Tag Archives: Thomas Mann

Democracy, Off the Rails, Republicans

Is democracy alive and well in the U.S. and unthreatened by a “bugnut insane” GOP?

Kevin Drum — indispensable blogger, over many years my favorite (though not someone whom I am “in basic agreement with on nearly everything,” nor do we think “the same way,” as he characterizes himself relative to Ezra Klein) — takes issue with a recent Klein observation that democracy in the United States is at great risk (and that the Supreme Court is central to that risk). Klein writes (in a passage that Drum quotes):

If Democrats win back power this November, they will be faced with a choice: Leave the existing Supreme Court intact and watch their legislative agenda — and perhaps democracy itself — be gradually gutted by 5-4 and 6-3 judicial rulings, or use their power to reform the nation’s highest court over fierce opposition by the Republican Party.

. . . Supreme Court reform matters — for good or for ill — because democracy matters. In his recent book, The Great Democracy, Sitaraman makes an argument that’s come to sit at the core of my thinking, too: The fundamental fight in American politics right now is about whether we will become a true democracy. And not just a democracy in the thin, political definition we normally use — holding elections and ensuring access to the franchise. The fight is for a thicker form of a democracy, one that takes economic power seriously, that makes the construction of a certain kind of civic and political culture central to its aims.

Drum rejects the thesis that this is a time of special threat to democratic governance. He grants that the Republican Party has grown “more bugnut insane ever since the ascent of Newt Gingrich in the early 90s followed by the Mudochization of the news a few years later,” that right-wingers believe that “Democratic rule threatens to destroy America,” and that huge numbers of Republicans believe QAnon conspiracy tales. (So far, so good.)

He continues:

Wherever it comes from, it’s real. And it’s toxic. Needless to say, liberals aren’t trying to destroy America. But neither are conservatives, and our toxic partisan swamp just gets worse if liberals join conservatives in believing that the opposition party is ready to literally destroy the nation.

If Drum is right, the view that there is a grave threat to democracy posed by conservatives (or more precisely, by the Republican Party) is unfounded. I disagree. I believe Klein (and other small-d democrats, not simply liberals) have a much stronger case to make than Drum acknowledges.

In the passage Drum quotes, Klein presents no arguments for his conclusion, but other commentators have done so. Among the most comprehensive attempts to establish this threat is Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die. To oversimplify: The authors identify two norms essential for democratic governance — mutual toleration (accepting one’s political opponents as legitimate) and forbearance (showing restraint, rather than launching scorched-earth assaults); they argue at length, and with many contemporary and historical examples, that political parties and party leaders are key to preserving these norms, so that democracy stays strong; they observe that in recent years the Republican Party has repeatedly thrashed both these norms; and they conclude that, as a result of these violations (and other widely observed developments), American democratic institutions are under threat.

Perhaps because Drum doesn’t even allude to this argument, his scattershot objections fall flat. For instance: “Democrats controlled Congress for nearly 50 straight years after World War II and liberals didn’t think it was a threat to democracy.”

If Democratic majorities in Congress had been in place for decades, even though most voters had cast ballots for Republicans, then he might have a point. But that’s not what happened. Large majorities of Americans, district by district, cast votes for Democratic candidates. And that’s consistent with majority rule, hardly a violation of electoral or governing norms, and not a threat to democracy.

Several things have changed since the era of Democratic Congressional dominance: the parties aligned in ideological opposition to one another, with virtually no overlap; partisanship and negative polarization increased, while Americans came to adopt strong, thick identities on one side or the other of the divide; and one party – with a shrinking electoral base – veered off the rails.

The GOP has ceased to have confidence in its ability to attract voting majorities and has come to rely on gerrymandering (a much more devastatingly precise and effective tool than back in Governor Gerry’s Massachusetts), voter suppression (reminiscent of Jim Crow and equally shameful), and judicial intervention by hyperpartisan Republican judges and justices to forestall democratic accountability.

Party-line votes in the courts on issue after issue, including voting rights; legal arguments — in the courtroom, the classroom, and at think tanks — reminiscent of the Lochner Era; and the burgeoning successes of the conservative legal movement to win judicial rulings that dismantle Democratic legislation and administrative rules, all place the Supreme Court at the center of these democratic skirmishes (and provide context for Klein’s comments).

Republicans have resorted increasingly to constitutional hardball, delegitimizing their opponents and employing tactics hostile to principles and practices that nourish democracy, while Donald Trump — unique among his 44 predecessors — has run amuck. Far more disturbing than Trump’s behavior has been the response of Republican leaders in Washington and a number of state capitols: murmur objections (at most) to Trump’s tweets or comments, while doing whatever is necessary (when possible) to enable his transgressions, no matter what harm results.

