"Ever since our government transferred power from George Washington to John Adams in the year 1797, we have had a core custom of routine and peaceful transfer of power...."

"These defendants tried to change that history. They concocted a plan for an armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of democracy."

Said Jeffrey S. Nestler, in the opening statement for the prosecution, quoted in "Prosecution Says Oath Keepers ‘Concocted a Plan for Armed Rebellion’ Defense lawyers said the far-right militia had assembled ahead of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to await what they hoped would be a decision by Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act" (NYT). 

If it was a plan for an armed rebellion, why weren't the protesters/revolutionaries using arms?

One answer is provided by the lawyer for the defense in his own opening statement:

... Phillip Linder, [the defendant Stewart] Rhodes’s lawyer, said Mr. Rhodes and his subordinates had never planned an attack against the government on Jan. 6. Instead, Mr. Linder said, the Oath Keepers were waiting for Mr. Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act — a move, they claim, that would have given the group standing as a militia to employ force of arms in support of Mr. Trump.

This is a delicate position to defend. It concedes that there was a plan to use force to engage in a military fight, but it was conditional on an action by Trump that would supposedly have legalized their fighting. 

Calling the Oath Keepers a “peacekeeping force,” Mr. Linder also argued that the group did not go to Washington on Jan. 6 to storm the Capitol but to provide security at political rallies for speakers and dignitaries, like Roger J. Stone Jr., Mr. Trump’s longtime political adviser.

“Even though it may look inflammatory,” Mr. Linder told the jury, “they did nothing illegal.”

But they didn't peacefully await Trump's invocation of the Insurrection Act or restrict themselves to providing security. According to the prosecutor Nestler, "more than a dozen members of the Oath Keepers advanced in military-style “stacks” into the Capitol itself — with some moving off in search of Speaker Nancy Pelosi."

There are 5 defendants, Stewart Rhodes, Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins and Thomas Caldwell. (Watkins is "a former Army Ranger and a transgender woman who had repeatedly struggled to fit in with the Oath Keepers.")

I'm not clear on whether any of the defendants entered the building. The NYT says, "the trial is less likely to focus on disputes over what the group did in the days and weeks leading up to Jan. 6 than it is to hinge on the question of why they did it."

The defense maintains that the Oath Keepers could not have seditiously sought to stop the transfer of power because they believed that the Insurrection Act would allow them to legally come to Mr. Trump’s aid....

ADDED: Did Trump ever talk about invoking the Insurrection Act? I see that during the riots in the summer of 2020, Trump said:

“Mayors and governors must establish an overwhelming law enforcement presence until the violence has been quelled. If a city or a state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.... I am mobilizing all available federal resources, civilian and military, to stop the rioting and looting, to end the destruction and arson, and to protect the rights of law-abiding Americans”...

A political commentator quoted in the Washington Post interpreted that statement to refer to invoking the Insurrection Act. I blogged about  that here. At the time, Trump was criticized by Joe Biden for threatening to go military on the rioters. By the way, George W. Bush was criticized for not invoking the Insurrection Act after Hurricane Katrina. Blogged here.

So in recent years the Insurrection Act has been talked about as a way to deal with widespread disorder. Are the Oath Keepers in the present case saying they saw themselves as a potential security force if the peaceful protest broke into disorder, and they were simply ready to augment law enforcement, if the President called them into action?

"The indictment [for seditious conspiracy] describes some Oath Keepers’ belief that 'the federal government has been coopted by a cabal of elites actively trying to strip American citizens of their rights.'"

"That [Stewart Rhodes, the leader and founder of the Oath Keepers], the leading defendant, graduated from one of the country’s most élite law schools, Yale, is more than just a fun fact. He developed his views on the Constitution as a law student eighteen years ago, and won a school prize for the best paper on the Bill of Rights. His paper argued that the Bush Administration’s treatment of 'enemy-combatants' in the war on terror was unconstitutional. Rhodes wrote that 'terrorism is a vague concept,' and that 'we need to follow our Constitution’s narrow definition of war and the enemy.' The argument would have found much support in liberal legal-élite and civil-liberties circles.... [I]n order to convict the defendants of seditious conspiracy, the government will have to prove that they planned their storming of the Capitol with the purpose of opposing the lawful transfer of Presidential power.... Rhodes’s seeming belief that his plan for January 6th was resistance to an unconstitutional process may seem wholly unreasonable.... But, if the case goes to trial... [s]ome jurors may find it difficult to convict Rhodes and others of seditious conspiracy if they find that sincere views about reality informed the defendants’ purpose.... Such an outcome might have the effect of adding legal legitimacy to the big lie.... Now that talk of potential 'civil war' occurs not only among extremist groups but in the mainstream press, a public trial of alleged seditionists will showcase the central fissure that could lead us there."

Writes Jeannie Suk Gersen in "The Case Against the Oath Keepers/Members of the group face seditious-conspiracy charges for their roles in the January 6th insurrection. Can a sincere belief that the election was stolen protect them?" (The New Yorker).

