Tag Archives: GOP

Time For The Grown-Ups To Step In

I frequently quote Jennifer Rubin, a columnist with whom I almost always agree, and today’s post will echo yet another of her observations. Earlier in October, she wrote

Once upon a time, we had two functional parties that respected the rule of law, the outcome of elections and the norms necessary to preserve democratic governance. In that world, the filibuster was rarely invoked, an incapacitated member could be replaced on committee, indicted or even “merely” disgraced members would resign voluntarily and blue slips and single-member holds on appointments were not abused.

 Those days are long gone.

Since that column appeared in the Washington Post, the downsides of our governmental dysfunctions have gone from severe to frightening. Alabama’s ideological and intellectually-challenged Senator Tommy Tuberville has been holding up hundreds of military appointments for months, weakening America at a time when the war that has once again broken out in the Mideast and the danger posed by Russia in Ukraine are escalating and immediate challenges.  Other Republicans have refused to allow votes on State Department or Justice Department nominees, hobbling America’s ability to mount effective responses to these and other emerging crises.

Worse, at a time when we desperately need a functioning government, the crazed, performative GOP buffoons in the House of Representatives have brought that chamber to a standstill. The lack of a Speaker not only threatens America’s ability to respond to international crises, it may well cause a government shutdown, and the widespread misery such a shutdown would cause.

This is what happens when–thanks to gerrymandering and other political games–the people elected to conduct the nation’s business are clearly uninterested in doing that business. The current GOP is a collection of unserious, performative culture warriors and theocrats; few of them show any evidence of even understanding the role or imperatives of governing.

As Rubin wrote in the linked column,

This is the nature of the MAGA Republican Party. It cares not one whit for governing and considers Democrats’ electoral victories of no consequence. (The latest game: Make baseless impeachment threats to hamper duly elected Democrats from fulfilling their duties, as they’re doing with President Biden and a newly elected Supreme Court judge in Wisconsin.) Pleading with individual Republicans to break ranks or offering trade after trade to accommodate those acting in bad faith is useless. Worse, it blurs responsibility for chaos, paralysis and gridlock….

The exploitation of Senate rules is part of a larger GOP undertaking: the subversion of democracy. In their must-read book, “Tyranny of the Minority,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt cogently explain that Republicans, unable to appeal to a broader share of the electorate beyond diminishing numbers of White, rural Christians, have found ways to exploit, abuse and, indeed, break majority governance.

The authors have no quarrel with legitimate protections for minority rights (e.g., the Bill of Rights, an independent judiciary, federalism, separation of powers). Rather, the problem is Republicans’ insistence on denying the key component of a democracy: the power of the people to elect the leaders of their choice to govern. Republicans have grown attached to tactics that perpetuate minority rule, including thwarting voting (e.g., filibustering voting rights legislation) and denying election results (e.g., signing onto a brief to disenfranchise millions of Americans, baselessly challenging Biden’s electors).

The situation Rubin describes is depressing enough in normal times, but in times of crisis, it becomes exceedingly dangerous.

What is ironic is the fact that it’s those “America First” “American Exceptionalism” MAGA posturers who are sullying America’s reputation and threatening to destroy America’s international dominance–not to mention the country’s ability to react to world events.

Rubin quotes Levitsky and Ziblatt for the observation that America’s excessively counter-majoritarian institutions operate to reinforce extremism, empower authoritarian minorities and threaten minority rule. Their prescription is to “double down on democracy”– we need to dismantle rules that provide undue minority protection, to re-empower majorities–and we need to force politicians to be “more responsive and accountable to majorities of Americans.”

All that will take time, and right now, time is definitely not on our side. The GOP has brought the United States government to the brink of collapse–and it couldn’t have happened at a worse time.

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On The Brink

What a time for Congress to be impotent.

The outcome of the war in Ukraine will have enormous consequences for global democracy, and requires unflagging support that MAGA Republicans oppose. The war just launched by Hamas against Israel threatens to strengthen Netanyahu, a corrupt, anti-democratic autocrat embraced by Trump who has caused immense damage to Israel’s reputation, both at home and abroad, and to further destabilize one of the world’s most dangerous areas. Climate change is accelerating, while MAGA Republicans continue to deny its reality. The gap between the rich and the rest is accurately characterized as a new and massively unfair Gilded Age. American lifespans are declining…The list goes on.