In their account, Levitsky and Ziblatt identify troubling patterns of Republican behavior. Perhaps the story told in How Democracies Die is mistaken. Drum observes that “America has had gerrymandering, the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court since the beginning.” He comments that “the foundation of democracy is that the people mostly get what they want most of the time.” But neither rhetorical point, nor his other objections, undermine the argument that Levitsky, Ziblatt, and other democrats make.

Drum doesn’t grapple with the observations, historical review, and arguments that undergird the democrats’ fears, so he doesn’t show how they have gone wrong. The points he makes are often contentious or lack relevance or both. Drum’s off-point commentary suggests that he may have failed to grasp what Klein and other democratic critics have tried to articulate.

In a second post on the same topic, Drum begins with this:

It should be possible to view something as appalling without also insisting that it portends the end of democracy. There are lots of appalling things going on today, but this doesn’t mean that democracy is withering on the vine.

No one could disagree with that, including the small-d democrats who embrace the view that the behavior of the contemporary Republican Party and its leadership threaten democratic institutions.

Drum’s apparent lack of understanding also surfaces in another passage from the final paragraphs of his first post, as he reflects on an earlier time, and — in effect — offers a shout-out to Democratic leaders of the past. If they could best the Republicans, he suggests, without adding seats to the Supreme Court or admitting D.C. and Puerto Rico to the Union, then 21st century Democrats should be able to replicate these successes:

Old school liberal pols like Sam Rayburn or Tip O’Neill would laugh at present day progressives who complain that the system is rigged against them just because we’ve lost control of the Senate for a few years and now face a potentially hostile Supreme Court. In no uncertain terms they would tell us to stop whining and instead do the hard work of winning more votes in more places. The Senate is what it is and everyone knows it. The rules are simple and well known, so go out and say things that will appeal to enough people in enough places to win 51 senators. We don’t need a couple of new states or a packed Supreme Court or any of that. We need to convince the American public that our agenda is the right one, and just running up the vote in California won’t do it—and isn’t perhaps the most democratic approach anyway.

In principle, this is straightforward. Progressives can make better arguments and eventually get most of the American public on our side. Alternatively, we can moderate our agenda to win more votes. Or some combination of the two. That’s the democratic way to victory.

While I’m cheered by this celebration of Democrats taking it to the Republicans — I was a fan of Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy and Tom Perez’s every zip code strategy; I believe Elizabeth Warren’s bread and butter agenda is vital for American families, whether they be Democratic or Republican — it only glancingly addresses the threat that has galvanized small-d democrats.

By the time It’s Even Worse Than It Looks appeared, numerous scholars had begun to draw attention to the transformation of the Republican Party from earlier eras — including the Reagan years — into something twisted and threatening. In 2012, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein described the Gingrich and post-Gingrich era GOP in these words:

The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

This represented a mutation. Today’s Republican Party is not your father’s (or uncle’s) GOP. Not Sam Rayburn or Tip O’Neill’s opposition party. Absolutely not the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan. Yes, in previous eras, we had Joseph McCarthy, the John Birch Society, and paranoid activists in Kevin Drum’s Orange County. But they didn’t represent the leadership of the Republican Party. They were individuals on the party’s edge; they were outliers. The GOP itself was fit and healthy — and well within the mainstream: not an outlier and not a threat to democracy.

And things have gotten worse year by year. In an essay last month (in Ezra Klein’s Vox), “insurgent outlier” had become “authoritarian outlier.”

Although Drum has noticed that the GOP has become “more bugnut insane,” he hasn’t acknowledged the significance of the changes articulated by the small-d democrats. He still sees the same old political battlefield and the same old GOP (though nuttier). His approach insists, Nothing new here.

Drum has neglected a rigorously argued, well documented account that deserves to be taken seriously, as Ezra Klein does. In February 2018, when How Democracies Die came out, Klein wrote:

In most modern cases, “democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.” They rot from the inside, poisoned by leaders who “subvert the very process that brought them to power.” They are hollowed out, the trappings of democracy present long after the soul of the system is snuffed out.

… 

Where Levitsky and Ziblatt make their mark is in weaving together political science and historical analysis of both domestic and international democratic crises; in doing so, they expand the conversation beyond Trump and before him, to other countries and to the deep structure of American democracy and politics.

Kevin Drum hasn’t touched on anything resembling deep structure. His appeals to Rayburn and O’Neill fail to acknowledge that the Republican Party — and its leadership — have fundamentally changed since the bygone eras of Rayburn and O’Neill.

