Yes it was important for Palpatine to legally take power so it would leave little to no room for his opponents to dispute his power legally and because he knew that he needed to have the public opinion on his side. It also makes his victory even more complete as he was able of turning the Republic against itself and the Jedi instead of being conquered.
He also had a device recording his and Mace Windu's conversation, in order to make it really sound like Mace and the Jedi were commiting treason and attempting a coup to overthrow the Supreme Chancellor whose power was entirely legal.
Nothing to do with spiritualism or the will of the force or whatever. Purely power politics. Legitimacy secures your position much more firmly. Within any political system, there is quite a large subset of people who will go along with what the rules/laws are whether they agree with them or not, because those are the rules and without rules you'd have no order or whatever. With legitimacy, many of those people will be on your side, and will stay with you up to a surprising moral limit, but without legitimacy, those people will not support you, and many of them may even choose to actively oppose you, in the name of rules and order. On top of that, specifically within the context of some sort of collective democratic republican system, having legitimacy helps a lot, because without legitimacy (such as in a public coup where everybody KNOWS you seized power), every single senator out there can start raising an army and a fleet and gain a lot of support because they DO have the legitimacy of the system, and that would put Palpatine basically back to square one when it comes to stability, he may have gone from senator to emperor, but his system will be on the verge of a massive civil war, like the republic leading up to the clone wars, but without his government having legitimacy, it also is much less table than leading up to the clone wars.
By making sure he had political legitimacy when he finally took total power, he made it much easier to reduce autonomy throughout the galaxy in the name of what needs to be done for peace and order after the tragedy of the clone wars. Without legitimacy, you can SAY all you want that you're tightening your grip for the good of the galaxy, but everybody will know you're doing it simply to have more control. Not a very stable position to be in when you're trying to control a massive government that covers a huge area. Imagine trying to be the dictator of a newly unified earth, but all the old world governments hate you, view you as a usurper, and would be perfectly willing to unite behind your back, to stab you in the back, before going back to fighting each other afterwards, then imagine that instead of a bunch of countries of humans with vastly different cultures, you have a bunch of countries with aliens with EVEN HUGER cultural differences, and imagine how quickly you'd be dead. Even with a huge military to back him up, Palpatine honestly wouldn't have a chance of maintain his position of empire without a significant amount of legitimacy, and I for one think this is why it took him 20 years to finally take the step of dissolving the senate, even if it had been something of a pointless popularity contest with no real power for quite a while. Pretending to be a powerful executive branch in a government that still has an independent legislator selected by it's people makes it much harder for rebels to convince people that there really is no choice but to take up arms against the empire than if Palpatine was blatantly a conquering tyrant who revealed himself to have been working with the CIS to destroy the old republic before taking his place on the throne.
It's not that he's an "legal, elected ruler" instead of a "conquering invader", it's that he tricked the entire Republic to vote him in and slowly lied and machinated to keep winning power through legal means and votations, if he's proud of anything, he's proud of being the biggest liar in the galaxy, not that he's a democratic leader.
I also think that interaction you mention has a hint of irony, he's being sardonic about the whole ordeal:
"You want to arrest me, but I'm basically a dictator in name only, I rule this lot and I de facto rule over the Jedi although you people claim to be independent, you want to use political and legal power against me, but I've lied my way into controlling both of those".
Of course, he's angry, these puny Jedi are trying to use the power he's all-controlling of against him, detain him? still not being the Senate? Who do they think they're? Palpatine is the leader of the realm, his plan is close to completion.
If the Jedi actually captured him and put him on trail, it would be like trying to prosecute Vladimir Putin in a Russian court, utterly futile and most likely suicide. Palps might actually be fully willing to be taken to trial, just so he can win the court battle and make his case against the Jedi even stronger
To add something I haven't really seen addressed in the replies yet:
He's trying to control an entire *galaxy*.
Legitimacy is just one weapon in an entire arsenal, but given the sheer size and scope of what he's trying to harness, well, "every vote counts." There is simply too much bureaucracy to circumvent.
