Tag Archives: Ben Sasse

2020 General Election, Democracy, Off the Rails, Republicans

An unhinged President continues his efforts to overthrow the free and fair election that he lost

With fewer than 16 days left in his term, Donald Trump continues to try to wheedle, bully, beseech, and whine his way into staying in office beyond January 20, when Joe Biden is sworn in — as revealed in the recording of an hour long phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (reminiscent of his call to Ukrainian President Zelensky).

“We won very substantially in Georgia. You even see it by rally size, frankly. We’d be getting 25-30,000 people a rally, and the competition would get less than 100 people. And it never made any sense.”

In addition to rally size, Trump made many disparate appeals — to rumors, social media trends, conspiracy theories, and lies, none of which were grounded in fact, evidence, or reason.

A rambling Trump brought up 250-300,000 mysteriously lost ballots; a couple hundred thousand forged signatures; the promise of providing an accurate number – in the 50s of thousands – “with certified accountants”; 4,504 voters who weren’t registered; 18,325 vacant address voters; 904 with only post office box numbers; a burst water main (and vanishing Republican poll watchers); suitcases or trunks with ballots, rather than official ballot boxes; 4,925 out-of-state voters; 2,326 absentee ballots with addresses, but no names; drop boxes that were picked up, but not delivered for three days according to affidavits from many people; ballots dropped in massive numbers; close to 5,000 ballots from dead people; 300,000 fake ballots; 3,000 pounds of shredded ballots; a big issue with Dominion removing voting machines, or replacing the internal parts; a person identified on the internet as responsible for 18,000 to 56,000 phony ballots, including a “devastating” new tape showing the ballots fed through voting machines 3 times; and a “corrupt” Fulton County taking advantage of Raffensperger.

The vote margin of Biden’s win — 11,779 — is referenced multiple times, including the ask that Raffensperger somehow, someway find 11,780 votes to put Trump ahead in the count.

Trump reminds the Secretary of State that he is a Republican, calls him a child, objects that the GBI and FBI (who have found no evidence of voter fraud) are “either dishonest or incompetent,” and mocks him: “Stacey Abrams is laughing about you. She’s going around saying these guys are dumber than a rock. What she’s done to this party is unbelievable, I tell ya.”

Trump references “corrupt” ballots, warning Raffensperger:

And you are going to find that they are — which is totally illegal — it is more illegal for you than it is for them because, you know, what they did and you’re not reporting it. That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. And that’s a big risk.

Whatever else this call reveals about the pathetic, incoherent, flailing narcissist who sits in the White House, it exposes something else: an abuse of power that clearly constitutes impeachable conduct.

The President of the United States is actively, compulsively (albeit fecklessly) intent on overturning the results of a democratic election.

A majority of the Republican caucus in the House is on board with this theft, including the minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, while nine-term member (and former judge), Louie Gohmert, responded to his loss in federal court (where he sought to overturn Trump’s defeat) with these words: “But if bottom line is, the court is saying, ‘We’re not gonna touch this. You have no remedy’ — basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you gotta go to the streets and be as violent as antifa and BLM.”

In the Senate, a dozen Republicans intend to resist Biden’s victory.

A handful of Senate Republicans have spoken out against these attacks on an election that was free and fair, and in which Donald Trump lost decisively. Most prominent among these dissenters are Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse. But most national Republicans are Trump enablers — actively endorsing his conspiracy theories that Biden’s election was fraudulent; pretending that the election is in doubt, while dodging and weaving to avoid embracing the lie that Trump won; or maintaining silence, so as not to offend their vindictive leader.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party pose a grave threat to democratic governance. The GOP is seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, cast aside the votes of millions of Americans, and keep the Republican loser in power. That is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.

A full recording and transcript of the call is available from the Washington Post; the link to the recording in the first paragraph is from Atlanta’s 11Alive on YouTube.

(Screengrab of firefighter extinguishing an arson fire at a ballot drop box in Los Angeles from KCBS report.)

Democracy, Donald Trump, Republicans

A perspective that clarifies the agenda of the contemporary Republican party

Ten days after the FBI broke up a domestic terrorist plot to kidnap and murder Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Donald Trump encouraged rally goers (shoulder to shoulder, without masks, cheering and jeering in the midst of rising rates of coronavirus infection and hospitalization) to chant, “Lock her up,” while adding himself: “Lock ’em all up.”

As we approach an election that will likely deliver an emphatic defeat to the President, two prominent Republican Senators, Ben Sasse and John Cornyn, offered criticism of their party’s leader, but no condemnation of either his campaign to delegitimize the election or his musings about jailing his political opponents (including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden). Washington Republicans refuse to acknowledge these expressions of an increasingly authoritarian chief executive as causes for concern.

Meanwhile, the United States Senate, controlled by a party dominated by a shrinking base — mostly white, mostly men, shrugging off the twin crises of a raging pandemic that is hardly slowing down and a struggling economy months or years away from full recovery, is rushing toward confirmation of a justice of the Supreme Court. Why the rush? Ronald Brownstein offers an analysis that puts the issue into context:

The historic number of Americans who stood in long lines to cast their ballot in cities from Atlanta to Houston symbolizes the diverse, urbanized Democratic coalition that will make it very difficult for the GOP to win majority support in elections through the 2020s. That hill will get only steeper as Millennials and Generation Z grow through the decade to become the largest generations in the electorate.

Every young conservative judge that the GOP has stacked onto the federal courts amounts to a sandbag against that rising demographic wave. Trump’s nominations to the Supreme Court of Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Barrett—whom a slim majority of Republican senators appears determined to seat by Election Day—represent the capstone of that strategy. As the nation’s growing racial and religious diversity limits the GOP’s prospects, filling the courts with conservatives constitutes what the Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz calls “the right-wing firewall” against a country evolving electorally away from the party.

Small-d democratic governance is antithetical to the success of the contemporary Republican Party. Voter suppression and gerrymandering are central tenets of the GOP’s electoral strategy, while the party has come to rely on the courts to stifle the aspirations of a burgeoning American majority. 

(Image of Donald Trump intoning, “Lock ’em all up,” from WZZM13 on YouTube.)

Democracy, Donald Trump

Amid deep background reporting and anonymous bravado, the overall picture is unchanged: a train wreck of a presidency

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:

  • President Trump’s tax returns
  • Trump family businesses — and whether they comply with the Constitution’s emoluments clause, including the Chinese trademark grant to the Trump Organization
  • Trump’s dealings with Russia, including the president’s preparation for his meeting with Vladimir Putin
  • The payment to Stephanie Clifford — a.k.a. Stormy Daniels
  • James Comey’s firing
  • Trump’s firing of U.S. attorneys
  • Trump’s proposed transgender ban for the military
  • Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s business dealings
  • White House staff’s personal email use
  • Cabinet secretary travel, office expenses, and other misused perks
  • Discussion of classified information at Mar-a-Lago
  • Jared Kushner’s ethics law compliance
  • Dismissal of members of the EPA board of scientific counselors
  • The travel ban
  • Family separation policy
  • Hurricane response in Puerto Rico
  • Election security and hacking attempts
  • White House security clearances

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.”