Ahn Young-joon/AP Photo
South Korea’s main opposition Democratic Party leader Lee Jae-myung speaks during a rally against President Yoon Suk Yeol at the National Assembly in Seoul, South Korea, December 4, 2024. The signs read, “Yoon Suk Yeol should resign.”
As of this writing, Donald Trump, from what I’ve seen, hasn’t tweeted or commented about South Korea President Yoon Suk Yeol’s out-of-the-blue declaration of martial law, or the unanimous vote in that country’s National Assembly to oppose it, Yoon’s withdrawal of his declaration, and now, his impending impeachment. Trump has often displayed his own proclivities toward tin-pot dictatorship with his fanboy appreciations of other countries’ autocrats (Putin, Xi, Orbán). So far, though, he’s somehow managed to restrain himself from gushing over Yoon’s power grab. Whether that’s because Yoon quickly backed off is not yet clear.
But one thing that is clear beyond all doubt is that Korea’s National Assembly members have a fundamental appreciation of democracy that is utterly lacking in our own Republicans. Korea’s legislators voted, one and all, to reject Yoon’s power grab; some of them reportedly climbed though the Assembly’s windows, when the army had blocked the building’s doors, so they could get to the floor and cast their votes. No such commitments to democracy and the rule of law were evident among the Republicans who voted to reject the Electoral College tallies from Arizona and Pennsylvania on January 6th, or who subsequently voted against impeaching and convicting Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Yoon, by contrast, is now sure to be tossed out of office by the Assembly for his attempt to seize power.
Today, some Republican senators appear opposed to allowing Trump to make recess appointments to high government posts, as that would effectively strip them of their hard-won power. Similar thoughts doubtless informed the members of South Korea’s National Assembly. But January 6th was not only a direct assault, but also a physical assault on Congress and its powers, and the Republicans let it pass.
As David French has outlined in The New York Times, our Constitution does not directly give the president the power to invoke martial law, but it does give him the power to authorize the Army to repel an invasion (which is how Trump and his fellow Republicans characterize undocumented immigrants’ border crossings), while the 1792 Insurrection Act authorizes the president to send in the troops to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy.” This would not be cause for worry but for the fact that Trump and his MAGAnauts see and define “conspiracies” much as they see and define “invasion,” to mean any impediment to their agenda and rule.
Would congressional Republicans object to such purely political deployments of our armed forces? Well, they didn’t object, in sufficient numbers, to Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, or even his summoning a mob to attack them.
How to account for the greater appreciation that South Korean legislators and the South Korean public show toward democratic norms and constitutional order than that shown by today’s Republicans? Clearly, Yoon is nowhere near as skilled a demagogue as Trump. And I confess I have no idea whether Rupert Murdoch or somebody like him has a “news” outlet in Seoul, or whether South Korean talk radio and social media are befouled by the kind of fetid falsehoods that dominate ours.
That said, how about we trade our congressional Republicans for South Korea’s National Assembly members? Those Koreans have a commitment to democracy that our Republicans palpably and dangerously lack.