And the Republicans in Congress are clowns, utterly unable to rise to any occasion, or to make even the most feeble efforts to do their jobs. The GOP has picked a very unfortunate time to disintegrate ala the Whigs.

As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo has observed, McCarthy’s downfall is another symptom of the same underlying pathologies: a cultish GOP in thrall to a would-be autocrat, anti-majoritarian structural impediments, a surge in right-wing extremism, and White resentments and grievances channeled into a burn-it-all-down fever.

 Unfortunately, McCarthy’s ouster.doesn’t change those underlying systemic problems. Republicans in the House are deeply divided between an outdated and unrealistic Right wing and a full-blown lunatic Right. The two candidates who’ve emerged as frontrunners in the contest to succeed McCarthy would be unacceptable in any rational legislative body. (Jim Jordan is so unhinged that one Democratic strategist has been quoted for the observation that elevating him would give Democrats 14 additional House seats. Steve Scalise is best known for his claim to be “David Duke without the baggage.”)

All this would be bad enough in a saner, more peaceful world. Now, it’s terrifying–sort of like being stuck in place with a broken leg while watching an avalanche descending on you . 

Jennifer Rubin recently summed up where we are, and she echoed my own feelings: 

After Hamas is defeated, there will be a reckoning in Israel to match anything we have ever seen. Evidence of warnings to the Israeli government about insufficient deterrence, recriminations about putting a racist ideologue in the Defense Ministry post and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s misguided assault on democracy will all be reviewed. Careers will end. History will convict many of grotesque negligence.

Here in the United States, I have less patience than usual (which is often none) for inane right-wing rhetoric in the United States. No, there were no humanitarian funds released to Iran that might have put money in the mullahs’ pockets to be spent on Hamas. No, the Biden administration did not invite any of this. Republicans used to denounce the urge to “blame America first” for monstrous evil perpetrated by others. No more.

This should, but likely will not, inject some sobriety into the Republican Party, which has held up U.S. military promotions and confirmations and State Department postings; brought the House to a state of collapse under the weight of MAGA hysteria; carried water for Russia (an ally of Iran); and generally reminded us that adults are needed in government.

Voters need to wise up: We cannot tolerate the return to power of the egregiously unfit four-times indicted former president (who gleefully spread around intelligence information) nor allow MAGA nihilists to hold the country hostage. The stakes here and around the world are far too grave.

And those stakes are “around the world.” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began the largest war in Europe since World War II. Meanwhile, China has become more bellicose toward Taiwan, India is experiencing an eruption of virulent nationalism, and Israel has formed the most extreme government in its history. Populism is growing in otherwise democratic countries like France and Spain.

If the chaos caused in large measure by the “stop the world, I want to get off” Republcans in Congress ends up adding fuel to a meltdown of civilization and stability across the globe, if the wars that keep breaking out engulf us in another worldwide conflict, a significant cause will be the fact that far too many Americans have reverted to an unthinking and reflexive tribalism while they wallow in an utter lack of interest in –or desire for–adult governance.

The only bright spot in any of this is the fact that we have a seasoned, wise and statesmanlike President at the helm, and not the preceding ignoramus.

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Threats, Bribes And The GOP

The shocking acquittal of Ken Paxton in Texas despite  what the Washington Post accurately called “mountains of damning evidence” should have been predictable.

Why do I say that? Because we’ve had other signs of the thuggery that has become deliberate Republican strategy. A few weeks ago, Yoel Roth highlighted that strategy in an opinion piece for the New York Times. Roth was formerly the head of “trust and safety” at Twitter–and one of those who made the call to ban Trump from Twitter. He says that nothing prepared him for what followed.

Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the company’s head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire. I’ve lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move.

This isn’t a story I relish revisiting. But I’ve learned that what happened to me wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t just personal vindictiveness or “cancel culture.” It was a strategy — one that affects not just targeted individuals like me, but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online.

Roth’s essay detailed a campaign of online harassment that lasted months. Twitter users demanded that he be fired, jailed or killed. And it had the desired effect on those who were watching.

