By William Buckley. Published April 5, 2000. The Sacramento Bee
Over the weekend we had a flush -- and it is by no means gone -- of 200-proof populism. It looked for a while as if The People would not permit federal marshals to approach the house where Elian Gonzalez is living if their purpose is to act out the warrant to bring him to the airport and
deposit him on a plane bound for Havana.
You don't usually get, in a functioning democracy, such heady whiffs of independence. Recall the scene where the Cossack officials simply refused to fire on the people in St. Petersburg who had invaded imperial deposits of grain? Enter the revolution.
Suppose that at Rouen, some 600 years ago, the citizens had surrounded the prison where Joan of Arc was kept and prevented her from being taken to the square to be burned alive. Very nearly unimaginable, given the ratio of government over civil power in those days. In the extreme, of course,
the modern government has power many times that of protesting citizens, even if we assume that some protesters in Miami came to the scene with shotguns and pistols.
But the scene in Florida is one in which practicing lawyers pleading the case of the child are asserting rights of de facto sovereignty. Their argument goes along these lines, that there is an orderly community in Miami of Cuban-Americans, and that in the matter of Elian Gonzalez they are
affirming the most basic right, which is to protect a minor.
Whistling over the heads of such pleaders are instructions from a federal court, from the attorney general of the United States, and from the president of the United States, that is to say from two of the three branches of the U.S. government, telling the mob to make way for the federal
escorts, so that they can lead Elian back to his father. But the mob is asserting what would go by the name of a civil enclave of resistance.
Suppose that, in Montgomery, Ala., 45 years ago, the order came out to take Martin Luther King from his home to a place of detention and a crowd had come together, encircling his house, defying the officers, federal or state, to come in. One pauses between what would be done in such a
situation, in such an impasse, and what should be done.
The law would recede slowly and grudgingly to the back of the bus, one would think. The authorities view the pressures as intolerable. In vastly different circumstances we had that deadlock. It was 1971 and Lt. William Calley had been found guilty of presiding over the slaughter of civilians
in My Lai. The court ordered life imprisonment. The resulting uproar stopped government in its tracks and it was only when President Nixon announced that he would review the sentence, that the country could turn to other concerns.
For a brief moment the people were fixed on what they saw as an injustice, a young infantry officer being punished for his panicked and misbegotten execution of wartime duty. Here people are saying that they will flatly defy any law that says it is the right thing to do to take a 6-year-old
whose mother died in attempting to bring the child to a free country, back to the tyranny she died thinking him free from forever.
What would they do? I mean, the feds, just to begin with? If the Elianites set up day-and-night human cordons pledged to keeping him in Florida with his relatives, is the Reno Assault Team really prepared to do everything necessary to bring him out, presumably, alive? What instruments will
they use? We know from the long experience in civil disobedience 30 years back that there are limits to what is doable when the mandate is civilized. Gov. George Wallace, in those days, was Mr. Tough Guy and his answer to the question of what he would do if protesting students spread themselves
out in the way of Army trucks was a chuckled reference to the hardy tires of Army trucks.
But the Reno Assault Team isn't likely to go to such lengths. They can drag 10, 100, 1,000 protesters out of the way, but eventually they run out of handcuffs, don't they? And there is Elian, still sitting there on the ground floor with his crayons, and those jabbering lawyers taking deep
philosophical draughts of original jurisdiction and the sovereign rights of dominant majorities ...
Oh my goodness. If ever there was a time for diplomacy, it has come. What can the Reno diehards do? Well, why not promote a movement to impeach Al Gore for obstruction of justice? That would bring all kinds of lively political thought into the picture, and give us an arresting few weeks with
benumbed courts, lockjawed legislators, and federal marshals calling their insurance agents and asking for bigger policies.
Of course, another way to go is to stall some more. Miss Reno might appoint a commission to study the whole question, or rather to restudy it. The commission will be told not to give out its finding until after -- November. Meanwhile, a member of it can give out the hint that the commission
will recommend that it be Elian who makes the final decision, but that he will have to wait until he attains his majority before making it.
Write to William Buckley at Universal Press Syndicate: 4520 Main St., Kansas City, Mo. 64111.
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