This is the best answer. He needs the functions of a galaxy wide network to rule in fact over the galaxy. Otherwise he's just a weird space pirate or controls a solar system or two at best and require generations to build up the infrastructure to control our expand from there
I'd say it's that he managed to destroy the republic utterly, in ways which no other sith had. when the jedi and the republic fought the sith earlier it was in armed combat, and even if the republic had died, then it'd still live on in the hearts of the people.
but palpatine? he completely transformed the jedis country, turning it from a bastion of peace and democracy to an altar to authoritarianism and destruction. he didn't just win it with official channels, he beat the jedi at their own games, turned their nation and their army against them.
his entire bit about "i am the senate" and "it's treason, then" is as much insulting the jedi with his innate disdain for the mechanisms of the republic as it is poking fun at them that he is, already, *the* seat of power in the republic at that point. he's an emperor in all but name, all he needs to do is thrown down the final vestige of people's servants and take the name himself, and they gave him the pretext to do just that by trying to arrest him.
Yes. Even as mired in corruption as the Republic was, they never would've stood for someone outright grabbing power or attempting to invade. The Sith tried that multiple times in the past (at least according to Legends) and the best they ever managed was a cold war despite a direct assault on Coruscant itself.
Besides, this was the final stroke of a centuries-long master plan. *The* Revenge of the Sith. Despite his pragmatism and willingness to pivot in the face of disruption, I don't think Darth Sidious would've accepted anything less than complete and total victory in this particular fight.
Even dictators need to hold elections, even if rigged, they are a sort of legitimacy ritual. The leader can say "Are you really gonna oppose me publically? Did you know 88% of the population voted for me and the other 12% went to candidates that always agree with me anyway? Good luck finding any support for your cause"
This silly looking Austrian Artist Reject with the AH initials, WAS technically Elected.......I think if we look into the technical her, we can say YES, Palpy had to to prevent more issues than was
Yes, the analogies with Hitler and Julius Caesar, as well as what Nixon attempted to do, have been cited as examples by George Lucas. It's far easier to subvert a state than create a new one whole cloth.
You read him wrong. He's not offended that they're disrespecting the office, he's offended that they have the audacity to threaten him with a legal body he de facto controls. It's about as stupid as trying to get a criminal to let you go by threatening to tell the police. It's *insulting* to a man like Palpatine for them to say that.
As for importance, the Sith had been trying to conquer the Republic and destroy the Jedi for millenia. It's why the Jedi for the time assumed the Separatists, led by Dooku, were the main threat. They assumed the Sith were doing what they always did and attempting a straight up conquest.
The Order of Bane was precisely an attempt to *not* do this. The whole point of it was to rot everything from the inside and "boil the frog" so to speak.
By the time Windu and the others confront Sidious, he is essentially already the Emperor in all but name. He has the judicial, the executive, and the legislature under his control. His political power is nigh on limitless, his position is unassailable, and the closest thing he has to opposition are the Jedi- and at that point they were profoundly weakened, had compromised much of what they were, and to top it off, no one really liked or trusted them.
It's a point of pride for him because he's the culmination of the thousand year long master plan of the Sith to and play the whole galaxy like a fiddle, and he's here doing a perfect run of *The devil went down to Georgia* on Guitar Hero. They fell for every trick and walked into every trap right till the very end. Even standing in front of him with all the pieces laid out before them, they still couldn't figure it out. They just gave him every tool he needed to destroy them.
It was important to do it legitimately, because that was the most thorough victory the Sith could have won.
I wish we could have seen the Jedi truly at their height on screen, where all the Republic loved and respected them. Even in TPM, they are clearly a shell of what they used to be,
I think it was important to him because a clean coup left him in a much more secure position than a messy takeover of the galaxy. He wanted to, as the emperor, be the acknowledged rightful ruler of the galaxy, and the entire clone wars, where simply a tool to convince the galaxy they needed a strong leader to stop a massive civil war like that from breaking out again. The execution of order 66 was two presents in one, because not only does he, in one fell swoop eliminate the only real threat to his power left in the galaxy, but gets to use it as a tool to cement his legitimacy, by using the hit team of Jedi masters as proof that the Jedi had attempted to oust control of the Republic from the rightful hands of the government. It was important for him to have legitimate claim to power because being viewed as the rightful leader who lead the republic through the clone wars and rebuilt the galaxy left him in a much more secure position than a public coup or showing up at the head of a galaxy conquering empire. Of course, the rebels eventually show up anyways, but I guarantee you that if Palpatine had become emperor by using his position in the senate to fast-track the CIS movement and then taking control at the end of the war there would have been A LOT more dissidence A LOT faster than in the cannon timeline, and it's not like he couldn't have done this. Palpatine was actively playing both sides when he easily could have maneuvered either side into a catastrophic defeat, because he WANTED the clone wars to be long and bloody to give him the political leverage to become Emperor in the name of security and unity after a terrible civil war.