To appreciate this transformation, consider Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan. They had a mutual respect for one another. O’Neill had watched the first challenger in nearly a half century — since FDR toppled Hoover — defeat a sitting president (with the exception of Carter’s victory over Ford, who had never before faced voters in a national election, not even as a candidate for vice president). Ronald Reagan (never mind the fanciful revisionism of pre-Trump Republicans) was an eminently pragmatic president (just as he had governed in California), willing to work with Democrats. He was the furthest thing from the Tea Partiers and Trump enablers — and from the unprincipled Mitch McConnell and his ilk.

It is not far-fetched to think that Reagan and O’Neill may have wished, since they worked together, for their counterpart to succeed — that they regarded this as far and away better than gridlock or dysfunction.

In the 1980s, Democrats and Republicans had competing agendas for governing. Both parties, on a par, put forward solutions to social problems for voters to assess. Republicans and Democrats campaigned, sought to turn out the vote, and abided by the results of elections. (Note that “. . . prior to the 2006 election, no state ever required a voter to produce a government-issued photo ID as a condition to voting.” That’s how recently Republican have cranked up their voter suppression strategy.)

When there was divided government — a Republican White House and a Democratic House of Representatives — the two sides came together to find common ground: that’s how they made progress, how they served the American public, how they regarded job number one.

Nancy Pelosi (as tough and savvy as Rayburn or O’Neill, by the way) would have worked well with Reagan (and with Republican majority leaders in the Senate, Howard Baker and Bob Dole). Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Chris Coons (two mainstream Democrats to help illustrate a point), neither of whom have recoiled at the idea of expanding the Supreme Court or admitting new states, are hardly shrinking from a fight with Republicans. Today’s Democratic leaders are made of the same stuff as those in the good old days.

What’s changed: Mitch McConnell (and the GOP caucuses in both the Senate and the House) often strategically opt for dysfunction, gridlock, and paralysis rather than cutting a deal, if they think they can shun accountability and win the next election — or the cycle or two after that. The Republican rejection of the two democratic norms — mutual toleration and forbearance — cripples the ability of the two sides to work together.

Donald Trump cheated contractors who worked for him. How many of those small business owners, after prolonged litigation and settlements for pennies on the dollar, would chose to work with him again?

Are Democrats in a position to trust the word and the enunciated principles of Mitch McConnell? Of Lindsey Graham? Or of any of the Republican Senators who follow their leader? How about Bill Barr or Brett Kavanaugh?

These folks aren’t backbenchers. They aren’t peripheral to the GOP. This is today’s Republican Party.

Newt Gingrich taught Republicans the words to vilify Democrats: sick, pathetic, traitors, radical … Republicans learned the lessons and Fox News Channel amplified the message. Now the insults (and lies — and they were always lies) are commonplace. That marked the end of mutual tolerance.

Gingrich, and the Republican leaders who followed, put an end to the second democratic norm as well: forbearance. McConnell’s Senate is the best current example of that. I won’t bother to list chapter and verse. There are examples aplenty. The federal bench, led by the Supreme Court, is well on its way to becoming the prime force to obliterate forbearance.

It’s a new day. If the Democratic and Republican parties embraced analogous, though competing goals, and recognized the same incentives in 2020 as they did from the ’50s through the ’80s, the present would be like the past (as Drum would have it).

But the Republican Party has figured out that they can generate dysfunctional government, so voters are frustrated and angry and gridlock reigns — and escape accountability (made possible because of negative polarization, opposing partisan identities, and FNC). They don’t have to try to make the system work. (Ronald Reagan, like Tip O’Neill, wanted the system to work.)

Republicans can erect barriers to voting, strive to disqualify votes cast, amplify their vilification of Democrats (and of Democratic constituencies — families who live in urban areas, people of color, immigrants from disfavored countries, and religious minorities) on cable television, radio, and the web, and still have a pretty good shot at reelection. And — best of all for the GOP — if they lose the Senate (as McConnell may do because of indifference to the toll from COVID and to economic havoc), he is confident that the GOP will win in another cycle or two, because there are only two parties to chose from. The pendulum will swing right again, especially since the GOP will do all it can to gum up the works when the Democrats seek to govern, to keep the anger and frustration amped up.

That wasn’t the Reagan agenda. Or the GOP’s. Not even close.

An off the rails Republican Party threatens democratic governance. Political scientists and other observers have made a strong case for this judgment. Kevin Drum’s appeals to previous eras of American politics, to past partisan skirmishes with wins and losses for each side, and to old school leadership fail to undermine this conclusion.

