News outlets are now reporting that about 140 Republicans in the House of Representatives and at least 12 GOP senators, who were voted in by a democratic form of government and who swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States, plan to defy the will of the people and object to the 2020 election results on Jan. 6. Without evidence, and parroting one of the most dishonest presidents in the history of the nation, they claim that Joe Biden’s victory was fraudulent.
The election results have been affirmed by election officials, state governors, lower court judges and the Supreme Court. No significant malfeasance has taken place. Yet, in a desperate and undemocratic attempt to apparently stage a coup and reseat Trump, Sen. Josh Hawley will raise a complaint and force both houses of Congress to take a vote on the election. To their credit, Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, with whom I agree on almost nothing, and Sen. Ben Sasse voiced their strong dissent in going through with the measure.
According to Sasse:
The president and his allies are playing with fire. They have been asking — first the courts, then state legislatures, now the Congress — to overturn the results of a presidential election. They have unsuccessfully called on judges and are now calling on federal officeholders to invalidate millions and millions of votes. If you make big claims, you had better have the evidence. But the president doesn’t and neither do the institutional arsonist members of Congress who will object to the Electoral College vote.
Likewise, Sen. Mitt Romney called the efforts of his Republican colleagues “madness.”
The other word for it, of course, is sedition. Here is how the Constitution defines it:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress … who … having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same (.)
As this article from The Week outlines, the voting process, which has remained unchanged election after election, confirmed, after holding the line against all sorts of nefarious lawsuits and unfounded claims of fraud, that Biden won the presidency in a fair election both by the popular vote and in the Electoral College. Few people on the left or right disagree that Trump and Republicans did not have the right to question the results. They certainly did. But the results have been vetted over and over, and Trump lost handily.
To now float a bunch of conspiracy theories in the face of no substantive proof that any of them carry any weight whatsoever is a disgrace to Congress, our government, our nation and the people who went out of their way, in the throes of a pandemic, no less, to have their voices mean something, to participate in their greatest right as an American citizen. To have all of that put into question because Trump and his lackeys in Congress are sore losers and can’t bear to cede power to a competent administration, represents failure — failure as human beings and failure to be keepers of the democracy for which they pledged allegiance.
Once the fiasco is done next week, the remaining members of Congress who still believe in the process actually have the right, as The Week has said, to “convene a traitor-free Congress” and to prevent these seditious men and women from taking their seats. I don’t believe that will actually happen, but make no mistake, they don’t deserve to hold the seats for which they were elected, and they don’t deserve to stand as representatives of this democracy.
Whatever happens, their names should be plastered all over the Internet so that in two or four years when their names are on the ballots again, voters can remember that when they had a chance to stand up for democracy, they stood against it, and they stood against the clear and unequivocal will of the American people.
Here are all the names that have been released thus far, etched and cached online for all to see:
President Donald Trump’s audacity apparently knows no bounds.
In a recent tweet, he threatened to withhold federal funding, amid a global pandemic no less, if Michigan did not cease its call to send out mail-in ballots to all of its 7.7 million residents so that, in the words of Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, “no Michigander has to choose between their health and their right to vote.”
The first thing that needs to be said is that, even if Trump doesn’t like the decision — it was issued from a Democrat, so, of course, it would raise his ire — there is nothing illegal about a state mailing out absentee ballots to its own residents. That is lie No. 1. In 2018, Michigan voters approved a “no excuse” constitutional amendment to allow any resident to apply for an absentee ballot for any reason.
Trump’s tweet, which has been liked by more than 120,000 people at present, includes two other falsehoods.
Lie No. 2 is that Michigan’s move has anything at all to do with an attempt at voter fraud. Trump has pushed this dishonest claim repeatedly, but it’s well-documented at this point that, while voting in person is obviously more secure than mail-in ballots, cases of absentee fraud have been few and far between. Michigan’s decision is about ensuring that people stay safe during the virus outbreak while being allowed to participate in one of this nation’s most cherished, and important, democratic processes.
Trump also suggested that he has the power to withhold state funding. He almost certainly does not. That might have been true if this was an authoritative regime, and I’m sure some of the people in power would like to quietly move us in that direction and give Trump all manner of unconstitutional privileges, but here in this democracy, the executive can’t simply invent powers. As The New York Times notes, the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, issued under President Richard Nixon, requires the chief executive to get approval from Congress before any money is withheld. In any case, a lot of the recently approved funding to states has already been released.
Cutting a state’s funding because they don’t do your bidding would be illegal. By threatening to do so, as Greg Sargent, with The Washington Post said, the president is “abusing his office and betraying the national interest.” Not only would Trump’s threat be illegal if put into action, it’s also undemocratic. Not that either of these bother the president.
Trump knows that in the upcoming election, he might be in trouble in Michigan. Attempts to prevent more people from voting is a tried and true part of the GOP toolkit. Current conservative strategies for limiting votes or asserting more influence in elections, including new restrictive laws and gerrymandering, are certainly more subtle in the 21st century than they were in the 19th and 20th centuries, but they are designed to achieve the same result. Republicans, and conservatives throughout American history, have long known that if they can somehow suppress votes, they have a better chance of winning. And why is that? Because conservatives have historically protected the interests of the few — the privileged and the well-connected (and usually white) — to the detriment of the many, including blue collar workers, immigrants, low-income families and those in the inner city.