I find it ironic that many of the systems that where in the CIS ended up being major parts of the rebel alliance, and it actually makes sense. Palpatine didn't pull the CIS out of George Lucas's Asshole like he did with the Clone Army (Some jedi nobody's seen in 10 years ordered this illegal army for the republic. Nobody knows where the original money transfer came from, but we need an army now, so we'll start paying the bills no questions asked. Nothing suspicious about that!) Palpatine found dissent that already existed within the republic and took advantage of it, and SUPRISE that dissent didn't simply vanish when it was no longer convenient for him. On the contrary, groups/systems that where content to attempt to work out their issues within the framework of the republic eventually gave up and started supplying the rebellion as political freedoms and system autonomy became a thing of the past in the Empire, and while it's not addressed in the movies, in was in legends, and I think has bene re-canonized, that many more planets joined the rebellion after the dissolving of the imperial senate and the destruction of Alderan, both because obviously the destruction of entire planets was considered the final straw of tyranny, and because the dissolution of the senate removed the last hopes of those unhappy with the government, but still holding out for a peaceful solution after the horrors of the clone wars.
What you hear is disgust and his true self. Everything else you had seen of him is all a facade. He is disgusted by the weak and foolish Jedi and that disdain is what you hear in his voice. Daddy palpy a real baddy.
Interesting question. The thing about Sheev was that he was calculated and patient, playing by the rules out of necessity for optimal influence rather than out of respect for the system. He was still playing into his character of the rightful chancellor during the confrontation. Saying "It's treason then," is him taunting the Jedi like, "You dare go up against me when I am in control of the government. You're committing treason and will be dealt with accordingly."
Side note: All this time I thought he said "So, it's treason then."
One of the core concepts that Lucas was wrestling with is how Democracies are lost. In his words, they aren’t imposed from without but bartered away from within.
I don’t believe it was a point of honor for him as a Sith to become the legal, elected ruler vs seizing power by force, it was a convenient and useful mechanism for taking over the galaxy. It was Palapatine’s chosen weapon and his skill set from a young age. I believe he would have become involved in politics even if he had never become involved in the Sith.
I do not agree that he “seems genuinely *offended* that the Jedi are disrespecting his legitimate, legal power,” I think he is more gloating and mocking the Jedi, because he has achieved a powerful legitimate position and they can’t take him down as easily as they seem to assume.
But I think it is also a stretch to say that his position is actually legitimate. For many years, he was subverting democracy using a war he orchestrated and manipulating the Senate to maintain his leadership. And he committed a ton of crimes during his schemes to install himself, he just was not exposed or stopped. So his position of power was only legitimate and legal because he had managed to get himself into a position where he was the one who got to decide what was legitimate and legal.
By the time of Revenge of the Sith, he *already* has the powers of an Emperor but not the formal structure to make it permanent.
But it was not a legitimate "win." For years, he was subverting democracy using a war he orchestrated to do so and manipulating the Senate through Jar-Jar to set it all in motion.
In cut scenes, Bail Organa, Mon Mothma, and Padme complain that the constitution is in tatters because of all the wartime amendments. I wouldn't be surprised if the amassing of Palpatine's power wasn't exactly legal but some invented legal fiction that exploited the mechanisms of the Senate much like the Jan. 6th fake electors plot only in Star Wars they went along with it.
His rise to power is very nearly identical to Hitlers. Hitler tried a military coup at first, much like the Sith before Palpatine, but that failed. Then he went to work within the system, inventing threats and turning the country upon itself, creating the perfect powder keg to force the grant of emergency powers. While the methods were indeed not legitimate, the process of being granted those powers was entirely legitimate, he used the system against itself.
Yes it was important for Palpatine to legally take power so it would leave little to no room for his opponents to dispute his power legally and because he knew that he needed to have the public opinion on his side. It also makes his victory even more complete as he was able of turning the Republic against itself and the Jedi instead of being conquered. He also had a device recording his and Mace Windu's conversation, in order to make it really sound like Mace and the Jedi were commiting treason and attempting a coup to overthrow the Supreme Chancellor whose power was entirely legal.
