Mikie Sherrill and the Stand-up Six – A Litmus Test
Small “d” democracy
By Mark Lurinsky
Last month, six members of Congress, Senators Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly and Representatives Chrissy Houlihan, Jason Crow, Maggie Goodlander and Chris Deluzio, all Democrats with military or intelligence agency service backgrounds, stood up to the Trump administration’s most extreme attack on the rule of law. These leaders, who I’ll call the “Stand-up Six”, aired a video reminding people in our armed services that under long-standing law they have a right and an obligation to refuse illegal orders. The six have been threatened with prosecutions by Trump, who has gone as far as claiming that their remarks could be “punishable by death” and reportedly set the counterterrorism division of the F.B.I. to target them.
As former 11th Congressional District Representative Mikie Sherrill makes the transition to Governor Sherrill in the coming weeks, New Jerseyans’ attention is necessarily split between the excitement of a new beginning for her and our state government and the important choice of which of the twelve Democrats and one Republican now running should be entrusted to fill her shoes in DC.
With so many candidates and a short time frame before the early February special primary and then the April special election, many of us are understandably perplexed. Voters could be forgiven if we look to simple litmus tests to narrow down the choices. Some of these litmus tests relate to complex areas of policy, some to the candidates’ experience and some to associations between the contenders and those who endorse them. These may be good or poor reference points.
I submit that the first important test right now is staring us in the face — standing up for the rule of law, for our fellow citizens now in uniform and for stopping the unconstitutional use of our military and our law enforcement bodies. It’s essential that we keep our millions of neighbors who fill these positions safe and ensure that they remain able to carry out their responsibilities with honor and without pressure to commit illegal acts.
The potentially illegal orders questioned by the Stand-up Six have been widely understood to refer to Trump’s deployments of the active-duty military and the national guard in support of violent ICE assaults on residents and citizens in our largest cities. More recent have been the orders for the multiple air attacks that led to the cold-blooded summary executions of more than eighty individuals aboard small boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific that were purported to be used for drug smuggling.
Some in Congress have already narrowed their focus to a single air strike and to the dreadful extralegal killing of only two shipwrecked initial survivors of that incident (the so-called “second strike” of early September). But this limited attention obscures that all the attacks – which slaughtered everyone aboard these vessels without giving them any opportunity to surrender and defend themselves against any charges of crime in any court – were also certainly illegal under any number of U.S. and international laws.
President Trump has deliberately set our armed forces, along with our federal law enforcement agencies, on a course that pits them against the accepted rule of law.
Senators Slotkin and Kelly and Representatives Houlihan, Crow, Goodlander and Deluzio are leading the fight we all must join in the increasingly dangerous environment of Trump’s second term. Three of these Stand-up Six were freshmen in Congress when they joined then-Representative Mikie Sherrill in a Washington Post op-ed that ushered in the first impeachment investigation of Trump in his earlier term. The six are following in the path of honor that our Governor-elect helped launch.
It is up to each congressional candidate running for office – Democrat or Republican – to convince us that they will follow the lead of the Stand-up Six.
Mark Lurinsky has been an activist on matters of public policy since 1968. He is currently a member of BlueWaveNJ’s Electoral Reform Working Group and is co-chair of the Healthcare Committee.
Under the blog title Small “d” democracy, Mark will continue to weigh in on the current issues that define how our country can become a more just, equal, and democratic society.