Private individuals — from academic researchers to employees of tech companies — are increasingly the targets of lawsuits, congressional hearings and vicious online attacks. These efforts, staged largely by the right, are having their desired effect: Universities are cutting back on efforts to quantify abusive and misleading information spreading online. Social media companies are shying away from making the kind of difficult decisions my team did when we intervened against Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Platforms had finally begun taking these risks seriously only after the 2016 election. Now, faced with the prospect of disproportionate attacks on their employees, companies seem increasingly reluctant to make controversial decisions, letting misinformation and abuse fester in order to avoid provoking public retaliation.

In Texas, those of us following the Paxton impeachment can be forgiven for expecting a conviction–after all, the charges were brought by the Republican-dominated House, the witnesses were all Republican whistleblowers who had worked for Paxton, and the evidence of his corruption was overwhelming.

There are media reports that Republican Senators received very explicit threats of violence if they voted to convict. But according to the Washington Post, those threats were also accompanied by the other part of what we now understand to be standard GOP strategy: bribery.

That the fix was in for the attorney general in the Senate probably should have been apparent back in July. That’s when a campaign finance report revealed that a pro-Paxton political action committee, known as the Defend Texas Liberty PAC, had donated $1 million and made an additional $2 million loan to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who would preside over the impeachment trial.

Yes, you read that right: The person acting as judge took $3 million from the defendant’s deep-pocketed allies. Was it any wonder that only two Republicans in the Senate, where the lieutenant governor serves as president of the chamber, voted to convict?

According to the Texas Monthly, the big money folks who funded the bribe are the same evangelical Texas billionaires who are funding the state’s voucher campaign. Make of that what you will….

The Post article traced the devolution of Texas politics from the relatively genteel, often bipartisan Republicans of the Bush era into the hard-right fanaticism that gave Lone Star voters Ted Cruz and the assortment of corrupt culture warriors who currently run the state.

And now–in the only good news to emerge from this fiasco–the Texas GOP is preparing to eat its own.

Paxton’s far-right forces are now promising all-out warfare on the Republican House members — starting with Speaker Dade Phelan — who tried to remove the attorney general from office. And with Paxton supporter Donald Trump likely to be at the top of the ticket next year, you’d have to give them excellent odds of prevailing.

The rot extends far beyond Texas. So here we are, a good facsimile of a banana republic.

MAGA Republicans are a distinct minority of Americans and they know it–so they are willing to ignore more and more “rules of the game” in order to stay in power.  If vote suppression, dark money and “flooding the zone” prove inadequate to the task, then they’ll move to threats of violence accompanied by outright bribery.

I won’t be surprised if the Texas Speaker wakes up one morning with a horse’s head in his bed…..

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How Has It Come To This?

I’ve posted a lot about electoral structures that are currently enabling a distinct minority of Americans to govern the rest of us. One of those systematic distortions–gerrymandering–has been enabled by a judiciary unwilling to say what we all can see: that the practice is contrary to “one person, one vote” and thus the Constitution.

What’s relatively new is the willingness of the GOP to publicly defend its attacks on democracy.

In Wisconsin, Republicans have benefitted from a combination of extreme gerrymandering and the political complicity of a state Supreme Court dominated by Rightwing judges. A liberal judge just won a seat on that body (by a surprisingly large margin in a state where close elections have been the norm), and Republicans threatened to impeach her–before she can participate in a single case.

As an essay in the Guardian explains:

In 2011, Republicans gerrymandered Wisconsin’s state legislature so badly that the party can win supermajorities despite losing the popular vote, as it did in 2018. Voters have fought back, and earlier this year they elected Janet Protasiewicz to the state supreme court, ushering in a new liberal majority which looked poised to finally overturn the gerrymander and bring democratic regime change to Madison.

But Wisconsin Republicans have no intention of seeing their undeserved power slip away. They’re proposing to impeach Protasiewicz on spurious charges before she has ruled on a single case, paralyzing the court and leaving the gerrymander intact.

When Trump argued that he was the real winner of the election because the votes of people living in Democratic-leaning urban areas were somehow fraudulent and should not count, he was repeating arguments that Wisconsin Republicans had already honed. The speaker of the state assembly, Robin Vos, has explained that the state’s gerrymander is fair because “if you took Madison and Milwaukee out of the state election formula, we would have a clear majority”. Because Madison and Milwaukee are the parts of the state with the largest concentration of non-white voters, Vos has revealed what the Wisconsin gerrymander is really about: race.

No surprise there. The urban/rural divide isn’t just about racism, but rural racial grievance explains a lot.

