialist dogma.  Perhaps it’s a result of the radical indoctrination that so many young Americans have undergone as subjects of Randi Weingarten’s leftist American Federation of Teachers (AFT) or the Marxist professors dominating on college campuses across the country.  Patrick Tyrell of The Heritage Foundation warned us of the Socialist con game in his 2018 article, “The Empty Promises of Socialism”.

The key takeaways from Tyrell’s article are 1) Socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried, actually harming more people and producing new levels of misery (Venezuela being the latest example); 2) when government taxes wages at exorbitant rates, workers take a direct hit and are more likely to lose their jobs; and 3) economic freedom in the United States is in jeopardy and cannot be taken for granted.

Who told AOC that the Federal government has uncontrolled power?  The Howard Zinn-influenced teaching of American history is undermining faith in our country and seeking to discredit the Founders and the Constitution.

AOC and her fellow Democrat Socialists believe that there is no limit to what the Federal government can do.  She clearly did learn the same history lessons that I learned in college.  If she took any history classes at all, my guess is that the instructor preached from Howard Zinn’s Marxist anti-American book A People’s History of the United States, which portrays America’s history as little more than one continuous story of oppression perpetrated by white Europeans against Native Americans, African-Americans, and women.

Zinn, who had reported ties to the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and who openly embraced many of the tenets of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, made it his life’s mission to influence the history lessons that we teach American children.  George Orwell, author of the prophetic books 1984 and Animal Farm, wrote “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”

The left is certainly trying to control the past–rewriting history to disparage the greatness of our Founders while ignoring our foundational principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness–as part of their long-term strategy to steer future generations of Americans toward Marxism.  Zinn even admitted that his goal was to use history as part of a “quiet revolution” to influence or indoctrinate high school and college students.  By almost all metrics, Zinn and his followers are succeeding, as nearly every history department in the United States is dominated by “progressives” — overwhelmingly Democrats, with a growing number of outright Marxists.

Zinn’s shoddy academic work and his radical Marxist bias are thoroughly revealed in Mary Grabar’s 2019 book, Debunking Howard Zinn, Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation Against America.  Fortunately scholars such as Mary Grabar still have a few friendly confines, such as the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, which supports the preservation of factual American history.

Grabar’s book exposed Zinn’s goal “to inspire anger of such magnitude that its readers want to overthrow the American Republic.”  That sounds a lot to me like what AOC is doing, and that’s why I am so concerned about the potential for a constitutional crisis if she and her fellow Socialists succeed in taking power.

Fortunately, as much as AOC and the left may detest it, the Constitution remains the law of the land.  And the states, with a majority of Republican governors and legislatures, still have power.  The left’s agenda cannot proceed without triggering a constitutional crisis.

The biggest obstacles standing in the Socialists’ way are the states and the Constitution.  A majority of states are now controlled by Republican legislatures and governors, and they are the ultimate “check” to unbridled federal power.  The oft-forgotten Tenth Amendment clearly states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The Constitution was written expressly to limit the power of the federal government.  Its authors—who fought the American Revolution to cast off the yoke of a tyrannical King George III—were determined to prevent the rise of a similar tyrannical authority in the future.  They established a legal system protecting individual rights, enshrining civil liberties in the Bill of Rights.

The Declaration of Independence cites the “long train of abuses” committed by King George and his British authorities, whose tyranny trampled on the rights of the colonials.

Socialists ignore this aspect of our history, preferring group rights over individual rights. They place the power of the state above the rights of the individual.  Everywhere it’s been tried—the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and most recently in Venezuela—Socialism has been a gateway drug to totalitarian rule.  Quite simply, Socialism cannot coexist with the United States Constitution.

As long as the Constitution protects Americans’ rights to freely exchange ideas and to defend liberty, Socialism will never take hold here.  That’s why the left must discredit the Founding Fathers—tearing down statues and vilifying them as “oppressors” in revisionist history lessons—in order to discredit the Constitution itself.

Imagine if AOC implemented a Socialist system in the United States.  Would she follow the example of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, who packed the courts to control the judiciary and established a state-controlled media?  Would she implement draconian gun control to disarm the citizenry?  Would she imprison her political opponents? Is America willing to take that chance?

Conclusion: In a constitutional crisis, the military and law enforcement will be the ultimate arbiters of power.

A constitutional crisis may be on the horizon, with red states squaring off against a tyrannical government in DC.  Millions of armed, freedom-loving Americans will not submit without a fight.  More importantly, if our cold civil war gets hot, our men and women in uniform—who take a solemn oath to support and defend the Constitution—will be the ultimate arbiters of power. As Chairman Mao said, “Power flows from the barrel of a gun.”

This is the frightening scenario that I envisioned in my novel States of Rebellion, The Rise and Fall of the Ocasio-Cortez Administration.  Socialism could lead to the bloodiest conflict in America since the Civil War.  Let’s hope we wake up and stop it before it becomes reality.