Trump and his Republican cohorts know very well that the more they can suppress certain voters, the better chance they have of remaining in power. The president even admitted it. During an episode of “Fox and Friends” on Fox News, Trump was talking about measures that were proposed by Democrats to increase the number of people who could vote during the pandemic:
“The things they had in there were crazy. They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
And in November 2019, Justin Clark, one of Trump’s 2020 election advisors, had this to say in leaked audio captured by a liberal advocacy group:
Traditionally, it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes in places. …
Let’s start protecting our voters (regarding Election Day monitoring of polling places). We know where they are … Let’s start playing offense a little bit. That’s what you’re going to see in 2020. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program.
Clark claims this was taken out of context and that he was talking about historic, false allegations that the Republican Party suppresses votes — although the line, “let’s start playing offense” belies this argument — but when you actually do look at the historical record of how the conservative party in America actually is incontrovertibly guilty of widespread corruption at the ballot box, it becomes difficult to believe the president or anyone else in the Republican Party that their intentions are benevolent and on the up and up.
Slow Progress
Before the 15th Amendment became law, of course, the right to vote was more or less limited to white people who owned a certain amount of property. In the early 19th century, this began to change as restrictions were loosened in certain states. The constitutional amendment, ratified in February 1870, only allowed black men to vote. Black folks almost exclusively voted for the Republican Party, which was, crucially, the more liberal party in American politics at the time, while the conservatives mainly inhabited the Democratic Party. These dynamics didn’t begin to shift until around the year 1900 when “The Great Commoner” William Jennings Bryant, a Democrat, began to champion increased economic equality and railed against the robber baron class. Although he would later take an anti-Darwin, anti-intellectual stance and is known to many atheists and secular humanists mainly as a fundamentalist Christian, he set in motion the populist left movement en route to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” platform, which was a kind precursor to Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” programs of the 1960s.
But back in the 1870s with the passage of the 15th Amendment, the issue of voting rights for black people was far from settled. Politicians and former slaveholders in the South, who were reeling economically from the devastating effects of war and attempting to set up a form of slavery by a different name, Reconstruction began to take shape. Some black folks did get to vote, and some members of the black community even got elected to state and federal offices, but in many cases in the South, literacy tests and poll taxes were introduced as an attempt to control the numbers of African Americans who could vote. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia were formed to assert white influence in the nation and intimidate blacks and their supporters from participation in democracy and public life. [efn_note]”The Volume Library,” Volume II, Page 2239.[/efn_note]
Interestingly, three prominent Southern statesmen, Lucius Lamar in Mississippi, Wade Hampton in South Carolina and Alexander Stephens, the former vice president of the Confederacy, said in a public statement that denying black people the right to vote was “not only impossible but undesired,” according to “Origins of the New South” by C. Vann Woodward. Whether it is actually true or not, Hampton claimed to be the “first man at (sic) the South” to support enfranchisement for black folks, and went so far as to say that the black man, “naturally allies himself with the more conservative of the whites.” Lamar defended black voting rights and supported a plan to provide federal dollars to local schools “emphasizing the benefits for former slaves,” according to The Mississippi Encyclopedia. [efn_note]”Origins of the New South,” C. Vann Woodward, 1951, Page 321.[/efn_note] [efn_note]”The Mississippi Encyclopedia,” 2017, Page 704.[/efn_note] [efn_note]”Black Reconstruction in America,” W.E.B. Dubois, 1935, Page 443.[/efn_note]
But as Woodward notes, “The century had scarcely ended, however, before the prophecies of these statesmen were overturned throughout the South” as state after state rolled out disenfranchisement provisions through poll taxes and “other devices.”
That would largely remain the situation on voting rights until passage of the 19th amendment to the Constitution when women got the vote.
Full Access?
Probably seeing the writing on the wall and how the arc of history was progressing up to that point, and that they were, in fact, losing, white leaders in the South became even more committed to restricting access to the voting booth for black people, and thus, we have the marches, sit-ins and the battle for rights that ensued in towns like Selma, Miss., where civil rights supporters were hosed and beaten with clubs for daring to challenge the status quo. The crucial moment, 100 years after ratification of the 15th amendment, came with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, presumably giving black folks full access to the ballot box in practice, not just in theory. According to the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the bill was important to prevent some of the more egregious voter suppression offenses.
(The act) included provisions that required states and local jurisdictions with a historical pattern of suppressing voting rights based on race to submit changes in their election laws to the U.S. Justice Department for approval (or “preclearance”). In the ensuing decades, the preclearance provisions proved to be a remarkably effective means of discouraging state and local officials from erecting new barriers to voting, stopping the most egregious policies from going forward, and providing communities and civil rights advocates with advance notice of proposed changes that might suppress the vote.
In the ensuing years, young people were able to vote and new protections were put into place for foreign-language speakers and disabled people.
