Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, who have devoted scholarly careers to the study of the first branch of the federal government – Congress, established in Article I of the Constitution – have drawn attention to increasing violations of political and governing norms; this assault has diminished legislative effectiveness and eroded public trust. In their first book, The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get it Back on Track, they lamented the decline of Congress as an institution fit for the Founders’ vision – and (while reviewing Democratic transgressions before the party relinquished its majority in 1994) they pointed to the Republican Party as chiefly responsible for crippling the capacity of the House of Representatives to do its job.
Meanwhile, what began in the House has spread to the U.S. Senate (and throughout state governments across the country) and additional observers – political scientists, journalists, and others – have explored the erosion of democratic norms and acknowledged (often reluctantly) the key role of the Republican Party in these developments (as “both sides do it” has become abundantly less tenable for reporters and scholars alike).
The Republican Party has aggressively and relentlessly trashed norms (traditional civility, respect for ones opponents and for institutional safeguards, embrace of rules and practices that had heretofore been accepted by both sides) in order to attain political advantage over Democrats. That – and more careful discussion of these issues, including the consequences for representative government – will be the subject of future posts. For now, I will simply point to a number of areas where we can see that things have gone off track, where we can say, “That’s not normal,” or at least: That is something that was, until the recent demolition of democratic norms, just not done in our country.
In just the past week, numerous violations of democratic norms (which were respected and embraced by elected officials across the political spectrum, until Republicans jettisoned them) have been in the news. The list illustrates the nature and extent of the problem.
1. Falsehoods, concoctions, and whoppers.
Donald Trump has a prodigious capacity for lying. That’s not exactly news, but the fabrications have come in greater numbers than ever before, as the leader of the Grand Old Party has rallied his followers in advance of the midterm election.
“Donald Trump is waging one of the most inflammatory closing arguments of any modern campaign, lacing his midterm rhetoric with easily disprovable claims that are building on the fact-challenged foundation of his presidency. With just two weeks to go before the midterm election, the President is doing what he does best, seizing national attention with a flood of outrageous and improbable lies that drown out rivals, leverage his brawling personality and rip at fault lines of race, identity and patriotism.”
“With less than two weeks before the highly contested midterm elections, Donald Trump has been amplifying the Republican message on key campaign issues from immigration to trade at rallies across the country. But many of the president’s statements are ringing false, as fact checkers find that he made as many as 170 false claims during the second week of October, according to The Star Online.”
“Calling the president of the United States a liar used to be no small thing, but Trump’s record for lies, falsehoods and general untruths is genuinely impressive. Still, even the folks who fact-check Trump for a living have been surprised at just how bald-faced his recent lies have been.”
The two previous links illustrate falsehoods about healthcare policy – that Republicans will protect Medicare and guarantee insurance coverage for preexisting conditions, while Democrats will deny coverage – which are belied by Republican campaign promises and legislative activity going back eight years, executive actions taken since Trump’s inauguration, and numerous court battles (which are ongoing). These lies, as outlandish and insupportable as they are, have been embraced not just by the President, but by many Republicans on the November ballot.
Jonathan Cohn characterizes this as peak absurdity. The spectacle of Republican ads presenting topsy turvy Alice in Wonderland revisionism on this signature issue prompts incredulous laughter from former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough (in the video clip in Cohn’s post).
2. Democrats are the enemy.
Set aside the mammoth servings of untruths and whoppers, which have been catalogued by a number of observers. While this is unprecedented for a president, there is something more darkly disturbing – and damaging to our democratic institutions: demonizing the opposition party (which is embraced by half the country).
“It’s not just the whoppers or the particular outrage riffs … It’s the hate, and the sense of actual menace that the President is trying to convey to his supporters. Democrats aren’t just wrong in the manner of traditional partisan differences; they are scary, bad, evil, radical, dangerous. Trump and Trump alone stands between his audiences and disaster.” – Susan Glaser, after binge watching the first six Trump rallies of October.
Eli Stokols and Noah Bierman describe the President’s dystopian vision, which he lays at the feet of Democrats, who – he says – are embracing “mob rule” and rioting in California. They quote an evangelical Christian who served three previous Republican presidents: “Most of what Mr. Trump says these days is literally made up,” Peter Wehner, a veteran of both Bush administrations, wrote in a tweet following Trump’s Houston rally. “He’s trying to construct a world of make believe and fairy tales, of myth and fiction, of illusion and hallucination. It’s a world increasingly detached from reality. The rest of us must refuse to live within the lie.”
