Tag Archives: Republicans

January 6 Committee Hearing

June 12, 2022 7:20 pm , Leave a Comment

The January 6 Committee offers a vision to America:

America belongs to Republicans, but they ought (which is not to say that they must) govern according to orderly processes.

Reading between the lines of how independent observers summarized and commented on the Committee’s first prime time hearing, this is the prevailing conceptual framework whether or not most people realize it.

America is ailing badly from a rotten, toxic system. (Either extreme inequality, mass shootings, an appalling COVID response etc., etc., have been adequate to establish that context, or else just never mind any of this.) The January 6 Committee is, above all, a reaction to Donald Trump’s guidance for Republicans, to exploit people by encouraging the rottenness.

Rep. Liz Cheney calls on her party to reject Trump’s guidance, and instead exploit people by preserving the system. It’s an entirely logical entreaty: The system advantages Republicans, and Democrats are willing to help uphold it nonetheless. Even now, the system is furthering Republican policy, and it was and remains irrational for Republicans to risk that simply to prevent a non-Republican from getting Air Force One for a few years. Cheney and her colleagues ask Republicans to wise up, embrace the system and strategic victory, and accept relatively trivial tactical reverses.

Nowhere in any of this is reform, or liberalism, or even democracy. The narrative being generated by the Committee uses that last word a lot, certainly, but the word is very firmly betrayed by the story being told around it.

(I wrote a short version of this analysis a couple of days ago.)

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Power-Sharing

May 24, 2022 1:22 pm

There is a dry, but very deep, humor in a bipartisan delegation from the U.S. Congress urging an end to the sabotage of government in Northern Ireland, where one party is exploiting a power-sharing agreement by refusing to participate in necessary compromise.

I may not have all the details exactly right, but my general understanding is that government in Northern Ireland essentially guarantees participation for multiple political factions, backed up by a powerful veto on even the formation of government after the questionably-meaningful elections.

Any readers probably don’t need me to spell this out, but… that’s all too similar to how American government works, or rather doesn’t work, given the similar sabotage ongoing, here.

For the purposes of this post, the details of Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol and the Good Friday Agreement are largely extraneous. The essential point is that the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), one of the political factions with a guaranteed place within and veto over Northern Ireland government, is now pursuing its agenda by taking governance itself hostage. Quoth The Guardian: “The DUP has thwarted the formation of an executive and assembly at Stormont in protest at the protocol.”

It is especially funny that the DUP are offended at members of the US Congress calling on them to release the hostages, given that the US Congress is in its own affairs as inspiring a model as the DUP could wish for.

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Asymmetric belief in authority

May 10, 2022 11:32 am

Most people on the mainstream center-to-left spectrum have been successfully trained, to respond to the paralysis of this Congress, by parroting the names “Manchin and Sinema.” Supposedly Democrats are soundly for change—even in the US Senate 96% of them want to do something!—and all the responsibility for obstruction lies with the Evil Bobbsey Twins plus all the Republicans.

There are multiple reasons why this excuse is unsatisfactory, and I will note some others below. But first, I want to revisit something I have posted about here, before.

If you take them at their word (and in this regard I believe that we should) then Democratic elites genuinely believe that Mike Pence, alone, could via some sleight of hand with note cards have literally made Donald Trump the president for 2021-24. They may also profess that this act would have violated the rules, yet the degree of alarm in references to that prospect, combined with other patterns, convinces me: they really believe that one (lame duck) authority figure could have declared that down is up, and obliged the rest of society to stand on its head.

Yet these same Democrats profess that Senate President Harris and Senate Majority Leader Schumer are essentially powerless observers. Their hands are tied.

Say what you like, but this is an extremely asymmetric belief in authority.

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How our fight is and isn’t like Ukraine’s

April 3, 2022 4:07 pm

I definitely think there are connections between Ukraine’s fight against Russian attacks, and liberal democracy’s fight against Republican attacks. I have written as much, a number of times.

There are direct links, for one thing; long before Trump began flaunting Putin as his own modern day ring-giver, the American right has had partnership with Russian oligarchs. The NRA is just one example among countless.

There are also the conceptual similarities which motivate that partnership. Not only are the politics of Putin and of Republicans oppressive, predatory and definitely antidemocratic, they point toward complete intolerance of anything which exists independent of their faction. (Putin is definitively there, but there’s no reason to think Republicans won’t catch up.) Not just me saying that, either.

But there are differences which are at least as important.

Looking at the surprisingly effective resistance by Ukraine and seeing an example for Democrats anxious about midterm elections really, badly, misunderstands a lot.

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Accountability vs. Mythmaking

February 4, 2022 8:52 pm

Mythmaking seems like the greatest challenge to accountability for the January 6, 2021 Capitol putsch. I have written a bit about the mythmaking before, and about my skepticism toward accountability efforts, but I perceived the connection a bit more clearly today, I think.

Marcy Wheeler brought up the bureaucratic martial artistry of the Cheneys again, today, and in replying, it occurred to me that the biggest problem for Liz Cheney (and ultimately the rest of us) might be this:

  1. For Cheney, as I have posted here before, I’m not sure how her political career avoids a dead end, now, without making the Republican Party regret becoming the party of the Capitol putsch
  2. I’m not sure how she or anyone else can do that, partly because it seems like it would require turning all of American politics on its head; short of an electoral leveling, I don’t see how Cheney overturns even Republican elites’ ire, and I don’t think investigations, reveals or even convictions are going to produce such a leveling
  3. Also however, it occurred to me today, there is a larger problem that the Big Lie about a stolen election has now taken hold among Republicans and I don’t see anything which might even begin to reverse that. Unless something did so, how and why do Republicans end up genuinely regretting an aggressive attempt to “stop the steal”—?
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When is democracy out of danger?