Undermining Democracy
Although both the Democratic and Republican parties have used the tool of redistricting to their political advantage at various times, it has consistently been the conservatives who have sought to strike a blow for voting rights and make it restrictive for more people to make their voices heard.
The blow came with blunt force in 2013 when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision and with a conservative majority, removed the “preclearance” provision of the Voting Rights Act, to which liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg remarked, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” The Atlantic said this decision “set the stage for a new era of white hegemony.”
The Voting Rights Act was only a starting point that was, itself, shamefully, more than 100 years in the making. As Trump is currently predicted to lose the popular vote once again, according to NBC News, we should probably expect more crowing from Trump and Co. about election fraud and additional methods, subtle as they may be, to try to prevent access to the ballot box.
The president may be called a “populist,” but little about the conservative platform or policies suggest that the party cares one whit about the will or interests of the people. They care about obtaining and retaining power. They can more effectively do that by undermining enfranchisement, which in turn, undermines democracy.
The latest polls show that former Vice President Joe Biden is leading President Donald Trump by a five-point margin nationwide, according to CNN and the research firm SSRS, while Trump has a seven-point lead in battleground states. As we know, battleground states have historically been significant in ultimately choosing the winner in our electoral college system.
The 2020 election, which takes place Nov. 3, could be shaping up as another situation in which the Democratic Party candidate wins the popular vote but fails to garner enough electoral votes. In other words, we could be gearing up for another tight race.
This is stunning to me because Trump has spent four straight years brazenly lying to the public, issuing embellishments and half-truths and just generally talking out of his ass — almost all of it documented and written about repeatedly in the press — as well as insulting nearly every voting demographic in the country and being openly hostile to our democratic institutions. Yet, he seems to have carte blanche free reign to do as he pleases inside the Republican Party, which is full of cowards who refuse to stand up to him, and his supporters in the public sphere either don’t care about his unethical behavior or give him a pass because they like his politics.
Trump bullies and insults anyone who dares disagree or question him. He has shown many instances of narcissistic tendencies and crude behavior toward women. He’s flirted with open racists. He and/or his inner cycle most certainly colluded with Russia to interfere in the 2016 election. He has shown little to no empathy during the coronavirus pandemic. He unabashedly refuses to wear a mask and set an example for the rest of the country. In one of the many talking-out-of-his-ass episodes, he raised the question about whether people could potentially inject disinfectant as a potential cure for the virus. And lo and behold, some small percentage of the population took him seriously. Of course, as he has done in the past, Trump covers his tracks on this idiotic idea by claiming that he was being “sarcastic.” I watched the press conference, and it sounded as if it was a fairly serious suggestion.
In any case, one can only imagine why millions still support him, but something close to half of the people who have been polled are still on the Trump train despite everything that I have mentioned.
Do they support him because he has made good on his campaign promises? A quick check at politifact.com will reveal that, of Trump’s five major campaign promises, two were broken promises — repeal Obamacare and build a wall and force Mexico to fund it — two were compromises and only partly completed and one promise — the travel ban — was actually kept. The following is a breakdown of all of his promises from Trump-O-Meter:
Remember that the election is six months away, so the likelihood that many, or any, of these will get done in that short timeframe, especially given the national pandemic crisis and Trump’s ceaseless obsession with “fake news” and how he’s being portrayed in the media, instead of, you know, being a leader and actually governing.
So, what is behind the continued support Trump receives, and no doubt, will continue to receive from conservatives heading into the election? In part, blue collar America sees the president as standing up for policies that will help them, although the Republican Party’s platforms the last several decades have been anything but concerned with the working class. And since at least 2008, the rise of the Tea Party and continued influence of Fox News, members of the populist right have lived in a vacuum, an echo chamber of whatever they want to hear. Obama was the reincarnation of the “antichrist.” The Democrats, liberals, progressives, homosexuals, feminists and atheists are all immoral, ill-begotten people who want to ruin the country, or worse and even more ridiculous, are themselves tools of the “antichrist.” Were these folks to read a book, they might learn that, historically, it has been the liberals, progressives and freethinkers who have largely moved society forward and generally cared for the interests of everyday, working Americans.
Trump’s other main voting bloc out in the public, besides wealthy Wall Street banker types who are willing to support any policy that puts the health of our financial institutions and corporations above the health and well-being of people, are white evangelicals, many of whom, according to Pew, still believe that Trump is fighting for their beliefs, even if some of them question his personal behavior. One of the more telling polls by Pew is the percentage of evangelicals who think Trump is either very religious or somewhat religious (12 percent and 52 percent, respectively) compared with the general public (7 percent and 28 percent, respectively). Sixty-three percent of the general public believes that Trump is not religious. But make no mistake about it, white, born-again Christian evangelicals in 2016, despite already having plenty of documented cases of Trump’s racism, sexism and dishonesty, overwhelmingly voted for him by an 80 percent margin, according to Pew. He was their consecrated leader. Remember this photo?