Invoking violence at the hands of Democrats is a theme Trump sounded earlier this summer:
I think we’re real popular, but there’s a real question as to whether people are going to vote if I’m not on the ballot. And I’m not on the ballot. A lot of people I don’t like Congress. People say I’m not voting because the President doesn’t like Congress. It’s not a question of like or dislike, it’s a question that they will overturn everything that we’ve done andthey will do it quickly and violently. And violently. There is violence. When you look at Antifa — these are violent people. You have tremendous power. You were saying in this room, you have people who preach to almost 200 million people. Depending on which Sunday we’re talking about.
Hate and hostility directed at political opponents – and false ascriptions of violence to those who voice opposition – have become White House talking points.
3. Hostility to national unity, even in the face of domestic terrorism.
After incendiary devices were mailed to nearly a dozen prominent Democrats (including two former presidents) and Trump critics, the President veered from his rally-the-base persona briefly to read a prepared statement from his teleprompter: “In these times we have to unify. We have to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America.”
On previous occasions when called upon to offer consolation or reassurance to the nation (as previous president’s have done), President Trump only grudgingly articulated a unifying message – and not very convincingly. On this occasion, his conviction didn’t last even 24 hours. He quickly returned to attacking the media:
The President is not simply indifferent to the traditional role of presidents to unite the country at times of national peril: he deliberately seeks to divide us. His chief partisan strategy in rallying his base (against all comers) is an imperative that conflicts with bringing the nation together.
4. In the aftermath of the brutal murder, beheading, and dismemberment of a journalist at the Washington Post by a foreign government – Saudi Arabia – inside their consulate in Turkey, the President adopted the Saudi talking points.
On a day when foreign policy experts worldwide were almost uniformly accusing Saudi Arabia’s government of murdering a prominent dissident, President Donald Trump spoke to the Saudi king and then offered an alternative theory: “Rogue killers” may be to blame.
Trump’s suggestion drew widespread scorn and ridicule, including charges that he could be complicit in a Saudi cover-up.
The episode brought “into clear relief President Trump’s double standard on the proof he demands on political issues.”
It also called to mind Trump’s deference to Vladimir Putin, whose word he accepted over his own Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, at Helsinki:
“My people came to me — Dan Coats came to me and some others — they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia.
I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be …”
5. Republican leaders in the Senate discard generations-long practices that served to ensure a modicum of bipartisanship in selecting judges.
“Prior to the Trump administration, there was plenty of tit for tat in the escalating partisan wars over judicial nominations. But the tactics were aimed at blocking nominees. Since President Trump was sworn in, however, the GOP Senate leadership has moved aggressively to speed confirmation of new judges, in the process ignoring or tossing aside rules that have long existed to ensure that there is some consensus in picking judges. Gone for all practical purposes is the rule that prevented action on a judicial nominee who was not approved by his or her home state senator. Gone is the practice of not holding a confirmation hearing until the American Bar Association has completed its professional evaluation of the nominee. Gone is the general practice of not piling up nominees in one hearing. And now, for the first time, the Judiciary Committee is holding confirmation hearings during a Senate recess over the objections of the minority party.” – Nina Totenberg
She counts four normative rules that Senate Republicans have discarded. A word about ‘blue slips‘ (the first rule mentioned), which have represented an institutional norm in the Senate going back generations. David Hawkings offers a good explanation of the practice – and Republicans’ shredding of the practice – in the Senate.
Essentially, there was a consensus that presidents (who were elected to represent all Americans) would have wide discretion in selecting judges, but not carte blanche; that the judiciary was more or less set apart from the political branches of government, so presidents would confer with senators when making nominations to ensure general agreement (as opposed to blunt partisanship); and that a blue slip would signify that the home state senators of a nominee were on board with the president’s selection. Conversely, without the blue slip, the nomination would not go forward.
Long story short: the most recent Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy, respected this process, while the current Republican Chairman, Chuck Grassley, has discarded it. This institutional norm, which held sway for decades as presidents and Senate majorities shifted from party to party, stands in the way of the Republican goal of filling the federal bench with ideological partisans.
