…
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it, would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy.
And this effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith we trust.
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(Image: Inaugural poet Amanda Gorman reads “The Hill We Climb” as seen on PBS.)
From insurrection based on a Big Lie to death on a scale never before seen in our country, Donald Trump is finally on his way out.
One year after the first case of COVID-19 diagnosed in the United States 24,246,230 Americans have been infected and 401,553 have perished.
Joe Biden has a steep hill to climb.
(Image: Seth Abramson on Twitter.)
When we last checked in with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, he had issued a statement that failed to hold Donald Trump responsible for months of lies about the election, underhanded attempts to overturn it, and then the violence on the 6th.
McCarthy subsequently spoke on the House floor, in a call for unity, explained why he would oppose impeachment:
A vote to impeach will further divide the nation. A vote to impeach will further fan the flames of partisan division.
Most Americans want neither inaction nor retribution. They want durable, bipartisan justice. That path is still available, but it is not the path we are on today.
He continued by placing a measure of responsibility on Trump:
That doesn’t mean the President is free from fault. The President bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.
These facts require immediate actions by President Trump: Accept his share of responsibility. Quell the brewing unrest. And ensure President-Elect Biden is able to successfully begin his term.
In the context of a months-long campaign before November 4 to undermine the election, repeated attempts to overthrow the results afterwards, and stirring up a mob to demand that the Vice President and Congress declare Trump, not Biden, the victor, this is pretty weak tea.
Nor is this circumscribed view of the President’s responsibility surprising considering Congressman McCarthy’s role in the subversion.
On November 5 on Fox News, McCarthy insisted:
We can unite together. And you don’t need to be a Republican. If you believe in every legal vote needs to count, if you believe in American process, join together and let’s stop this.
McCarthy — whom Trump affectionately calls, “My Kevin” — ingratiated himself with Trump with a lie, which he followed up with a call to action: “Let’s stop this.”
A month later, McCarthy was one of 126 GOP House members — well over half the caucus — to sign onto a meritless court challenge to Biden’s victory.
On January 6, he voted to reject Biden’s victory in Arizona. And then, hours after the violence in the Capitol, McCarthy cast a vote with 137 other House Republicans to reject the electoral votes of Pennsylvania.
McCarthy lied about the outcome of the election. He urged on others to act on this lie. He joined a suit in court to overturn the results. Then he voted to throw out Biden’s victories in two battleground states that Trump falsely claims he won.
McCarthy doesn’t offer a mea culpa or an apology or even an excuse for this string of “undemocratic, un-American, and criminal” actions (to borrow his words). He doesn’t acknowledge his bad behavior at all. Instead he appeals for unity.
In his spoken remarks that evening, McCarthy said, “this call for unity may ring hollow.” That’s for sure.
(Image: PBS.)
The U.S. Army said that Jacob Fracker – one of the two off-duty Virginia police officers who have been arrested on federal charges related to the Capitol riot – is a corporal in the Virginia National Guard.
The disclosure of Fracker’s status as a guardsman comes as thousands of National Guard service members, some of them armed, provide security in and around the Capitol in the wake of the deadly riot Jan. 6.
Yes, police “have First Amendment rights.” And in a well-disciplined police force, as in a well-disciplined military unit, organizational solidarity may matter more than a member’s attraction to groups and ideologies on the extreme fringes of society. The center holds.
McVeigh, a decorated Gulf War vet, didn’t blow up the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168 people, until after leaving the military. That explosion was 25 years ago: before the nation’s first Black president served two terms, before Donald Trump’s election and (nearly complete) one term, before white terrorist groups became emboldened and increased their numbers, before QAnon was even a thing, and — yes — before a Republican president embraced, energized, and enabled white nationalists.
The violence at the Capitol on January 6 (with all that came in the months before) raises the live possibility that the police and the national guard may harbor potential security threats to the president-elect and other officials, as well as guests, at the inauguration.