That Republicans have claimed their party holds the moral high ground in America the last half century, couching it in Christian language when their policies have little, if anything, to do with the teachings of Jesus — care for the sick, the downtrodden and the least among us and meet the needs of the poor — is contemptible. The Republican calling card, since the rise of the Moral Majority in the late 70s and even before, has, in fact, been to address the interests of corporations, financial institutions and, of course, privileged white people. The platform goes like this: leverage power from the pulpit and through The Family, leverage power from Wall Street, leverage power and influence from the halls of Congress and demonize those who actually do care about the underdogs of our society: the sick, the disabled, the blue collar workers, the immigrants and inner city families. “Somewhere I read,” as Martin Luther King Jr. would say, that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Yet, while the Democratic Party certainly contains many Christians, it is the Republican Party that has draped itself in the flag and the cross all the while eschewing the very teachings espoused in the Bible.
The populist right, then, has been duped into believing that Trump and the Republican Party has their best interests at heart. They do not. But despite the reality, and decades of evidence as support and four years of outright lies and unethical behavior from the Child-In-Chief, one of the pettiest human beings I have ever encountered, and certainly one of the most ill-fit to ever hold office, conservatives will, once again, lacking a basic understanding of context or history, foolishly vote against their own vested interests and make this a close race.
Evangelicals and white workers in small-town America believe that the Republican Party cares about them. They believe Trump, or whoever the Republican nominee is in any given year, cares about them. All are demonstrably false. This is the great delusion of the last 30 years.
Anyone trying to figure out how Donald Trump became the presumptive presidential nominee of one of the two most powerful parties in the United States, itself the most powerful nation in the world, would have had to either be a) asleep or b) lobotomized at some point in the last four eight years to not at least have some clue as where the political trajectory of the Republican Party was headed. And only someone completely deluded by their own red-hued ideological blinders would have the gall to cast blame across the aisle.
Credit: Getty
Sure, even the most wonky of political junkies like Nate Silver failed to see Trump coming and predict that so many people would, apparently, be galvanized around a message that has practically dripped, at nearly every phrase, with some combination of bigotry, xenophobia, sexism and in-group, out-group hostility.
But the proverbial writing has been on the wall for a long time, and for someone like Jeb Bush to lay Trump at the feet of President Barack Obama and the Democrats is the height of absurdity.
But he did exactly that in this op-ed piece for The Washington Post. Here is part of it:
Call it a tipping point, a time of choosing or testing. Whatever you call it, it is clear that this election will have far-reaching consequences for both the Republican Party and our exceptional country.
While he has no doubt tapped into the anxiety so prevalent in the United States today, I do not believe Donald Trump reflects the principles or inclusive legacy of the Republican Party. And I sincerely hope he doesn’t represent its future.
As much as I reject Donald Trump as our party leader, he did not create the political culture of the United States on his own.
Eight years of the divisive tactics of President Obama and his allies have undermined Americans’ faith in politics and government to accomplish anything constructive. The president has wielded his power — while often exceeding his authority — to punish his opponents, legislate from the White House and turn agency rulemaking into a weapon for liberal dogma.
In turn, a few in the Republican Party responded by trying to out-polarize the president, making us seem anti-immigrant, anti-women, anti-science, anti-gay, anti-worker and anti-common-sense.
The result has been the vanishing of any semblance of compromise or bipartisanship in our nation’s capital. Simple problems don’t get solved. Speeches happen; the important stuff doesn’t. The failure of elected leaders to break the gridlock in Washington has led to an increasingly divided electorate, which in turn has led to a breakdown in our political system.
He goes on to lay out his plan for returning the Republican Party to respectable status in American politics by advocating for the following:
Continuing to control Congress and hold on to seats in state government;
Establishing a program that supports “greater economic growth, revitalized leadership on the global stage and a strengthened democracy”;
Bolstering what he called the “true pillars of America,” which he said include two-person families, communities and the business sector;
And returning to civil political discourse that has been all but lost this election cycle.
First, let me get it out of the way at the start: I think Jeb Bush would have been far and away a better option for president than Trump. While I don’t think Jeb and George W. Bush are miles apart intellectually, I would have actually preferred to have Jeb in George’s footsteps between 2001-2009. I think Jeb, for all his faults, largely because of the influence of his wife and his experience with the Hispanic community in Florida is a little more worldly and more attuned to the larger planet and the complexities of living in a multicultural society. While he definitely would not be my first, second or third pick for the presidency, I could have at least imagined waking up to a Jeb Bush White House and the world not burning to the ground on day one. With Trump, we don’t have the luxury of that thought experiment; it is actually a potential and disturbing reality, and a reality that’s polling at about 50 percent if recent data is to be trusted.
So, for all that I’m about to say about Bush’s piece on how far the GOP has fallen with Trump as its best offering, I will say that I agree with his final point. Trump’s over-the-top style has pushed the political discourse beyond the realm of civility, such that people like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who have normally displayed at least a certain level of decorum when engaging with the opposition, were drawn into the fray and resorted to name-calling and petty insults during the primary debates.
In any case, let’s consider a few of Bush’s statements about the rise of Trump inside the GOP. Bush claimed Trump does not represent the “principles or inclusive legacy” of the party and did not make the country’s “political culture on his own,” while he said Obama’s “divisive tactics” have damaged Americans’ trust in government.