One morning during the Kavanaugh hearings, when Senator Leahy objected to the norms – including blue slips – being rejected, among the first words out of Senator Grassley’s mouth in response were “Judge Bork.” This exchange provides a lesson in partisan rationalization and hypocrisy. If Democrats abused the process (and institutional norms of the Senate) during the Bork nomination, then every instance of trashing institutional norms by Senate Republicans going forward can be justified by reference to Ronald Reagan’s 1987 nomination of Bork to the Supreme Court (which was voted down when Democrats ruled the Senate). That was 31 years ago. On Senator Leahy’s watch, blue slips were still in place during the 113th Congress – not yet 4 years ago – when Democrats were in the majority.
The deliberate, ongoing repudiation of institutional norms is not tit for tat. If it were, one of many previous Republican tits would have evened the scales for the initial Democratic tat. The injury would have been repaid. (When one country expels diplomats and another country responds in kind, even if the number of expulsions on each side is not identical, an equilibrium is reached. The incident does not come into play three decades later when another diplomatic dispute arises. It is history. Fresher tits and tats come into play.) But such offenses are never repaid in the GOP ledger. Senate Republicans have retaliated against the Democrats many times over for whatever injury they believe they suffered when Robert Bork was rejected by the Senate. But – forevermore – Republicans will use the rejection as a pretext for throwing out another rule or practice that heretofore enjoyed bipartisan agreement.
In no area of political life is the assault on institutional norms more evident than in the selection of federal judges and justices of the Supreme Court. Virtually none of the items listed as consensus views four paragraphs above is still in play. Republicans are ready and willing to use scorched earth means to achieve their end – domination of the judiciary by right-wing ideologues.
I’ll skip rules 2 and 3, which are clear enough, and comment on the 4th rule Nina Totenberg lists: the Judiciary Committee is holding hearings while the Senate is in recess:
“No other Senate committee has been holding hearings during the recess. But for judicial nominees, the Senate confirmation train keeps on running even though – and likely because – Senate Democrats are defending a near record number of seats in the election and have to be out on the hustings. Indeed, just two Republican senators – Orrin Hatch of Utah, who is retiring, and Mike Crapo of Idaho – showed up at yesterday’s hearing for two appeals court nominees, a hearing that lasted just 19 minutes and featured one controversial nominee talking for several minutes about his wife, parents, children, even his cat.”
Note: there are 21 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. When Totenberg asks Senator Hatch (who did not hold hearings during Senate recesses when he chaired the committee) why he was doing so now, he responded: “Well, I don’t know why. All I can say is that, you know, we have to move ahead. And if they’re not cooperating, you just go ahead and move ahead. And so far, we haven’t had a lot of cooperation.”
6. Voter suppression (the rule during the Jim Crow era, which stretched from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 into the 1960s), while it did not entirely disappear after passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, was supplanted by robust voting rights. This – the right to vote – was the norm in most of the country during the past half century. Many of us who watched Congress enact civil rights legislation in the 1960s, thought that this right – especially for black Americans in the South, but for everyone, no matter what color, creed, or ethnicity – was securely in place. We were wrong.
Republicans have waged furious battles in state after state to disenfranchise voters who are generally supportive of Democrats. Richard Hasen, an expert in campaign and election law, reports on ongoing legal conflicts:
” There’s North Dakota, which changed its voter identification law after the razor-thin election of Sen. Heidi Heitkamp in 2012 to make it harder for Native American voters living on reservations and lacking a residential street address to be able to vote. There’s Georgia, where Secretary of State (and current gubernatorial candidate) Brian Kemp has been holding for administrative review up to 53,000 voter registration cards for failing to have an exact match (like a missing hyphen) between the official record of a person’s name and the name appearing on the registration card. And there’s Dodge City, Kansas, a Latino-majority city with only a single polling place for 27,000 people—a polling place that was recently moved out of town and a mile from public transportation for the 2018 midterm elections.”
In Georgia, county election officials have been eyeballing signatures on mail-in ballots. If an employee in the county clerk’s office decides that the ‘match’ isn’t near enough to the signature on a voting registration card, the ballots have been thrown out. A federal judge has ruled that this process for determining eligibility is flawed and that voters – who have cast their votes and returned their ballots – should have a chance to verify that the ballots are theirs.
Yes, it has come to this. If Republicans can’t win elections if everyone votes, they have no compunction about enacting laws that restrict the number of folks allowed to cast ballots. This stratagem, while perhaps no more cynical than the rejection of other governing norms, is especially offensive. Nothing is more central to democratic government and the principle of majority rule than the right to cast a ballot. I will return to this issue in future posts.
That is James Madison’s portrait at the top of this post.