Mark this as one more consequence of the campaigns, election, and tenure of Donald Trump. The once unthinkable has become a ghastly possibility.
[Update:] “Twelve National Guard troops deployed to Washington ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration were flagged during background checks and have been sent home, Defense Department officials confirmed Tuesday, offering scant details as to what raised suspicions about them.”
(Image of Jacob Fracker and Thomas “T.J.” Robertson from CNBC.)
Mitch McConnell hasn’t yet decided whether or not he will vote to convict Donald Trump at the Senate impeachment trial. He announced yesterday, “…while the press has been full of speculation, I have not made a final decision on how I will vote and I intend to listen to the legal arguments when they are presented to the Senate.”
This is in keeping with McConnell’s approach to sticky political issues, as described in The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell, the Alec MacGillis book about the senator, which portrays McConnell as a highly skilled negotiator, who often swoops in after lying low as controversies rage and other political actors skirmish.
MacGillis — describing one of the shutdown episodes generated by “archconservatives” aka “self-aggrandizing extremists” in the Republican caucus — quotes former Senator Judd Greg (a McConnell ally) on the Kentucky senator’s approach in that crisis and in other controversies:
The Republican Party, after Trump’s failed insurrection and the two Georgia defeats, is at war with itself. Lots of stuff is going to happen between now and January 20 — and in the following weeks.
McConnell will decide on another day how to vote on impeachment. The stakes are high and McConnell doesn’t always win.
So, the wily senator is watching and waiting as the cards play out. He hopes to have a better read of the hand he holds in a few weeks than he does today.
Or — maybe not. Perhaps McConnell knows how he’ll vote, but he’s psyching out other players at the table. Or misdirecting the media as they offer a play by play. Or grasping for some advantage that may or may not become clear to us for a while.
This much is clear: It is not likely that “the legal arguments” will sway Mitch McConnell nearly as much as political calculations.
Bet on it.
(Poker face? Image from CNBC.)
Since the 2016 inauguration, most Republicans — if they didn’t step up to defend and support him — have dodged and weaved, made excuses, changed the subject, ducked reporters and declined to comment, when confronted with norm-busting outrages by Donald Trump. Throughout four years of aberrant presidential behavior, there have been a handful of GOP critics who objected forthrightly to one discrete thing or another, but then retreated into silence (and acquiescence); other Republicans have (at most) tut-tutted about tweets, overlooking every other crash through the guardrails of democracy. Virtually all Republicans serving in the Senate and the House — whether voicing occasional murmurs of disapproval or not — hardly ever strayed from the Trump-GOP party line. They were willfully blind to Trump’s off-the-rails conduct.
The Republican Party has never been willing to hold the President accountable for his actions. Not even when national security was as stake — from choosing Putin over the Intelligence Community in Helsinki, to betraying American allies in Syria, to extorting the Ukrainian president, to refusing to utter a word of criticism regarding Russian bounties on American soldiers or cyberattacks on government agencies and corporations — the pattern has been to let it slide. Trump made implementing tax cuts and packing the courts possible. Republicans kept their heads down, celebrated their partisan victories, and endeavored to preserve their careers.
At this stage — four days after Trump instigated the crowd that assaulted the Capitol, seeking to overturn the election — the pattern hasn’t changed one whit. There are a handful of GOP critics who have taken their leader to task, while the vast majority of Republicans have stayed silent, sought to deflect Trump’s sedition by changing the subject, and absolutely refused to hold him accountable.
(The pattern looks different but only because of a handful of names, including four Senators: Mitt Romney, Pat Toomey, Lisa Murkowski, and Ben Sasse. Yes, their voices have our attention, but this is still a small number of Republicans. Turning to the House, few Republicans — Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger stand out — have objected to Trump’s anti-democratic rampaging.)
