Video courtesy of Twitter:
January 10 update:
Video courtesy of Twitter:
January 10 update:
After the overwhelming Democratic victory for the control of the House of Representatives – Democrats won by nearly 10 million votes nationally, which was the greatest popular vote margin in U.S. history – a highly diverse Congress convened yesterday. It doesn’t look quite like America – but it’s closer than ever before.
A woman became Speaker of the House for only the second time; Nancy Pelosi, who made history the first time, made history again. More women – 102 – will serve in the 116th Congress than in any previous House. (And consider this contrast: in 1989 there were 16 Democratic women and 13 Republican women in Congress. In 2019, there are 89 Democratic women and 13 Republican women in Congress.)
Two Native American women will serve in this Congress. And, heralding greater religious diversity, two Muslim women (a Somali-American and a Palestinian) will serve.
A PEW survey notes that even with the new members, Congress still doesn’t accurately represent Americans’ religious preferences and ‘by far the largest difference between the U.S. public and Congress is in the share who are unaffiliated with a religious group. In the general public, 23% say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular.” In Congress, just one person – Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., who was recently elected to the Senate after three terms in the House – says she is religiously unaffiliated, making the share of “nones” in Congress 0.2%.’
Ed Kilgore notes that the two parties present a stark contrast regarding religious diversity: “With the exception of the two Jewish Republicans in the House, all of Congress’s non-Christians and religiously unspecified members are Democrats. Professed Christians are over-represented in both parties’ congressional ranks…”
Meanwhile, evangelical Christians continue to be the most devoted, unwavering supporters of one Donald J. Trump, a man (in Michael Gerson’s words) “prone to cruelty, bigotry, vanity, adultery and serial deception.” Gerson, who embraces a never-Trump conservatism, notes in an op-ed in this morning’s newspaper – borrowing a phrase from Ronald Brownstein – the “hardening loyalty” of evangelicals to Trump.
Gerson suggests that something other than fidelity to the Gospel lies behind this support:
Trump has understood something about evangelical Christians that many are unable to articulate themselves. White, theologically conservative Protestants were once — not that long ago — a culturally predominant force. Many of their convictions — on matters such as sexuality and public religiosity — were also the default settings of the broader society. But that changed in a series of cultural tidal waves — the Darwinist account of human origins, the application of higher criticism to the text of the Bible, the sexual revolution — which swept away old certainties.
Americans, in an increasingly diverse country, have reason to celebrate more diverse representation at the national level. Democrats are at the forefront of the changes taking place. Make no mistake: Trump and Republicans, 89% of whom approve of the job he is doing in the latest Gallup Poll (December 17-22), view diversity as a threat. Identity politics, tribalism, and cultural anxiety have swamped faith, hope, and charity in this group.
(Photograph is MSNBC screengrab of Kyrsten Sinema, a departing member of the House just elected to the U.S. Senate from Arizona, taking the oath of office with her hand on a law book, which contained the Constitution of the United States, rather than a religious text.)
More recent update: The Times has changed the story. Instead of, “although Mr. Trump had already seen the resignation letter,” the report now reads, “But Mr. Trump had not read the letter. “
December 23 update: “President Trump said on Sunday that he would remove Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who issued a stinging rebuke of the president when he announced his resignation last week, from his post by Jan. 1, two months before he had planned to depart. . . .
When Mr. Trump first announced that Mr. Mattis was leaving, effective Feb. 28, he praised the defense secretary on Twitter, saying he was retiring “with distinction.” One aide said that although Mr. Trump had already seen the resignation letter when he praised Mr. Mattis, the president did not understand just how forceful a rejection of his strategy Mr. Mattis had issued.” – Helene Cooper, New York Times
Initial post:
Every time I see ‘America First’ in a headline describing Trump’s actions regarding foreign affairs, I cringe and think: America alone.
The man is isolating our country; abandoning allies, partners, and alliances that have ensured our security since the end of World War II; and he has strengthened adversaries that threaten to reshape the global order to serve their interests, not ours. America alone weakens the United States and democratic countries worldwide.
Whether through ignorance, vanity, greed, or malign foreign influence – Trump’s actions serve the enemies of our country and the West.
Dear Mr President:
I have been privileged to serve as our country’s 26th Secretary of Defense which has allowed me to serve alongside our men and women of the Department in defense of our citizens and our ideals.
