Ellie Mystal pointed out that was a risk of civil war: If congress were to strip SCOTUS of jurisdiction (no longer decides what is Constitutional or not) and the court then responds by saying that law is unconstitutional, the blue states side with Congress while the red states side with the Court, and we have a crisis that cannot be resolved by institutional procedure.
Personally, I’d like to see more of They’ve made their ruling, now let them enforce it. But as we recently saw with the Virginia redistricting referendum, their governor obeyed in advance.
That’s possible, but the US doesn’t have the institutional capacity for civil war. I think that while the possibility of violence is high, actual civil conflict is low.
Civil war will certainly not look like the first one with battle lines, though if we see an interstate conflict, we might see fights over strategic points. The experts I’ve read suggest there would be flash strikes coordinated the way that flash mobs are, only armed.
We certainly have enough firearms to make for a bloody mess.
Sure, but only paralysis or a split of the US military would leave the result in doubt. There just isn’t any group or organization with the capacity to rival the military, or even law enforcement really.
You’re assuming that the military would willingly be deployed in the US against civilians. While that has happened with various state National Guard reserves, it is not legal when it comes to the other branches.
This is not to say they won’t given that plenty of flag officers have been replaced with MAGA loyalists, but doing so would destroy unit cohesion and would risk mutiny. More likely, so long as the US military remains professional (and not conscripts), they’re likely to respond via malicious compliance, much the way parade discipline was lacking during Trump’s birthday parade in 2025.
I’m not in the service, but I’ve heard from many veterans that an attempt to deploy the armed services against US civilians, or to engage in law enforcement action would cause far more problems than it would solve. This is why, when Trump has deployed the Marines on US soil, their duties have been limited to protecting federal buildings and not engaging with civilians, assisting ICE or controlling crowds.
I don’t think the organizational capacity exists to be a threat to law enforcement or local or state government.
If there were, I suspect attitudes of the military toward domestic deployment would change.
If, for example, militias succeeded at kidnapping plots against several state governors like the michigan plot against slotkin. Anything that could cridibly be labeled civil war would invite intervention by the military.
Basically there is a huge hill to climb to get to something that could be called a civil war that seems deeply implausible.
Ellie Mystal pointed out that was a risk of civil war: If congress were to strip SCOTUS of jurisdiction (no longer decides what is Constitutional or not) and the court then responds by saying that law is unconstitutional, the blue states side with Congress while the red states side with the Court, and we have a crisis that cannot be resolved by institutional procedure.
Personally, I’d like to see more of They’ve made their ruling, now let them enforce it. But as we recently saw with the Virginia redistricting referendum, their governor obeyed in advance.
That’s possible, but the US doesn’t have the institutional capacity for civil war. I think that while the possibility of violence is high, actual civil conflict is low.
Civil war will certainly not look like the first one with battle lines, though if we see an interstate conflict, we might see fights over strategic points. The experts I’ve read suggest there would be flash strikes coordinated the way that flash mobs are, only armed.
We certainly have enough firearms to make for a bloody mess.
Sure, but only paralysis or a split of the US military would leave the result in doubt. There just isn’t any group or organization with the capacity to rival the military, or even law enforcement really.
You’re assuming that the military would willingly be deployed in the US against civilians. While that has happened with various state National Guard reserves, it is not legal when it comes to the other branches.
This is not to say they won’t given that plenty of flag officers have been replaced with MAGA loyalists, but doing so would destroy unit cohesion and would risk mutiny. More likely, so long as the US military remains professional (and not conscripts), they’re likely to respond via malicious compliance, much the way parade discipline was lacking during Trump’s birthday parade in 2025.
I’m not in the service, but I’ve heard from many veterans that an attempt to deploy the armed services against US civilians, or to engage in law enforcement action would cause far more problems than it would solve. This is why, when Trump has deployed the Marines on US soil, their duties have been limited to protecting federal buildings and not engaging with civilians, assisting ICE or controlling crowds.
I don’t think the organizational capacity exists to be a threat to law enforcement or local or state government.
If there were, I suspect attitudes of the military toward domestic deployment would change.
If, for example, militias succeeded at kidnapping plots against several state governors like the michigan plot against slotkin. Anything that could cridibly be labeled civil war would invite intervention by the military.
Basically there is a huge hill to climb to get to something that could be called a civil war that seems deeply implausible.