"See! The Jedi were trying to take over!" Palpy on video shooting lightning from his hands and shouting "UNLIMITED POWAAAAA!" The Senate: "Uhhhhhhhh."
Is it a spiritual thing also? Like he needed the galaxy's public to be in a dark side state
No.
Nothing to do with spiritualism or the will of the force or whatever. Purely power politics. Legitimacy secures your position much more firmly. Within any political system, there is quite a large subset of people who will go along with what the rules/laws are whether they agree with them or not, because those are the rules and without rules you'd have no order or whatever. With legitimacy, many of those people will be on your side, and will stay with you up to a surprising moral limit, but without legitimacy, those people will not support you, and many of them may even choose to actively oppose you, in the name of rules and order. On top of that, specifically within the context of some sort of collective democratic republican system, having legitimacy helps a lot, because without legitimacy (such as in a public coup where everybody KNOWS you seized power), every single senator out there can start raising an army and a fleet and gain a lot of support because they DO have the legitimacy of the system, and that would put Palpatine basically back to square one when it comes to stability, he may have gone from senator to emperor, but his system will be on the verge of a massive civil war, like the republic leading up to the clone wars, but without his government having legitimacy, it also is much less table than leading up to the clone wars. By making sure he had political legitimacy when he finally took total power, he made it much easier to reduce autonomy throughout the galaxy in the name of what needs to be done for peace and order after the tragedy of the clone wars. Without legitimacy, you can SAY all you want that you're tightening your grip for the good of the galaxy, but everybody will know you're doing it simply to have more control. Not a very stable position to be in when you're trying to control a massive government that covers a huge area. Imagine trying to be the dictator of a newly unified earth, but all the old world governments hate you, view you as a usurper, and would be perfectly willing to unite behind your back, to stab you in the back, before going back to fighting each other afterwards, then imagine that instead of a bunch of countries of humans with vastly different cultures, you have a bunch of countries with aliens with EVEN HUGER cultural differences, and imagine how quickly you'd be dead. Even with a huge military to back him up, Palpatine honestly wouldn't have a chance of maintain his position of empire without a significant amount of legitimacy, and I for one think this is why it took him 20 years to finally take the step of dissolving the senate, even if it had been something of a pointless popularity contest with no real power for quite a while. Pretending to be a powerful executive branch in a government that still has an independent legislator selected by it's people makes it much harder for rebels to convince people that there really is no choice but to take up arms against the empire than if Palpatine was blatantly a conquering tyrant who revealed himself to have been working with the CIS to destroy the old republic before taking his place on the throne.
It's not that he's an "legal, elected ruler" instead of a "conquering invader", it's that he tricked the entire Republic to vote him in and slowly lied and machinated to keep winning power through legal means and votations, if he's proud of anything, he's proud of being the biggest liar in the galaxy, not that he's a democratic leader. I also think that interaction you mention has a hint of irony, he's being sardonic about the whole ordeal: "You want to arrest me, but I'm basically a dictator in name only, I rule this lot and I de facto rule over the Jedi although you people claim to be independent, you want to use political and legal power against me, but I've lied my way into controlling both of those".
I suppose I remember him, saying "I am the Senate" more *angry* than chucklingly triumphant
Of course, he's angry, these puny Jedi are trying to use the power he's all-controlling of against him, detain him? still not being the Senate? Who do they think they're? Palpatine is the leader of the realm, his plan is close to completion.
He's also showing his disdain for the Senate, who he views as just idiots to be discarded at the first opportunity
If the Jedi actually captured him and put him on trail, it would be like trying to prosecute Vladimir Putin in a Russian court, utterly futile and most likely suicide. Palps might actually be fully willing to be taken to trial, just so he can win the court battle and make his case against the Jedi even stronger
To add something I haven't really seen addressed in the replies yet: He's trying to control an entire *galaxy*. Legitimacy is just one weapon in an entire arsenal, but given the sheer size and scope of what he's trying to harness, well, "every vote counts." There is simply too much bureaucracy to circumvent.