I am proud of the progress that has been made over the past two years on some of the key goals articulated in our National Defense Strategy: putting the Department on a more sound budgetary footing, improving readiness and lethality in our forces, and reforming the Department’s business practices for greater performance. Our troops continue to provide the capabilities needed to prevail in conflict and sustain strong US global influence.
One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies. Like you, I have said from the beginning that the armed forces of the United States should not be the policeman of the world. Instead, we must use all tools of American power to provide for the common defense, including providing effective leadership to our alliances. 29 democracies demonstrated that strength in their commitment to fighting alongside us following the 9-11 attack on America. The Defeat-ISIS coalition of 74 nations is further proof.
Similarly, I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours. It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies. That is why we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense.
My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues. We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances.
Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position. The end date for my tenure is February 28, 2019, a date that should allow sufficient time for a successor to be nominated and confirmed as well as to make sure the Department’s interests are properly articulated and protected at upcoming events to include Congressional posture hearings and the NATO Defense Ministerial meeting in February. Further, that a full transition to a new Secretary of Defense occurs well in advance of the transition of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in September in order to ensure stability within the Department.
I pledge my full effort to a smooth transition that ensures the needs and interests of the 2.15 million Service Members and 732,079 civilians receive undistracted attention of the Department at all times so that they can fulfill their critical, round-the-clock mission to protect the American people.
I very much appreciate this opportunity to serve the nation and our men and women in uniform.
Jim N Mattis
(Photo from Wikimedia Commons: Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis meets with North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) defense ministers for a Defense Ministerial in Brussels, Belgium on June 7, 2018)
Yesterday in the news:
None of this is normal. The Nixon presidency comes to mind, but we’ve never before seen anything like this.
The 2018 midterm elections ended one-party rule in Washington. A Democratic majority in the House of Representatives will restore Congressional oversight of the Executive Branch and the checks and balances the Founders envisioned.
Democrats and activists opposed to Trump have been energized since before his 2017 inauguration. By election day – following the battle over Kavanaugh’s nomination and the president’s deceitful campaign of fear-mongering and violent political rhetoric – the Trump base was also revved up. The result: 49.2 percent turnout (as of November 11), the highest rate in a midterm election in the past 100 years.
As of today (as votes are still being counted in undecided races) Democrats have picked up 31 seats in the House, which will welcome record numbers of women, including the first Native American and Muslim women. With a highly unfavorable Senate map – 10 Democrats were running in states Trump won – the Republican majority will increase by no more than two (Florida is still counting ballots and Mississippi will have a December runoff). Democrats flipped more than 300 legislative seats, made a net gain of 7 governorships, and will have 27 (of 51) attorneys general in place in January 2019.
In their book, How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblat write:
Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended—by political parties and organized citizens, but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents.
Flipping Congress from red to blue was not a certainty. Trump’s election generated intense grassroots push-back from left-of-center groups and aroused citizens. The Women’s March protests across the country (and the world) on January 21, 2017 set the stage. The outpouring of volunteers and huge number of campaign contributions lead the way to the November 6, 2018 general election.
Electoral rules and practices in a number of states tilted the playing field through stratagems reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. The proceedings in some cases did not constitute free and fair elections: too many institutional norms were shattered to suppress the vote. But the elections were free and fair enough to bring about change. That’s worth celebrating.
November 21, 2018 update:
Dems' national lead in raw House votes – now 8.8 million – just broke the record for largest for either party in the history of midterm elections (previous record was 8.7 million set by Dems in 1974). https://t.co/0pm7oW1pFE
— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 21, 2018
Four prominent villains appear in Trump’s closing ad – titled, “Donald Trump’s Argument for America,” released just before the November 2016 election: Three are Jewish; the fourth is the 2016 Democratic nominee for president:
George Soros, favorite Trump punching bag – “The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election. For those who control the levers of power in Washington …”
Janet Yellen, then Chair of the Federal Reserve – “… and for the global special interests.”
Hillary Clinton – “They partner with these people who don’t have your good in mind.”
Lloyd Blankfein, then CEO of Goldman Sachs – “It’s a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities.”
Josh Marshall, who posted this ad on November 5, 2016, commented at the time:
“These are standard anti-Semitic themes and storylines, using established anti-Semitic vocabulary lined up with high profile Jews as the only Americans other than Clinton who are apparently relevant to the story….
