25 Apr My Ad in Seattle Times 4 27 2025: It’s the 800th Anniversary of Due Process

posted from Seattle, WA April 25, 2025

800 Years!- But don’t expect a celebration

Exactly on the 800th Anniversary of Due Process, the World finds itself in epic struggle between Democracy and Autocracy. For the last 150 or so years of this span the US has been the World’s strongest country and has at least paid lipservice to due process although Woodrow Wilson’s second term was an exception to this.

But the current President doesn’t do Lipservice, that wouldn’t be his style. After sending an innocent man to a freezing dungeon of Hell in El Salvador, America’s own new Gulag, he cracked jokes about it with that country’s Autocrat leader.

All the while, as I have argued before, America is paying the price for not truly understanding just how great of a President George Washington was. All the fawning has been directed at Lincoln. But because the long line of Presidents who succeeded Washington didn’t have the wierd combination of luck and skill to be in a position to become strongmen, we have always assumed that Washington wasn’t head and shoulders above most of the founders of states, most of the Fathers of countries, and indeed, in a sense, all the other Presidents who merely followed dutifully in his footsteps, again, with a few exceptions.. He was in a position to create a new royalty, it was almost harder for him not to do this than to do what he did.

As for his underlings once preparing a coup, the story is told in an article in the November 2024 Atlantic by Tom Nichols..

In 1784, at the time of the Newburgh Rebellion, Washington had real grievances against the Congress, which was far behind in its financial obligations to the Army, which had gone unpaid. And Washington personally as well as the Continental Army generally were held in vastly higher esteem by the people than the Congress was. Washington listened patiently to the plan to confront and defeat Congress but was appalled and repelled by the very idea and sternly rebuked those who had crafted it. That was the decisive moment but it was only one instance in which Washington demonstrated an understanding of and a commitment to democracy. He entered all of his government positions in debt and emerged from them still in debt. It was hard for some people at the time to even comprehend why he would do this just as it would be impossible for Trump to understand if he were capable of learning the story of George Washington. Nichols quotes retired Marine Corps General John Kelly as describing Trump as a “person that has no idea what America stand for and has no idea what America is all about.”

Meanwhile Kilmar Abrego Garcia continues to languish in the New American Gulag of an El Salvadoran prison,. having been cut off from his job, his family and wife, and his university studies. And he is one of many, including people on student visas who embraced America to the point of expressing their views in forums and protests–what could be more American and what kind of person do we want as World Citizens more than this kind?

The road ahead will surely be tough. We must remember that Democracy is not just a system where the people choose their leaders through elections. If anyone thinks that, the American Educational System really is failing. Democracy is full of checks and balances and all these checks and balance are built around the first building block of democracy: due process. We must defeat the Ghost of King John!