Look no further than House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. On Friday, he issued a statement that condemned “the violence, destruction, and chaos that unfolded at the Capitol on Wednesday” as “unacceptable, undemocratic, and un-American.” He said he had spoken with Trump (after the rioting had unfolded) to advise him that “he had a great responsibility to intervene to quell the mob and start the healing process.”
There is no further reference to Donald Trump in McCarthy’s statement, no suggestion that Trump paused to consider McCarthy’s advice, and not a hint that the President bears any responsibility for the violence he encouraged. McCarthy (with most Republicans) has let Donald Trump off the hook.
The Minority Leader hasn’t acknowledged that the rioters were Trump supporters of all stripes, from (what passes for) mainstream Republicans to fringe groups and true believers who revere the President.
Donald Trump has waged a months-long campaign to challenge the integrity of the election; to hurl baseless charges of fraud; to press, through established legal channels as well as through rogue, illegal, and corrupt efforts without precedent in American history, to overturn a democratic election. After Georgia officials refused to bend to Trump’s will, he turned to the ceremonial certification of the Electoral College vote in Congress. While Vice President Pence declined to play along with the Trump script, and a violent mob could only delay the count, Senate and House Republicans got on board to challenge the results in several battleground states that Trump lost.
McCarthy’s January 8 statement acknowledges none of this, though I submit that Trump’s campaign has been “unacceptable, undemocratic, and un-American,” the tactics of a wannabe strongman, not the elected leader of a free country. McCarthy doesn’t acknowledge that Donald Trump bears the least responsibility for any of this.
McCarthy’s statement appeals to President-elect Joe Biden to “work together to lower the temperature and unite the country to solve America’s challenges.” And he doesn’t spare high-flown rhetoric in his statement:
The coronavirus is still coursing through our communities, businesses and workers are facing unprecedented stress, and children are falling behind. Threats from adversaries such as Russia, China, and Iran are increasing. As leaders, we must call on our better angels and refocus our efforts on working directly for the American people. United we can deliver peace, strength, and prosperity our country needs. Divided, we will fail.
In a statement a day earlier, the Majority Leader acknowledged his role in casting doubt on the integrity of the election. He noted that “millions of Americans” questioned that integrity, without referencing the role of the President, Congressional Republicans, and conservative media in spreading lies. He further proclaimed the challenges served “to ensure that our country follows an accurate and accountable process.” He doesn’t note that after the Trump mob trashed the Capitol, McCarthy (and 139 of his House colleagues, plus 8 Senators, Republicans all) returned to the chamber to challenge the integrity — without any factual basis — of the election results in Pennsylvania.
Never mind McCarthy’s role in the campaign to delegitimize the election; never mind doubts about the sincerity of his appeal to unity. What is indisputable is that McCarthy declines to ascribe responsibility to Donald Trump for either the welter of lies regarding the election or the full-court press to overturn the results.
In the Senate, Marco Rubio’s stance is instructive. While Rubio, a perennial weathervane in the Republican caucus, stood with the majority of his colleagues in rejecting the challenges, he is not prepared to hold Donald Trump responsible for his anti-democratic crusade. Instead, Rubio has decided to change the subject. He has gone on a tear, first criticizing Biden’s comments — which “makes everybody blow up and go back in their corner” — and which equally characterized Rubio, who never left his corner. Then the next day he turned his attention to a perennial Republican grievance: Rubio tweeted that Twitter, in banning Trump, would “only stoke new grievances that will end up fueling the very thing they claim to be trying to prevent,” another charge that applies equally to Rubio and his tweets.
Senator Rubio, like Kevin McCarthy, is loath to even nod to the possibility of holding Donald Trump accountable.
We shall see, if and when the Democratic House moves to impeach Donald Trump, what fraction of Republicans acknowledge Trump’s role in delegitimizing and seeking to overturn a free and fair election, which culminated in the attack on the Capitol. I suggest — based on recent history — that there will be no more than a handful.