Gersen highlights the risk the government is taking, forcing public attention onto the seditious conspiracy charge: Americans will put effort into understanding the defendants' arguments, some unknown segment of us will agree with them, and many more will think the government has overreached because it cannot prove that they were insincere.

"In recent years, the Justice Department has sometimes acted more like a trade association for federal prosecutors than the administrator of a fair system of justice based on clear and sensible legal rules."

"In case after case, we have advanced and defended hyper-aggressive extensions of the criminal law. This is wrong and we must stop doing it.... We should want a fair system with clear rules that the people can understand. It does not serve the ends of justice to advocate for fuzzy and manipulable criminal prohibitions that maximize our options as prosecutors.... Advocating for clear and defined prohibitions will sometimes mean we cannot bring charges against someone whom we believe engaged in questionable conduct. But that is what it means to have a government of laws and not of men.... If criminal statutes are endlessly manipulable, then everything becomes a potential crime. Rather than watch policy experts debate the merits or demerits of a particular policy choice, we are nowadays treated to ad na[u]seum speculation by legal pundits — often former prosecutors themselves — that some action by the President, a senior official, or a member of congress constitutes a federal felony under this or that vague federal criminal statute. This criminalization of politics is not healthy. The criminal law is supposed to be reserved for the most egregious misconduct — conduct so bad that our society has decided it requires serious punishment, up to and including being locked away in a cage. These tools are not built to resolve political disputes and it would be a decidedly bad development for us to go the way of third world nations where new administrations routinely prosecute their predecessors for various ill-defined crimes against the state. The political winners ritually prosecuting the political losers is not the stuff of a mature democracy.... Our job is to prosecute people who commit clear crimes. It is not to use vague criminal statutes to police the mores of politics or general conduct of the citizenry. Indulging fanciful legal theories may seem right in a particular case under particular circumstances with a particularly unsavory defendant—but the systemic cost to our justice system is too much to bear."

Said Attorney General William Barr at the Hillsdale College Constitution Day event yesterday.

The NYT covered Barr's speech under the headline "Barr Defends Right to Intrude in Cases as He Sees Fit/The attorney general’s remarks scanned as a rebuke of career Justice Department lawyers who have questioned his level of involvement." This article portrays the speech as a response to accusations against Barr:

"Some scholars opined that the coffee house was 'even worse than the wine room'..."

"... and the authorities noted how these places could easily become dens of sedition. However, all attempts at banning coffee failed, even though the death penalty was used during the reign of Murad IV (1623-40). The religious scholars eventually came to a sensible consensus that coffee was, in principle, permissible."

"He is not Aseem but he is a storm, he is the nation's another Gandhi."

A protest chant, chanted in Mumbai, over the arrest of the cartoonist Aseem Trivedi, charged with sedition.

In one of his cartoons the customary three lions in India's national emblem are replaced with three wolves, their teeth dripping blood, with the message "Long live corruption" written underneath.

Another cartoon depicts the Indian parliament as a giant toilet bowl.

Government officials say that while they are in favour of free speech, there is a thin line between that and insulting national symbols....

Sedition = to "urge disaffection" toward the government or to promote "ill will or hostility" among groups.

According to the proposed anti-terrorism bill in Australia, where free speech doesn't seem to be much of a treasured value:

Public debate has been limited because the government did not publish the bill. The chief executive of the Australian Capitol Territory, Jon Stanhope, published it on his Web site three weeks ago, saying he thought broader public discussion was needed. Mr. Howard, leader of the center-right Liberal Party, reacted by refusing to provide Mr. Stanhope, of the Labor Party, any further drafts. Based on that draft, the proposed law would permit the police to use preventive detention for up to 14 days, during which time the detained person would be allowed to let only one family member know of the detention. It would be a crime for the family member to tell anyone else - even for a father to tell the detainee's mother, for instance. The definition of sedition would be expanded to include statements that "urge disaffection" toward the government, or that promote "ill will or hostility" among groups. Mr. Howard is expected to introduce the bill on Thursday. Approval is expected within days. Mr. Howard's party controls both houses of the Parliament, and the leader of the Labor Party, Kim Beazley, has said he supports such a law.

Well, I would urge disaffection toward the... Or, no, I guess you'd better be careful down there.

Is it clever to call your show "Morning Sedition"? Well, the play on Morning Edition has been used before. I'll just note that I started by misreading it as "Morning Sedation," thinking they were making fun of the tediousness of (some of) Morning Edition and then thinking "Sedation" isn't a good term to repeat to people when they are trying to get up in the morning. You don't want to pick a name that makes it easy to make a joke at your expense ("Morning Sedition"? More like Morning Sedation! ... ha ha....) And considering that a big theme of Air America is that liberals are patriots too, isn't sedition--"[c]onduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of a state"--the wrong word? Quite aside from that, isn't the liberal self-image "I'm a revolutionary" a bit tired? I mean like 30-years-out-of-date tired?