{"id":12632,"date":"2018-02-06T18:36:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-06T18:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.commoncause.org\/articles\/dont-dare-call-it-treason\/"},"modified":"2018-02-06T18:36:00","modified_gmt":"2018-02-06T18:36:00","slug":"dont-dare-call-it-treason","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/www.commoncause.org\/vi\/articles\/dont-dare-call-it-treason\/","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Dare Call It Treason"},"template":"","class_list":["post-12632","article","type-article","status-publish","hentry","article_type-blog-post"],"acf":{"details":{"summary":"Treason is the only crime defined in our Constitution; it doesn't include failing to applaud the president","featured_image":null,"article_type":1103,"authors":["{\"site_id\":\"1\",\"post_type\":\"person\",\"post_id\":12633}"],"related_issues":false,"related_work":false,"location":null},"sidebar":{"helper_enable_sidebar":false,"helper_media_contact":{"heading":"Media Contact","manually_enter_person":false,"person":null,"name":"","role":"","phone":"","email":""},"helper_links_downloads":{"heading":"Links & Downloads","links":null}},"page_layout":[{"acf_fc_layout":"layout_wysiwyg","_acfe_flexible_toggle":null,"component_wysiwyg":{"content":"

In Cincinnati on Monday, President Trump took a swipe<\/a> at Congressional Democrats’ lack of enthusiasm during his State of the Union address. As is common for members of the opposition party at the annual event, most Democrats remained seated and kept their hands still as their Republican counterparts stood to cheer the president’s remarks.<\/p>

“They were like death and un-American. Un-American,” Trump lamented. “Somebody said, ‘Treasonous.’ I mean, yeah, I guess, why not… Can we call that treason?”<\/p>

In a word, no.<\/p>

In the United States, treason has a specific legal definition, indeed it is the ch\u1ec9 m\u1ed9t<\/em> crime specifically defined in our Constitution.<\/p>

Theo Article III<\/a>, “Treason against the United States, shall consist ch\u1ec9 m\u1ed9t<\/em><\/strong> in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort” (emphasis added). This was a narrow definition even for the framers of the Constitution, and it was deliberate. They aimed to avoid the abuses<\/a> caused by an overly-broad definition of treason in English law, which had expanded the crime in an effort to target the king’s enemies.<\/p>

Of course, when most people describe something as “treason,” they aren’t rigorously applying the constitutional language. They are thinking of the more general definition<\/a>: “the crime of betraying one’s country.”<\/p>

For instance, when former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon described<\/a> the July 2016 meeting of senior Trump campaign officials with Russian officials in Trump Tower as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” he presumably wasn’t trying to suggest that Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, or Paul Manafort had declared war on the United States.<\/p>