This is an anti-Semitic ad every bit as much as the infamous Jesse Helms ‘white hands’ ad or the Willie Horton ad were anti-African-American racist ads. Which is to say, really anti-Semitic…. This is an ad intended to appeal to anti-Semites and spread anti-Semitic ideas….
This is intentional and by design.”
Fast forward to today, in the aftermath of what is “likely the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the history of the United States.” Julia Ioffe raises the question, “How much responsibility does Trump bear for the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh?” and observes: “Culpability is a tricky thing, and politicians, especially of the demagogic variety, know this very well. Unless they go as far as organized, documented, state-implemented slaughter, they don’t give specific directions. They don’t have to. They simply set the tone. In the end, someone else does the dirty work, and they never have to lift a finger — let alone stain it with blood.”
She writes of Trump’s campaign:
Trump had so much to say about the Jews that his Jewish son-in-law has had to publicly defend him as “not an anti-Semite.”
But the anti-Semites have not been convinced. A month after he had ordered his trolls to attack me, white supremacist Andrew Anglin told the HuffPost what he thought of Trump’s refusal to denounce them. “We interpret that as an endorsement,” he said. To his readers, he wrote, “Glorious Leader Donald Trump Refuses to Denounce Stormer Troll Army.” When Trump blamed “both sides” for Charlottesville, his supporters heard him loud and clear: “I knew Trump was eventually going to be like, meh, whatever,” Anglin said. “Trump only disavowed us at the point of a Jewish weapon. So I’m not disavowing him.” Many others in the alt-right praised Trump’s statement as moral equivocation on Charlottesville. To them, this, rather than the forced, obligatory condemnation, was the important signal. (According to the Anti-Defamation League, the incidence of anti-Semitic hate crimes jumped nearly 60 percent in 2017, the biggest increase since it started keeping track in 1979. What made 2017 so different? It was Trump’s first year in office.)
Image of July 2016 Trump tweet (subsequently deleted) featuring Star of David.
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:
A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News. It has gotten so bad and hateful that it is beyond description. Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 25, 2018
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.
During a week when the world’s attention (“This one has caught the imagination of the world, unfortunately.”) is focused on the apparent murder, beheading, and dismemberment of a journalist by Saudi Arabia, the President of the United States (who has been bending over backwards to excuse the Saudis), is revving up a crowd of his supporters with a gleeful account of Congressman Greg Gianforte who (as a candidate) assaulted a reporter for asking questions.
Amazing, after calling Dems the party of mobs and violence, Trump is now praising and complimenting Greg Gianforte for "body slamming" @Bencjacobs
— Sam Stein (@samstein) October 19, 2018
We need to stop with the “amazing” and “astonishing.” It is worse. It is “typical” and “commonplace” for this narcissistic sociopath.
— Norman Ornstein (@NormOrnstein) October 19, 2018
https://twitter.com/BCAppelbaum/status/1053110947580203009?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
https://twitter.com/jonathanvswan/status/1053096082069164032?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
In the twenty-two months since leaving the White House, Barack Obama has kept quiet. He broke his silence on Friday in a speech at the University of Illinois, making it clear he believes the country is in crisis, having strayed from our values, and urgently needs to get back on track:
“I’m here today because this is one of those pivotal moments when every one of us, as citizens of the United States, need to determine just who it is that we are. Just what it is that we stand for. And as a fellow citizen, not as an ex-president, but as a fellow citizen, I’m here to deliver a simple message, and that is that you need to vote because our democracy depends on it.”
Obama painted a picture of “fitful progress, uneven progress” throughout American history, as our country moved nearer our ideals, while describing “a darker aspect to the American story.”
Each time we’ve gotten closer to those ideals, somebody somewhere has pushed back. The status quo pushes back. Sometimes the backlash comes from people who are genuinely, if wrongly, fearful of change. More often it’s manufactured by the powerful and the privileged who want to keep us divided and keep us angry and keep us cynical because it helps them maintain the status quo and keep their power and keep their privilege. And you happen to be coming of age during one of those moments.
It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause. He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years, a fear and anger that’s rooted in our past but it’s also born out of the enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes.
The former president reminded students of the financial crisis at the time he took office and the progress he made in setting things right – but the fear remained.
So we pulled the economy out of crisis, but to this day, too many people, who once felt solidly middle class, still feel very real and very personal economic insecurity. Even though we took out bin Laden and wound down the wars in Iraq and our combat role in Afghanistan, and gotten Iran to halt its nuclear program, the world’s still full of threats and disorder that come streaming through people’s televisions every single day.