Obviously, much of the framework that led to Trump getting so much support among grassroots voters, closeted bigots and the rest of the riffraff, didn’t happen overnight or over the course of a year. It has been brewing under the surface for a long time, possibly since the race riots near the end of George H.W. Bush’s tenure when Rodney King was beaten by police officers, who were subsequently acquitted, and when Reginald Denny, a white semi-truck driver, was pulled from his vehicle and likewise beaten by a group of black residents, such that it seems race relations in this country were actually better through parts of the 1970s and ’80s until tensions boiled to the surface in the early 1990s. We experienced a relative cooling off period through the rest of the 1990s into the early 2000s and then a period of solidarity after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack. That’s not to say isolated incidents didn’t occur during this period. They did, but in my lifetime, the greatest periods of racial tension in the nation have occurred in the early 1990s and in the last couple years before Trump got a national platform to spew his incendiary rhetoric.
Although I don’t know how far back in history Jeb Bush was intending to go by arguing that Trump doesn’t represent the party’s “inclusive legacy,” he would certainly be in error if he was thinking about Abraham’s Lincoln’s legacy on race because Lincoln’s Republican Party was simply not the same as the modern iteration of the Republican Party. In the mid-19th century, the GOP was the liberal party in the United States, while the Democratic Party included all the not-so-closeted bigots and know-nothings (distinguished from the actual Know Nothing party). Not until the 1960s did the Republican Party come the represent the conservative wing of American politics when de facto racist and old-guard Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond from South Carolina, displeased that certain members of his party at the time were supporting the Civil Rights Movement (those bastards), he decided to switch, thus essentially turning the GOP over to the white supremacists, evangelical Christians and small government types for the next 50 years and counting.
If Jeb Bush was referring to more recent history, I will concede that Ronald Reagan has been one of the most inclusive major Republican figure in the last 30 years, especially in providing amnesty for millions of Hispanics, but he would be conspicuously out of place in today’s Republican Party that has evolved even since George W. Bush took office. Even if we take it as a given that Reagan was the most inclusive of all Republican presidents since the mid-19th century, to say that the party has been generally inclusive and on the forefront of civil rights since the 1980s is just patently false.
Here is a look from The Washington Post on how the GOP party platform shifted from the 1960s and ’70s to the 1980s with a few examples:
The GOP, like its opposition, has responded to ideological, demographic and social changes by hardening some of its positions and adopting entirely new planks, all part of an effort to create a coalition capable of winning national elections. In the Republicans’ case, that meant adapting and appealing to a new base in the South from the 1970s forward, becoming the dominant party of white suburbia, and finding ways to marry its traditional pro-business foundation with less affluent, more socially conservative voters.
Many positions Republicans often tout as traditionally conservative are actually relatively new to GOP ideology. Indeed, although the party’s stance on the issues has shifted rightward over the past 20 years, Republicans have studiously avoided using the word “conservative” in platforms.
…
In 1972, the platform celebrates Republicans’ use of wage and price controls to curb inflation, a doubling of federal spending on manpower training, and a tripling of help to minorities.
…
Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the GOP platform includes vigorous support for an equal-rights amendment to protect women. Then, in 1980, the party stalemates: “We acknowledge the legitimate efforts of those who support or oppose ratification.”
In the 1960s and ’70s, the party positions itself as a strong advocate for D.C. voting rights, in the Senate as well as the House. Then, in 1980, all mention of voting rights vanishes; the subject has not appeared since.
In the past 30 years, then, we find the Republican Party becoming less, not more, inclusive — by implication or otherwise — on issue after issue, supporting policies that undermine minorities, Hispanics, women, low-income families and labor union members, to name a few.
So no, while Trump may not directly reflect the modern Republican Party, he is its manifestation in its most unbecoming state, and his willingness to say what is, apparently, on the minds of millions of angry, white, disaffected Americans has ripped off the scab of tensions that we have, by whatever force, been able to contain to some degree since the early 1990s.
The other part of Jeb’s column that I take issue with is the contention that Obama’s “divisive tactics” created the political climate that we find ourselves in and not Trump. As I have already said, Trump didn’t create it, but decades of ill-conceived policies led to its rise. Trump just lit the torch.
Jeb is also wrong to suggest that Obama and the Democrats solely fostered distrust in lawmakers and the political process. They may have certainly contributed, but I would say that many lawmakers and politicians, including Obama and Hillary Clinton, along with a veritable gaggle of past misfits like George W., Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, all contributed largely to Americans’ hostility toward Washington.
The situation was not helped during Obama’s tenure, when, as he was attempting to move forward on some of his campaign promises, lawmakers like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner led efforts to block him at every level, no matter how beneficial the policies could have been for their own constituents.
Republicans blocked the jobs bill. They blocked the infrastructure bill. They wasted untold taxpayers resources passing symbolic repeals of Obamacare and looking like complete buffoons, took up more than 60 votes to repeal the law, knowing all along they wouldn’t pass. Indeed, GOP leaders in Congress have been so busy trying not to do anything the past eight years in these juvenile games that they have actually been quite busy finding new and creative ways to obstruct and halt the legislative process.