January 11 updates: David Frum called out Rubio for a hedged and contorted statement on the violence in the senator’s 4-minute “blame-everybody-but-me video” (which I hadn’t seen) that “joined 20 seconds of forthright condemnation to nearly four full minutes of blame shifting and excuse making.” The video consists of shameless grievance-mongering. There are two passing references to Donald Trump, but the principal blame for the attack on the Capitol falls on Trump’s and Rubio’s political opponents.
Jonathan Bernstein weighed in on Republicans’ retreat “to the flimsiest of defenses against impeachment and removal,” defenses that “say nothing about whether the president is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, and nothing about whether his offenses are so grave that they demand the extraordinary action of impeachment and removal in the last days of his term. Surely that’s what matters, not whether standing up for the republic is divisive or hurts the feelings of those who oppose it.”
(Image: Sky News.)
Sixty-six percent of registered voters blame Donald Trump (either a great deal, 55%, or somewhat, 11%) for the storming of the Capitol building. The consensus of opinion is hardly surprising: Trump was there. He had urged his supporters to come to the Capitol on January 6 — “Be there, will be wild!” he tweeted — after spending months crying fraud after losing the election decisively to Biden (a “fake president”), trying to overturn the results in court after court, in appeals to governors, state legislators, secretaries of state, and others. He implored the crowd of his supporters on January 6:
Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down–
We’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol–
And we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.
He meandered through a string of lies about the results of the election, made-up charges of voting fraud, complaints of disloyal Republican officials, and — despite his pledge to march with the crowd — drove directly back to the White House. The revved-up Trump enthusiasts took it from there.
Only 28% of Republicans blame Trump for the sacking of the U.S. Capitol. Instead, a majority — 52% — of Republicans blame Joe Biden: 35% place a great deal of blame on Biden, while 17% say he is somewhat to blame.
There’s nothing in the water that Republicans drink that explains this perception. Rather, Republican voters are — unsurprisingly — listening to the national leadership of their party: the President, Republican senators and members of Congress, and most emphatically, Fox News Channel, along with conservative talk radio and websites on the right trafficking in alternate facts. And these sources have been on a raging campaign of disinformation for months, with nary a dissenting voice.
This is their tribe. And though it was folks at the Trump rally, waving Trump flags (American flags, Confederate flags, Gadsden flags) and banners (“Stop the steal,” “Jesus is My Savior, Trump is My President,” “Unleash the Kraken,” “Q”), and enthusiastically cheering Trump on, who marched to the Capitol, broke through police lines, smashed through doors and windows, and trashed the place — Joe Biden (the fake president), the man who somehow, someway stole an election (without leaving a trace of evidence), was responsible.
To come to any other conclusion contradicts what these voters are convinced they know. For certain. After hearing it day in, day out.
The message from the most influential source (apart from Trump himself) — Fox News Channel — for those in the bubble, is delivered slickly, professionally, with the look and feel of a genuine news report — with clear intent to deceive. When the actual news is inconvenient, shift attention to something else (even something manufactured out of whole cloth).
Kevin Drum offers a summary of the disinformation technique as mastered by Laura Ingraham:
In a nutshell, it goes like this:
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the pros do it.
Editor’s note: more to come.
(Image above headline: ABC News.)
[See Update below.]
The headline is cribbed from the first sentence of a George Will column, “Trump, Hawley and Cruz will each wear the scarlet ‘S’ of a seditionist.” While I don’t share Will’s politics, we both deplore the current state of the Republican Party. With this post, I highlight Will’s condemnation of the two ambitious scammers from the Senate who — with Trump — put into motion yesterday’s shameful events at the Capitol:
Hawley announced his intention to object to the certification of some states’ electoral votes, for no better reason than that there has been an avalanche of “allegations” of election irregularities, allegations fomented by the loser of the election. By doing so, Hawley turned what should have been a perfunctory episode in our civic liturgy of post-election civility into a synthetic drama. He turned this moment into the focus of the hitherto unfocused fury that Trump had been stoking for many weeks.