And these challenges get people worried. And it frays our civic trust. And it makes a lot of people feel like the fix is in and the game is rigged and nobody’s looking out for them, especially those communities outside our big urban centers.
And even though your generation is the most diverse in history, with a greater acceptance and celebration of our differences than ever before, those are the kinds of conditions that are ripe for exploitation by politicians who have no compunction and no shame about tapping into America’s dark history of racial and ethnic and religious division. Appealing to tribe, appealing to fear, pitting one group against another, telling people that order and security will be restored if it weren’t for those who don’t look like us or don’t sound like us or don’t pray like we do, that’s an old playbook. It’s as old as time.
He continued, “And in a healthy democracy, it doesn’t work.” The old playbook falls flat. When, however, “the better angels of our nature” are eclipsed, things go awry.
But when there’s a vacuum in our democracy, when we don’t vote, when we take our basic rights and freedoms for granted, when we turn away and stop paying attention and stop engaging and stop believing and look for the newest diversion, the electronic versions of bread and circuses, then other voices fill the void. A politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment takes hold and demagogues promise simple fixes to complex problems. No promise to fight for the little guy, even as they cater to the wealthiest and most powerful. No promise to clean up corruption and then plunder away. They start undermining norms that ensure accountability and try to change the rules to entrench their power further. And they appeal to racial nationalism that’s barely veiled, if veiled at all.
He indicted the Congress of the United States for its failures:
This Congress has championed the unwinding of campaign finance laws to give billionaires outside influence over our politics. Systematically attacked voting rights to make it harder for young people, the minorities and the poor to vote. Handed out tax cuts without regard to deficits. Slashed the safety net wherever it could, cast dozens of votes to take away health insurance from ordinary Americans, embraced wild conspiracy theories, like those surrounding Benghazi or my birth certificate, rejected science, rejected facts on things like climate change, embraced a rising absolutism from a willingness to default on America’s debt by not paying our bills, to a refusal to even meet, much less consider, a qualified nominee for the Supreme Court because he happened to be nominated by a Democratic president. None of this is conservative.
I don’t mean to pretend I’m channeling Abraham Lincoln now, but that’s not what he had in mind, I think, when he helped form the Republican Party. It’s not conservative. It sure isn’t normal. It’s radical. It’s a vision that says the protection of our power and those who back us is all that matters even when it hurts the country. It’s a vision that says the few who can afford high-price lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions set the agenda. And over the past two years, this vision is now nearing its logical conclusion.
He denounced the lack of checks and balances, passage of $1.5 trillion tax cuts for the richest Americans with resulting skyrocketing deficits, carte blanche to polluters and dishonest lenders, repudiation of the global climate change agreement, eroding our relationships with allies, cozying up with Russia, and sabotaging the Affordable Healthcare Act. He also criticizes, in passing, the infamous Anonymous op-ed:
In a healthy democracy, there’s some checks and balances on this kind of behavior, this kind of inconsistency, but right now there’s nothing.
Republicans who know better in Congress, and they’re there, they’re quoted saying, yes, we know this is kind of crazy, are still bending over backwards to shield this behavior from scrutiny or accountability or consequence, seem utterly unwilling to find the backbone to safeguard the institutions that make our democracy work. And, by the way, the claim that everything will turn out okay because there are people inside the White House who secretly aren’t following the president’s orders, that is not a check. I’m being serious here. That’s not how our democracy’s supposed to work.
These people aren’t elected. They’re not accountable. They’re not doing us a service by actively promoting 90 percent of the crazy stuff that’s coming out of this White House. And then saying, don’t worry, we’re preventing the other 10 percent. That’s not how things are supposed to work.
This is not normal. These are extraordinary times. And they’re dangerous times.
Finally, Obama urged his listeners to participate in the political process – and, especially, to vote – to change the country’s direction:
Thirty minutes, 30 minutes of your time, is democracy worth that? We have been through much darker times than these and some how each generation of American’s carried us through to the other side. Not by sitting around and waiting for something to happen, not by leaving it to others to do something but by leading that movement for change themselves.
And if you do that, if you get involved and you get engaged and you knock on some doors and you talk with your friends and you argue with your family members and you change some minds and you vote, something powerful happens.
The complete speech, annotated by Amber Phillips, is available at the Washington Post.