Add to this political malaise people like Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, who have turned anti-intellectualism into a virtue, and the constant drone of the 24-7 news cycle with its borderline sensationalism and paranoid-level headlines, and it’s no wonder the party is in the process of careening off the edge or imploding altogether.
Trump absolutely reflects a certain demographic of people in the Republican Party. Quite literally, the only thing he has brought to the table was that he made it OK to come out into the open about who they are and what they really think about American society and their place in it. He played to their most base concerns and fears, exposed the GOP’s vulnerabilities and in doing so, laid bare its inner demons and now threatens its destruction.
Like John Oliver, I have, for the most part, ignored Donald Trump on this site partly because he’s so ubiquitous, and I don’t want to be perceived as writing about him just to get a few click-throughs. The other reason is that a lot of my thoughts on politics are recorded in a column I write for the newspaper, so while I have plenty to say, much of it has already been said in newsprint. With that out of the way, what I am about to say has been stewing in the attic for quite some time, so pull up a chair …
***
Back in November 2008, just after President Barack Obama was voted into office the first time, I wrote a blog post titled, “Republican Party on the wane,” and the main point was that the GOP had been in a process of slow decline for years leading up to that point in American history, and it culminated, or so I thought, in the nomination of Sarah Palin, who was one of, if not the, most clueless politician ever to be a few heartbeats away from the White House.
Here’s what I had to say at the time:
The general failing that has been accumulating over the years begins with the party’s seeming inability (or unwillingness) to move on, to modernize itself in our multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religion society.
… Many Republicans, at least those not yet attempting to analyze where the disc skipped, are still locked in a time, real or imagined, where America was more morally upright and more partitioned into separate ideologies, social classes and races. … This no longer represents America today. The inability to recognize this has led to the coinage “the stupid party.” I include this not to trivialize the matter or make jokes because it’s not funny in the least. …
Whether the title of the original post was understated or not — I tend to think it was about right for that particular time — the events of the last four years, and particularly of the last six months leading up to Tuesday night’s primary races, have clearly demonstrated, after scores of meaningless and symbolic repeals of Obamacare, the GOP-forced government shutdown of October 2013, the resignation of former Speaker of the House John Boehner, the emergence of Trump as a “serious” candidate, the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the party’s subsequent unconstitutional refusal to hold confirmation hearings to pick a replacement, that the current iteration of the GOP is now in its death throes as a party with scarcely any coherent, unified message.
As you might recall, Boehner, more or less a centrist, mainstream Republican, attempted to rein in the more fringe elements of his party and, as witnessed by his resignation, failed to do so and was apparently no longer interested in fighting the battle. Perhaps Palin was the more identifiable manifestation of the fringe contingent in the GOP, but it had been there all along, simmering somewhere under the halls of Congress, for the better part of three decades beginning with the advent of the Moral Majority back in the late 1970s when the party became inexplicably bound up with evangelicals and the religious right in a way that it had not been in previous generations. The tide clearly shifted with Ronald Reagan’s election of 1980.
According to Clyde Wilcox in “God’s Warriors: The Christian Right in Twentieth-Century America,” one-fifth of those who supported the Moral Majority cast their ballots for Reagan that year, although the same people voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976. Although the Moral Majority as an organized political organization went under in the late 1980s, only to be briefly reincarnated in 2004, its influence, its conflation of religion and patriotism, its strident opposition to things like a homosexuality and a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body, its support of public prayer in schools and its populist anti-intellectualism all, in my view, laid the groundwork for the Tea Party and for the kind of post-Tea Party GOP that we see today. Indeed, a detailed analysis on the long-term influence of the Moral Majority on the Republican Party would make for a fascinating study.
Now, Sen. Ted Cruz, once a darling of the Tea Party, was, at one time, heralded as the kind of politician who could give the movement a fresh, more diverse face and erase the image that the Tea Party was largely a club for angry, white Christians, is barely hanging on in this year’s GOP primary, as real estate mogul Donald Trump, despite being a liar and a firebrand with questionable business sense, carried seven states Tuesday en route to what looks to be a decisive overall victory, while Cruz won three states. Another “diversity candidate,” Sen. Marco Rubio, only managed to eek out a win in Minnesota this week.
Credit: Tea Party Express
The irony, of course, is that while Trump has been tapping into the worse angels of our nature in his open hostility to Mexican immigrants and Syrian refugees — nonetheless using illegal immigrant labor on his own construction projects, as reported here and here — the field of Republican candidates this year has never been more diverse.
But the GOP’s Johnny-come-lately strategy in modernizing itself to look more like the body politic, if not in reality, at least in the candidates it has offered this election cycle, has simply been drowned out by the meteoric rise of Trump, who has proven time and again that he will literally say anything and insult anyone to gin up votes.