Of Cruz, Will said:
With his characteristic unctuousness, he regretted the existence of what he and kindred spirits have not only done nothing to refute but have themselves nurtured — a pandemic of suspicions that the election was “rigged.”
“I want to take a moment to speak to my Democratic colleagues,” said Cruz. “I understand your guy is winning right now.” Read those weasely words again. He was not speaking to his “colleagues.” He was speaking to the kind people who were at that instant assaulting the Capitol. He was nurturing the very delusions that soon would cause louts to be roaming the Senate chamber — the fantasy that Joe Biden has not won the election but is only winning “right now.”
Will observes that Trump will soon be gone.
Yes, and I’m in complete agreement with Will regarding the two senators: “from this day forward, everything they say or do or advocate should be disregarded as patent attempts to distract attention from the lurid fact of what they have become. Each will wear a scarlet “S” as a seditionist.”
Both Hawley and Cruz, of course — privileged fellows who strike populist poses — claim to be intent on examining allegations or dispelling suspicions, though they have had a heavy hand in spreading the disinformation that Trump’s followers accept. No matter their clever language, they are liars, as another conservative, Yuval Levin, notes (“Failures of Leadership in a Populist Age”):
To knowingly pretend a lie is true is, simply put, to lie. Doing that carefully enough to let you claim you’re only raising questions only makes it even clearer that you know you’re lying. Lying to people is no way to speak for them or represent them. It is a way of showing contempt for them, and of using them rather than being useful to them. This is what too many Republican politicians have chosen to do in the wake of the election. They have decided to feign anger at a problem that cannot be solved because it does not exist, and this cannot help but make them less capable of taking up real problems on behalf of their voters. And in any case, it makes them cynical liars.
Update: Josh Hawley’s mentor, former senator John Danforth set aside his opposition to Trump in backing Hawley’s bid to knock-off former senator Claire McCaskill:
Hawley was Danforth’s guy. They met at a Yale Law School dinner when Hawley was still a student and Danforth was the smitten elder statesman. Enough so that years later, Danforth, a Never Trumper, turned a blind eye to Hawley’s cynical embrace of the president, intended to ensure the support of rural Republicans who love the president for all the wrong reasons.
Republican after Republican has “turned a blind eye” regarding Trump over the past five years. Finally, with less than two weeks to go, they are backing away:
“Supporting Josh and trying so hard to get him elected to the Senate was the worst mistake I ever made in my life,” Danforth said in a phone interview Thursday afternoon. “Yesterday was the physical culmination of the long attempt (by Hawley and others) to foment a lack of public confidence in our democratic system. It is very dangerous to America to continue pushing this idea that government doesn’t work and that voting was fraudulent.”
One of Hawley’s biggest Missouri donors, David Humphries, has also rebuked the senator. “Along with his sister, Sarah Atkins, and his mother, Ethelmae Humphreys, his family provided $4.4 million of the $9.2 million Hawley raised for his 2016 campaign for attorney general.” The Humphries added another $2 million to Hawley’s senate campaign.
Now David Humphries has had enough:
Josh Hawley … has shown his true colors as an anti-democracy populist by supporting Trump’s false claim of a ‘stolen election.’ Hawley’s irresponsible, inflammatory, and dangerous tactics have incited violence and further discord across America. And he has now revealed himself as a political opportunist willing to subvert the Constitution and the ideals of the nation he swore to uphold.
“Hawley should be censured by his Senate colleagues for his actions which have undermined a peaceful transition of power and for provoking yesterday’s riots in our nation’s capital. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to protect our country and its Constitutional underpinnings.”
None of this means that Hawley’s bet that his recent showboating regarding “allegations” won’t pay off with Republican voters in 2024, or moreover, that the blowback he is experiencing now won’t pay dividends in that campaign. But at this stage, the Republican Party is split in two and (at least for the time being) the bet that Hawley and Cruz made is hardly a sure thing.