In a week when Bob Woodward’s “Fear” paints in chilling detail a portrait of a White House engulfed in conflict, chaos, and covert insubordination, and an anonymous op-ed in the New York Times attests to the derisive views of President Trump by those closest to him and persistent workarounds to keep him from getting his way, what have we learned?
Conflict in presidential administrations is commonplace. Appointees often represent wings of a political party with different priorities than the president. Directives are often ignored by cabinet members. Aides try to protect the president from his worse impulses. This is all normal.
“But,” Jonathan Bernstein writes, “what we’re hearing about in these Trump stories is sort of a radical version of standard operating procedure for White House staff and the executive branch when faced with a president who is utterly unfit for the job.”
Donald Trump is impulsive, indulges in reckless rants and incoherence, has a short attention span, is easily distracted, lacks intellectual curiosity, is ignorant of history and policy, and reveals an irrepressible narcissism. We already know all this (which touches only on Trump’s mental capacity, not on his prejudice, avarice, or lack of principle) from watching the public Donald Trump and, for anyone who reveres democratic government, this is frightening. In Bernstein’s words:
What’s really scary is that Trump’s ineptitude at his job means that the normal constraints that keep presidents from doing terrible things may simply not apply. Normal presidents care about their professional reputation among those they work with, and about their popularity among the nation at large, and so they attempt to do the sorts of things that would enhance their reputations and make voters like them. Because he’s unable to even try to do those things — because he has apparently has no sense at all of how the job works — Trump doesn’t see the clear warning signs and then back off things that damage himself and the nation.
Or, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Timothy L. O’Brien puts it, “he generally doesn’t care about the long-term damage he might inflict on himself or those around him as long as he’s the center of attention.” That’s truly scary because the entire political system, as those who have read Federalist 51 will recognize, depends on politicians who care deeply about avoiding damage to themselves.
Federalist 51, generally attributed to James Madison, describes the features of the Constitution intended to “furnish the proper checks and balances between different departments” of government, such as constraints on personal ambition and buffers against encroachment of one branch on another. As remarkable as Donald Trump’s incapacity is, equally remarkable is the implacable abdication of the Republican majority in Congress to provide oversight over the executive branch.
Two of the President’s ‘critics’ in the majority party – both of whom have chosen not to seek reelection, which would require them to face the GOP voter base (still in lockstep with Trump) – find no grounds for disputing the devastating portrait of their leader.
Senator Bob Corker: “This is what all of us have understood to be the situation from day one… I understand this is the case and that’s why I think all of us encourage the good people around the President to stay. I thank General Mattis whenever I see him…”
Senator Ben Sasse: “It’s just so similar to what so many of us hear from senior people around the White House, you know, three times a week. So it’s really troubling, and yet in a way, not surprising.”
Neither Senator proposed any activity by Congress to remedy the situation our nation finds itself in. Congressional investigations of the executive branch are commonplace, even when the same party controls both Congress and the White House. Yet taking a closer look at what is going on is not in the cards for this Congress.
There is ample evidence, dating back to Newt Gingrich’s first days as Speaker of the House, of Republicans paring back the capacity of Congress to do its job. The inability to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act (aka Obamacare) is the most glaring example of this failure in the current Congress (in part because no one on the Republican side of the aisle had developed the policy expertise to understand the ACA or to craft a plausible alternative, and no one in the leadership or among committee chairmen cared enough to do so).
Nonetheless, Speaker Paul Ryan and his team, which encouraged investigation after investigation of Benghazi (while boasting that it would harm Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election prospects) hasn’t simply forgotten Congress’s investigative role. Republicans have actually catalogued scandals and controversies that Congress could be investigating, if it had the will to do so (which is anticipated if Democrats regain the majority in the House this fall). A partial list from Axios, which obtained a copy of a document prepared by House Republicans:
Things aren’t normal in either the executive or legislative branches of government. (I’ll set aside for the moment consideration of the judicial branch, which will be transformed for at least a generation as Brett Kavanaugh takes a seat on the Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate continues to approve ideologues to district and appellate courts nationwide.)
Things aren’t normal because the Republican Party has become an outlier, trashing traditional governing norms whenever it has glimpsed a partisan advantage, while ignoring – and diverting attention from – the resulting harm to the country.
September 9, 2018 update: Barack Obama reentered the political fray on Friday, decrying the course our nation is on, the absence of checks and balances, and the urgency of changing direction.
“This is not normal. These are extraordinary times. And they’re dangerous times.”
Image: Dr. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford) running for dear life in “The Fugitive.”