Whereas politicians in previous elections have shown a modicum of restraint and decorum, Trump is openly combative, speaks in populist platitudes and caters to the lowest common denominator of right-wing anger, and GOP officials, flailing about as if caught in the undertow, simply have not been able to control him or the message, such that traditional Republican talking points and substantive discussion on things like low taxes, limited government and social conservativism can all be scrapped in favor of unbridled derision and infighting. Sen. Lindsey Graham, who in any other election cycle would have been a boilerplate mainstream conservative candidate, has himself been relegated to the hinterlands of the GOP. Graham has expressed his consternation with the current political landscape, calling Trump a “jackass” this past summer when he was still a candidate, and most recently, describing his own party as “batshit crazy.”
Graham, who hails from my home state, should be given credit for speaking out about the decline of the GOP, even now as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, formerly a harsh critic of Trump’s xenophobia, has now shamefully fallen in line, which is more than I can say for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan and the rest of the Republican Party leadership in Washington. Although Ryan and McConnell “denounced” Trump’s latest cringe-worthy episode, a refusal to decisively eschew the support of David Duke and the KKK, they have been mostly quiet and have only said they will get behind the eventual nominee.
Here is what Ryan had to say earlier this week regarding Trump’s comments on Duke:
This party does not prey on people’s prejudices.
Actually, it has and does — it’s just that now, the scab formerly covering up the ugly underbelly of the GOP has been ripped off for all to see.
In the past, the GOP played to people’s prejudices in less obvious ways, in support of policies that stunted economic and social progress in inner cities and among low-income residents, giving overwhelming preference to the interests of corporations, defense contractors across the globe and Wall Street. Today, and thanks to the GOP’s failure to neuter, first, the Tea Party, now Trump and put the party on a path toward modernization so its platform is more aligned and attuned to the 21st century, the face of the Republican Party, who commanded a dominating win Tuesday, has made his bones channeling the frustrations of the middle class, speaking to people’s anger about our supposedly inept government and appealing to the same old bigoted spirits of the past that never quite seem to fade away, all the while, alleging that he is going to restrict the First Amendment, expand the role of government to build a wall along the Mexican border — and somehow make that nation pay for it (“I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall!” retorted former Mexican President Vicente Fox.) — and get tough on sanctions with China and Russia, promises that Trump can’t possibly deliver.
And here is how McConnell addressed the party’s perceived bigotry problem:
Let me make it clear: Senate Republicans condemn David Duke, the KKK and racism. That is not the view of Republicans that have been elected to the United States Senate.
Credit: John Cole
That does, however, appear to be the view, veiled or otherwise, of a shocking number of Republican voters who have welcomed a candidate who is finally giving voice to their most closeted fears and prejudices. Unfortunately for the GOP — and most unfortunately for the country at large — the “batshit crazy” voting bloc is no longer a fledgling little demographic on the fringe. I hate to say it, but GOP leaders couldn’t do anything about Trump now even if they wanted to. They missed that chance, and attempting to stop Trump at the convention, against the will of the people, would be tantamount to authoritarianism.
I don’t believe Trump has much of a chance to win a general election, and if he gets the nomination, my hunch is that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will win decisively, as Sen. Bernie Sanders’ supporters fall on the sword and cast their default Democratic vote, while all but the most conservative Hispanics, blacks and women, left with scant few options at that point, will simply flock to the party that clearly has their best interests at heart.
Disturbing as recent events may be, this is democracy in action, like it or not. The double-edged sword of democracy is that while Trump and his supporters may in the midst of a heyday right now after Super Tuesday, we, as a nation, will inevitably get the kind of government we deserve, especially if he somehow gains enough traction to pose a serious challenge to Clinton. If we are irresponsible in choosing our candidates at the ballot box, as we have been, don’t stay informed about who these people are and view the sobering task of picking the next president as if it’s a fucking game show, we will reap more than a few ill-gotten fruits, as our collective stupidity continues to be laid bare before the world.
I’m not going to take a bunch of time dissecting this week’s GOP presidential debate, for trying to look for any kind of productive political dialogue in that veritable wasteland of half-truths, truisms and outright obfuscations would be like scouring a landfill for a speck of silver, but suffice it to say that the Republican Party has now divested itself of anything useful, and as this Boston Globe column rightly points out, the modern iteration of the GOP, as a party of “know-nothingness,” as it is called in the piece, seems to have a ferocious allergy to facts.
I would go one step further. Since an “allergy” seems to imply something that is beyond the GOP’s control, I would rather say the Republican Party has a willful aversion or an open disdain for facts.
Here is how Michael Cohen concludes his piece:
The Republican Party is dominated by candidates who are proudly, even boastfully ignorant. Rejecting the clear science on vaccines or climate change is practically the price of admission even to be considered a legitimate presidential candidate. Playing on xenophobic fears of immigrants by lying about the economic costs and threats to American workers — pro forma. It reached a point Wednesday night when a candidate actually saying something true was an event worthy of note (italics mine).
But make no mistake, the descent of the Republican Party into dishonesty, lies, and cravenness is no joke. It’s a national crisis.
After all, one of these 15 candidates might actually get elected president.