(Image above headline: KSDK TV.)
● Seven Republican House members released a joint statement explaining why they would not oppose counting the electoral votes as presented to Congress by any of the states. Among the most significant reasons they offered, as Jim Newell noted (“Trump is Breaking Congressional Republicans on His Way Out”), is one that will “give Republicans a chance to keep winning presidential elections against the wishes of a majority of the country’s voters“:
From a purely partisan perspective, Republican presidential candidates have won the national popular vote only once in the last 32 years. They have therefore depended on the electoral college for nearly all presidential victories in the last generation. If we perpetuate the notion that Congress may disregard certified electoral votes—based solely on its own assessment that one or more states mishandled the presidential election—we will be delegitimizing the very system that led Donald Trump to victory in 2016, and that could provide the only path to victory in 2024.
● Kevin Drum on the role of Fox News Channel: “As long as Fox News exists in its current form, American politics is going to be broken. But what’s the answer to that?“
I agree and I have no answer.
● “There’s been no serious talk of a challenge to his leadership position, and the legislative filibuster will grant McConnell plenty of clout even if Republicans lose both Senate races in Georgia and, with them, their majority. (Democrats are unlikely to be able to gut the filibuster with so narrow an advantage.) But either way, he’ll have to manage a conference divided between Republicans inclined to work with Biden on bipartisan deals (such as Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mitt Romney of Utah) and a dozen or more conservatives who won’t even acknowledge the Democrat’s legitimacy as president.” — Russell Berman, “Mitch McConnell’s Slipping Grip on the Republican Party”
Yes, but while Murkowski, Collins, and Romney are perhaps the most plausible candidates who might be cast as “Republicans inclined to work with Biden on bipartisan deals” — if Mitch McConnell remains majority leader after Tuesday, it will be surprising to see much meaningful bipartisan cooperation. Max Baucus, for all his efforts, couldn’t find one or two Republicans to cast a vote for the ACA. And if significant Biden initiatives gain support across the aisle, it will likely extend more deeply into the Republican caucus than these three senators.
● From The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell by Alec MacGillis (which I’ve just finished), pp. 74-75:
Even as his position on spending limits or PACs or soft money shifted, McConnell had spoken in favor of public disclosure of political giving and spending. It had become his ultimate mantra: stop trying to limit the inevitable flow of money into campaigns, but just make sure it’s all out in the open. “Disclosure is the best disinfectant, and I think the maximum amount of disclosure is exactly what we need,” he said on a Sunday morning show in 1996. …
Even that last plank fell away. In 2010 Senate Democrats introduced the Disclose Act, legislation that would have forced outside groups spending more than $10,000 on campaign-related expenditures to disclose contributors who had donated more than $10,000. It was, say Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, the “last best hope for doing anything to ameliorate Citizens United.” McConnell held together his caucus—even John McCain—for a successful filibuster of the bill. McConnell explained his reversal on disclosure by arguing that the bill favored unions and that the increasingly toxic political atmosphere put a new premium on protecting the privacy of major donors against what he called “liberal thugs.” . . .
As with his previous shifts, though, this maneuver could also be explained by changing circumstances in the partisan landscape.
Perhaps the most prominent recurring theme in the book is summed up in that last sentence. McConnell ingratiated himself among Republican senators by taking on McCain, Feingold, and other reformers on campaign finance reform. He found principled reasons — in the First Amendment — for his views. But the wily Kentuckian shifted his specific positions time and again (in response to specific legislative proposals or Supreme Court decisions), always embracing some principle or another for for doing so — but invariably his newfound position offered a political advantage for Republicans.
In 1997, when McConnell shifted from favoring a soft money ban (when he was convinced that soft money benefited Democrats) to opposing the ban (when Republicans had gained the advantage), he is reported to have told his colleagues: “If we stop this thing, we can control the institution for the next twenty years.” (p. 66)
(Photo: CNBC.)