January 8, 2022 10:16 am

I want to return one more time to The Morning email from January 6, and one particular idea: that democrats and especially Democrats should make enormous sacrifice for now, with relief to come “Once the authoritarian threat has receded.”

A lot of people maintain some form of this premise, and for my part I have touched upon this question before. But I feel like it’s worth addressing specifically in these terms.

Setting aside the practicality of still stopping the authoritarian threat to America, at this late hour, what is the “after” condition when America moves our democracy off the endangered list? What does that look like?

This seems like a very important and obvious question, because a lot of us would have said that we entered the “after” condition a year ago, yet here we are.

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Elites for Oligarchy

January 6, 2022 11:43 am

I wrote a reply to the “Republicans for democracy” feature in today’s The Morning email newsletter. Partly I was just reacting to the ongoing stupidity of this elite fantasy about a “grand coalition” in which democracy is saved by teaming up with anti-Trump Republicans. This is fan fiction, and bad fan fiction at that. But, I think my efforts to compose a relatively tight response helped clarify some concepts which are important. So here’s my email.

I appreciate The Morning emails. They are frequently informative and often thoughtful.

“Republicans for democracy” is really not good analysis.

One, your premise of a crucial division between the Republicans of Trump and the Republicans of Cheney is entirely arbitrary. Trump aspired to use procedural mumbo jumbo to overturn democracy; Bush and Cheney actually did so (as did Trump 16 years later), it’s called The Electoral College.

“But The Electoral College is a legitimate institution,” except it’s an antidemocratic and [as employed since the 18th century] extra-Constitutional institution, which the Cheney Republicans were and undoubtedly remain ready to delegitimize the instant that it might disfavor them instead of Democrats.

20 years before Trump did so, the Bush-Cheney team ginned up a mob to storm and disrupt official post-election processes. You pooh-pooh this precedent as mere “hardball,” and insist that the greater violence of Trump’s mob makes it “not consistent with American democratic traditions.” Yet in the very sentence before you insist that violence and supportive lies are firmly out of bounds, you insist that lying the nation into an entire war is firmly in bounds. Please.

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How many refuseniks can a liberal democracy handle?

December 9, 2021 2:39 pm

There’s a saying that goes “if someone owes you $500, that’s their problem; if someone owes you $500 million, that’s your problem.”

Lately I’ve been thinking that if one citizen of a liberal democracy rejects its philosophy, one person has a problem; if one million citizens of a liberal democracy reject its philosophy, society has a problem.

Mostly, this is just me putting a familiar theme into a new bottle, so I won’t dwell on it all that long here.

But it continues to seem like something which we need to confront, and I’m not sure that I have seen anyone doing so:

Even in an impossible scenario of sweeping new political rules to take away all of Republicans’ (currently generous) options for exercising tyranny of the minority, what does liberalism propose to offer them other than the steamrolling of what they value, forever?

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Redistricting Minority Reports

October 14, 2021 7:56 pm

I had an idea this week, which I’m sketching out just for whatever. Please note, this is not a recommendation, just a thought-experiment. The best approach for redistricting, short of reconsidering the whole concept of geography-based democracy, is probably still very independent commissions kept as far away from politicians as possible.

But, what if the backstop for legislative district maps supported by only the party in power was a kind of “official minority report” along these lines:

In Ohio, for example, current redistricting rules call for maps to be supported by at least half of the second-largest party in government (i.e. Democrats), but allow the party in power (i.e. Republicans) to enact four-year maps on a party-line basis, subject to antigerrymandering rules. In practice, Ohio Republicans are just ramming more gerrymandering right through the rules, and it seems to me like any real solution must involve taking the map-drawing pen away from the gerrymanderers at some point.

So how about, instead, if (when) Ohio Republicans ram through gerrymandered districts on a party-line vote, Ohio Democrats get to re-draw part of the map, say 40%.

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The Republican Party is pro-COVID

October 13, 2021 1:18 pm

I have been thinking about the substantial and, apparently, still growing pro-COVID energy among Republicans.

For one thing, I don’t think any other term is really adequate. When Republicans are simultaneously “antilockdown,” “antimask,” “antivaccine,” “antimandates,” etc., etc., the big picture is effectively pro-COVID. Republicans are pandemic accelerationists.

Masks make a difference. Republicans gleefully want to discourage them, with both policy and stigma. Vaccine mandates have been working really well! Republicans are busily working to thwart them, through preemption or riddling them with exemptions.

Above all, vaccines work, yet the Republican Party is letting crackpot antivaxxers pull it their way rather than making any attempt to celebrate vaccines as a triumph of the Trump administration.

None of this is shocking, it’s just of some interest, if only as a reference point within the stampede of daily events.

I recall, with some effort, a few fleeting days in July when Republican elites were supposedly attempting a new, pro-vaccination message; that went basically nowhere. Among other things, it’s quite obvious that neither Republicans’ voting base nor the party’s middle ranks support that message.

What strikes me is that the overall pro-COVID energy among Republicans seems like a boundary marker between rational sabotage, and irrational self-destruction.

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