And since the general public is vastly more qualified to judge contestants on reality shows like “The Voice” and “America’s Got Talent,” than in discerning actual leadership and governing ability in the political sphere, we don’t have cause to be hopeful.
As I have said more than once in newspaper columns the last couple years — most recently here — if the Republican Party is going to continue to be a viable political option for voters in the future, it is going to have to abandon some of Tea Party and ultra-right ideals that have all but turned off significant segments of the body politic, including Hispanics and women, and adopt more centrist positions to attract younger and more accepting groups of people who increasingly have no patience with policies that promote discrimination and inequality.
Possible GOP presidential candidate and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, House Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham seem to understand this on some level, as each have both been open to an expansion of legal immigration, and Graham has even said he favored passing along citizenship to adults who have lived in the United States since coming here as children.
provides a template for the party on how to succeed in a battleground state with two ascendant constituencies: well-educated social liberals and increasingly assertive Hispanic voters.
Gardner prevailed by jettisoning most of his own conservative baggage. A hard-core loyalist of the right during his service in the state legislature from 2005 to 2010 and as a congressman for two terms, Gardner won a tough election against the Democratic incumbent Mark Udall by shifting left on both immigration and social issues like abortion and contraception.
These maneuvers did not cost Gardner support from the Republican Party base. Exit poll data reveals that Gardner did as well or better with core party voters than other recent Republican statewide candidates.
…
Running statewide for the first time after representing largely conservative rural voters, Gardner radically altered his ideological self-positioning.
He abandoned his past opposition to liberal immigration policies. On June 5, Gardner declared his support for giving undocumented immigrants who serve in the armed forces a path to citizenship. On Aug. 1, Gardner cast one of only 11 House Republican votes in favor of an Obama administration program granting work permits to immigrants brought here illegally as children.
Gardner’s most dramatic shift was to publicly renounce, on March 21, his own sponsorship, as a member of the House, of an anti-abortion constitutional “personhood” amendment. That wasn’t all. On Sept. 2, he announced his support for making oral contraceptives available over the counter without a prescription – a tactic adopted by several successful Republican candidates.
In the House, he sponsored bipartisan water infrastructure legislation and formed a rural broadband coalition – the type of policies that the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party exists to oppose.
Indeed, as The Times article pointed out, “establishment” GOP Senate candidates — contrasted with the anti-government Tea Party types — won decisively across eight states in the South and Alaska, arguably ground zero for Tea Party fervor that began in about 2008. While the Tea Party certainly still has a voice in Washington in the likes of Sens. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and others, McConnell, Rep. John Boehner and other establishment Republican leaders will have a lot of work ahead of them to moderate a party that has been steered in a less than constructive direction these last six years and then to convince the American people that meaningful reform has taken place. Because for sure, the Tea Party, on the wane as it may now be, will more than likely have to be dragged kicking and screaming into that good night.
House Speaker Rep. John Boehner has balls of titanium steel, I’ll give him that. In the following speech, he has the gall to say that he and incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have “worked” closely together for eight years. If by “worked” he means grousing around Capitol Hill, crying over spilled milk that their party is not in the White House and admitting that they would rather undermine the president at every turn rather than trying to make the most out of the situation for the betterment of the nation and his own constituents, he would be accurate:
He then kissed McConnell’s ass and in Boehner’s tried and true fashion, proceeded to speak for “the people,” even though he and McConnell’s inaction the last eight years have been all about them and their party and nothing whatsoever to do with the will of the nation, all the while pretending to be willing to compromise and work across the aisle. Funny how since Boehner and McConnell now have a majority in both houses, they’re now talking about action. The obscurantism is so thick that you would think that the American public would see through the charade, but after Tuesday, clearly not.
The people who vote these sophists into office deserve the government that they get.
If you are wary of politicians telling you how you should feel about Obamacare and the government shutdown, you are not alone. Republicans in Washington are losing the conversation, and their infighting may signal the death knell if they don’t show some solidarity and move past this most recent debacle toward a more tenable resolution, something more tenable than shutting down the government and defunding a law that’s already on the books.
Happily, as I never tire of pointing out, merely making an assertion doesn’t make said claim true:
In the first hours of the shutdown, the terrain looks very bad for Republicans. It’s amazing how consistent the polls have been about linking a confrontation over the Affordable Care Act to funding of the government. While polls show the public disapproves of the law, it has consistently told pollsters it is not in favor of tying government operations to defunding the health care plan. In addition to theQuinnipiac poll, the polls from CBS, CNN, CNBC, National Journal, and Kaiser show this. As GOP Sen. Jeff Flake said, Republicans have found the one gambit less popular than Obamacare.
Conservatives would interrupt the conversation here. They didn’t shut the government down over Obamacare—Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid shut the government down because he refused to negotiate. This is true; Reid refused to negotiate. But the American public would have to view this confrontation differently for that fact to give the Republicans any leverage. Right now, the public agrees with Democrats: Funding the government and taking apart Obamacare should not be part of the same conversation. How do Republicans change that dynamic? Asserting that Obamacare is not popular hasn’t made a whit of difference. — “Why the Shutdown Looks So Bad for the GOP,” Slate, Oct. 1, 2013