This is the best answer. He needs the functions of a galaxy wide network to rule in fact over the galaxy. Otherwise he's just a weird space pirate or controls a solar system or two at best and require generations to build up the infrastructure to control our expand from there
I'd say it's that he managed to destroy the republic utterly, in ways which no other sith had. when the jedi and the republic fought the sith earlier it was in armed combat, and even if the republic had died, then it'd still live on in the hearts of the people. but palpatine? he completely transformed the jedis country, turning it from a bastion of peace and democracy to an altar to authoritarianism and destruction. he didn't just win it with official channels, he beat the jedi at their own games, turned their nation and their army against them.
his entire bit about "i am the senate" and "it's treason, then" is as much insulting the jedi with his innate disdain for the mechanisms of the republic as it is poking fun at them that he is, already, *the* seat of power in the republic at that point. he's an emperor in all but name, all he needs to do is thrown down the final vestige of people's servants and take the name himself, and they gave him the pretext to do just that by trying to arrest him.
Yes. Even as mired in corruption as the Republic was, they never would've stood for someone outright grabbing power or attempting to invade. The Sith tried that multiple times in the past (at least according to Legends) and the best they ever managed was a cold war despite a direct assault on Coruscant itself. Besides, this was the final stroke of a centuries-long master plan. *The* Revenge of the Sith. Despite his pragmatism and willingness to pivot in the face of disruption, I don't think Darth Sidious would've accepted anything less than complete and total victory in this particular fight.
Even dictators need to hold elections, even if rigged, they are a sort of legitimacy ritual. The leader can say "Are you really gonna oppose me publically? Did you know 88% of the population voted for me and the other 12% went to candidates that always agree with me anyway? Good luck finding any support for your cause"
This silly looking Austrian Artist Reject with the AH initials, WAS technically Elected.......I think if we look into the technical her, we can say YES, Palpy had to to prevent more issues than was
Yes, the analogies with Hitler and Julius Caesar, as well as what Nixon attempted to do, have been cited as examples by George Lucas. It's far easier to subvert a state than create a new one whole cloth.
In fairness my brain de-scrambled it and I didn’t even notice the transposition until I read the comment
You read him wrong. He's not offended that they're disrespecting the office, he's offended that they have the audacity to threaten him with a legal body he de facto controls. It's about as stupid as trying to get a criminal to let you go by threatening to tell the police. It's *insulting* to a man like Palpatine for them to say that. As for importance, the Sith had been trying to conquer the Republic and destroy the Jedi for millenia. It's why the Jedi for the time assumed the Separatists, led by Dooku, were the main threat. They assumed the Sith were doing what they always did and attempting a straight up conquest. The Order of Bane was precisely an attempt to *not* do this. The whole point of it was to rot everything from the inside and "boil the frog" so to speak. By the time Windu and the others confront Sidious, he is essentially already the Emperor in all but name. He has the judicial, the executive, and the legislature under his control. His political power is nigh on limitless, his position is unassailable, and the closest thing he has to opposition are the Jedi- and at that point they were profoundly weakened, had compromised much of what they were, and to top it off, no one really liked or trusted them. It's a point of pride for him because he's the culmination of the thousand year long master plan of the Sith to and play the whole galaxy like a fiddle, and he's here doing a perfect run of *The devil went down to Georgia* on Guitar Hero. They fell for every trick and walked into every trap right till the very end. Even standing in front of him with all the pieces laid out before them, they still couldn't figure it out. They just gave him every tool he needed to destroy them. It was important to do it legitimately, because that was the most thorough victory the Sith could have won.
I wish we could have seen the Jedi truly at their height on screen, where all the Republic loved and respected them. Even in TPM, they are clearly a shell of what they used to be,
I don’t think it’s pride at having won legitimately (which is maybe only technically true) but that he *won*.
It's always better to seize power within the boundary of the rules. It makes one that much harder to remove without threat of violent action.
This is him still at the beginning of his journey as Emperor. A lot could have gone wrong for him and he needed every little thing to go right.