[Updated to correct misstatement: President Ford — who was appointed vice-president and took office after the president had resigned in disgrace — was defeated in 1976 while running for election for the first time.]

[Second update: In my first update, I tried to justify a contention in my initial post (expressed with a misstatement) that Reagan’s defeat of a sitting president was a singular political accomplishment. Jonathan Bernstein, with a better grasp of history than mine, noted subsequently that Carter was the only president in the 20th century “who was defeated in his party’s first term in the White House.” In my telling, the 1980 election revealed Reagan’s strength, while Bernstein points to Carter’s failure. In either case: Reagan’s victory suggested something rare in American politics, which Tip O’Neill was unlikely to overlook.]

(Image: The Spirit of ’76 from wikipedia.)

Democracy, Republicans

Release of v. 5 of the report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is a man bites dog story

The Republican-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has released what is probably its final report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, which goes beyond what we learned from the Mueller report. The 966-page fifth volume provides more details and establishes more conclusively that Trump’s claim — “It’s all a hoax” — is a lie.

▪ “The Committee found that the Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.” (p. 5)

▪ “Manafort hired and worked increasingly closely with a Russian national, Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer. . . . Kilimnik and Manafort formed a close and lasting relationship that endured to the 2016 U.S. elections and beyond.

Prior to joining the Trump Campaign in March 2016 and continuing throughout his time on the Campaign, Manafort directly and indirectly communicated with Kilimnik, Derispaska, and the pro-Russian oligarchs in Urkraine. On numerous occasions, Manafort sought to secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik.” (p. 6)

▪ “The Committee found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump because the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.

[Redacted] WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian influence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence effort. The Committee found significant indications that [redacted] …

While the GRU and WikiLeaks were releasing hacked documents, the Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a russion election interference effort” (p. 7)

SSCI report on Russian interference in 2016 election, v. 5, p. vii.

Writing at Lawfare, Benjamin Wittes suggests that, in their statement asserting that “the Committee found no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government in its efforts to meddle in the election,” Senate Republicans on the committee have misrepresented the report they signed off on.

Wittes draws three conclusions from the report: First, the report’s findings validate and go further than the Mueller report. Second, the findings undercut Bill Barr’s efforts to portray the Russian investigation as illegitimate “spying” on the Trump campaign. And, finally [emphasis added]:

Third, while I have contempt for the rhetoric of these Republican senators and I find it almost mind-boggling to try to reconcile the text of this report with their votes in the impeachment only a few short months ago, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the public service they have done here. Yes, they are lying about having done it—pretending they found things other than what they found and did not find the things they actually found. And yes, they are almost religiously evading the moral, legal, and democratic consequences of what they found.

But unlike their counterparts in the House of Representatives, they allowed this investigation to take place. They ran a bipartisan, serious investigation. They worked with their Democratic colleagues to insulate it from an environment rife with pressures. And they produced a report that is a worthy contribution to our understanding of what happened four years ago.

This report may represent the most significant example of bipartisanship in American politics in 2020. It is an extraordinarily rare instance of senators working across the aisle on a fiercely partisan issue that has become nearly extinct.

In their 2012 book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein write: “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Documenting and illustrating the truth of that conclusion has been the most consistent theme of this blog. As someone who has followed politics since my teenage years in the mid-1960s, it has been fascinating and horrifying to see the Republican Party run itself off the rails. Bipartisanship, a collegial Senate, and even placing U.S. security interests above the Republican party line, are in the last stages of extinction.

Let’s acknowledge that we’re not quite there yet — not 100%.

(Although Marco Rubio now heads the panel, I suspect that we can attribute this milestone to the relationship between Senators Richard Burr and Mark Warner, and their respective authority as leaders to direct the work of the committee and to make decisions for their side of the party divide, for this success. Just like in the good ole days.)

Note however that this exception reveals the Republican Party’s comprehensive success in evading accountability and truth: Republican voters don’t trust the mainstream media, and will hear (if they hear anything at all of this report) only mischaracterizations on Fox New Channel and in other conservative media. So, the Republican senators who allowed the release of this report could rest assured that their false statement — which relies on “lying,” “pretending,” and “almost religiously evading the moral, legal, and democratic consequences of what they found” — will be taken at face value by Donald Trump and his base.

Republicans, in other words, will accept the fraudulent cover story as true. Should the actual substance of the report come to their attention, that will be rejected as “fake news.” In 2020, a singular gesture of bipartisanship doesn’t leave us much to celebrate.

(Image: screengrab of Reuters video.)

Democracy, Donald Trump, Off the Rails, Republicans, Tribalism

“Violating norms” = deliberately undermining institutional practices that protect and preserve our democracy

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.