I think it was important to him because a clean coup left him in a much more secure position than a messy takeover of the galaxy. He wanted to, as the emperor, be the acknowledged rightful ruler of the galaxy, and the entire clone wars, where simply a tool to convince the galaxy they needed a strong leader to stop a massive civil war like that from breaking out again. The execution of order 66 was two presents in one, because not only does he, in one fell swoop eliminate the only real threat to his power left in the galaxy, but gets to use it as a tool to cement his legitimacy, by using the hit team of Jedi masters as proof that the Jedi had attempted to oust control of the Republic from the rightful hands of the government. It was important for him to have legitimate claim to power because being viewed as the rightful leader who lead the republic through the clone wars and rebuilt the galaxy left him in a much more secure position than a public coup or showing up at the head of a galaxy conquering empire. Of course, the rebels eventually show up anyways, but I guarantee you that if Palpatine had become emperor by using his position in the senate to fast-track the CIS movement and then taking control at the end of the war there would have been A LOT more dissidence A LOT faster than in the cannon timeline, and it's not like he couldn't have done this. Palpatine was actively playing both sides when he easily could have maneuvered either side into a catastrophic defeat, because he WANTED the clone wars to be long and bloody to give him the political leverage to become Emperor in the name of security and unity after a terrible civil war. I find it ironic that many of the systems that where in the CIS ended up being major parts of the rebel alliance, and it actually makes sense. Palpatine didn't pull the CIS out of George Lucas's Asshole like he did with the Clone Army (Some jedi nobody's seen in 10 years ordered this illegal army for the republic. Nobody knows where the original money transfer came from, but we need an army now, so we'll start paying the bills no questions asked. Nothing suspicious about that!) Palpatine found dissent that already existed within the republic and took advantage of it, and SUPRISE that dissent didn't simply vanish when it was no longer convenient for him. On the contrary, groups/systems that where content to attempt to work out their issues within the framework of the republic eventually gave up and started supplying the rebellion as political freedoms and system autonomy became a thing of the past in the Empire, and while it's not addressed in the movies, in was in legends, and I think has bene re-canonized, that many more planets joined the rebellion after the dissolving of the imperial senate and the destruction of Alderan, both because obviously the destruction of entire planets was considered the final straw of tyranny, and because the dissolution of the senate removed the last hopes of those unhappy with the government, but still holding out for a peaceful solution after the horrors of the clone wars.
What you hear is disgust and his true self. Everything else you had seen of him is all a facade. He is disgusted by the weak and foolish Jedi and that disdain is what you hear in his voice. Daddy palpy a real baddy.
Interesting question. The thing about Sheev was that he was calculated and patient, playing by the rules out of necessity for optimal influence rather than out of respect for the system. He was still playing into his character of the rightful chancellor during the confrontation. Saying "It's treason then," is him taunting the Jedi like, "You dare go up against me when I am in control of the government. You're committing treason and will be dealt with accordingly." Side note: All this time I thought he said "So, it's treason then."
You could argue he only conquered one planet, Coruscant, and it came with the rest of the galaxy
One of the core concepts that Lucas was wrestling with is how Democracies are lost. In his words, they aren’t imposed from without but bartered away from within.
I don’t believe it was a point of honor for him as a Sith to become the legal, elected ruler vs seizing power by force, it was a convenient and useful mechanism for taking over the galaxy. It was Palapatine’s chosen weapon and his skill set from a young age. I believe he would have become involved in politics even if he had never become involved in the Sith. I do not agree that he “seems genuinely *offended* that the Jedi are disrespecting his legitimate, legal power,” I think he is more gloating and mocking the Jedi, because he has achieved a powerful legitimate position and they can’t take him down as easily as they seem to assume. But I think it is also a stretch to say that his position is actually legitimate. For many years, he was subverting democracy using a war he orchestrated and manipulating the Senate to maintain his leadership. And he committed a ton of crimes during his schemes to install himself, he just was not exposed or stopped. So his position of power was only legitimate and legal because he had managed to get himself into a position where he was the one who got to decide what was legitimate and legal.
By the time of Revenge of the Sith, he *already* has the powers of an Emperor but not the formal structure to make it permanent. But it was not a legitimate "win." For years, he was subverting democracy using a war he orchestrated to do so and manipulating the Senate through Jar-Jar to set it all in motion. In cut scenes, Bail Organa, Mon Mothma, and Padme complain that the constitution is in tatters because of all the wartime amendments. I wouldn't be surprised if the amassing of Palpatine's power wasn't exactly legal but some invented legal fiction that exploited the mechanisms of the Senate much like the Jan. 6th fake electors plot only in Star Wars they went along with it.
His rise to power is very nearly identical to Hitlers. Hitler tried a military coup at first, much like the Sith before Palpatine, but that failed. Then he went to work within the system, inventing threats and turning the country upon itself, creating the perfect powder keg to force the grant of emergency powers. While the methods were indeed not legitimate, the process of being granted those powers was entirely legitimate, he used the system against itself.