Per Talking Points Memo, the election of a liberal judge to the state’s high court infuriated the beneficiaries of Wisconsin’s undemocratic gerrymandering.

For months, Republicans have been plotting how best to overturn her election, as two redistricting lawsuits were immediately filed at the state’s high court. In recent weeks, they’ve been coalescing around impeaching her, settling on the rationale that she called the state’s maps “rigged.” Notably, state Republicans have not brought the same ire to Justices Rebecca Bradley and Brian Hagedorn continuing to preside over abortion cases after likening abortion to the Holocaust and calling Planned Parenthood a “wicked organization,” respectively. 

The GOP is threatening to impeach both Protasiewicz, the judge, and Evers, the Democratic governor (since you can’t gerrymander statewide elections, voters were able to elect a liberal justice and a Democratic Governor). “The threat of actual democracy has convulsed the state government, while state Democrats express their outrage from their manufactured permanent minority.”

The use of skewed election systems to suppress the voices of minority voters is not new to the U.S. Wisconsin is only a blatant example.

Like their predecessors in other states, Wisconsin Republicans have been remarkably frank about their intention of ensuring that minorities stay in their place. When Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tony Evers powered to victory in 2018 with massive wins in Madison and Milwaukee, the Republican legislature used a lame-duck session to strip him of much of his power. Not content with that, Evers’ Republican opponent in 2022, Tim Michels, promised that if he was elected then Republicans in Wisconsin “will never lose another election”.

Give him credit for transparency…

Republicans aren’t even pretending any more. It’s not just Wisconsin–but what happens in Wisconsin will be a test case, telling us whether these increasingly brazen attempts to secure minority rule will succeed.

The author of the Guardian essay–a British historian of the United States–notes that Wisconsin Republicans were among the most fervent backers of Trump’s undemocratic coup attempt, “but they needed no lessons from him in how to suppress the will of the people.” 

The Republican party’s belief in its own god-given right to rule – and that of its white, rural electorate – found its most dangerous expression in Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, but it long predated him. It will outlive him unless it is chastened by accountability and defeat at every turn. All eyes are now on Wisconsin and Janet Protasiewicz to see if it will be. 

If the Wisconsin GOP’s shameless abandonment of even a pretense of playing by the rules succeeds, we’re in for a world of hurt.

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Really, White Christians?

The Religion News Service has reported on a recent survey from Pew:

In April, Pew asked Americans which was the bigger problem facing the country when it comes to matters of race: People overlooking racism when it exists or seeing racism in places where there is none.

Overall, just about half (53%) of Americans said people not seeing discrimination where it does exist was a bigger problem. Just under half (45%) said people seeing discrimination where is does not exist is the bigger issue. 

What was most illuminating about this split in public opinion was the breakdown of who believed what.

Among religious groups, however, white Christians are most likely to say claims about non-existent racial discrimination is the biggest problem, including majorities of white Evangelicals (72%), white Catholics (60%) and white Mainline Protestants (54%), according to data provided to Religion News Service from Pew Research.

Few Black Protestants (10%), unaffiliated Americans (35%) or non-Christian religious Americans (31%) agreed….

Among Non-White unaffiliated adults, 71% say overlooking racial discrimination is the bigger issue, compared with 29% who give the opposite answer.  

Well, I’m just shocked. NOT.

The report noted that the wide divide over issues of race and racism has become more heated among American Christians over the past few years. It has prompted the so-called war against “woke” and has pitted those who believe America still suffers from systemic racism against those who dismiss any concern about those structural disadvantages as the dreaded (and totally mischaracterized) “CRT.”

That divide has fueled conflicts in the Southern Baptist Convention and other evangelical groups, led to feuds in local churches and Christian colleges, become a major debate during school board meetings and been a major talking point in the current race for U.S. president. The issue of race also led to concerns about the rise of white Christian nationalism in churches.

The divide wasn’t just between White Christians and everyone else; it was also–predictably–partisan:

Most Republicans and those who lean Republican (74%) said that people seeing non-existent racism is a bigger problem, while 80% of Democrats say the bigger problem is people not seeing racism that exists.

To be fair, one of the problems with polls of this sort is that language is imprecise. If a respondent defines “racism” as overt hostility–burning a cross on a black family’s lawn, or shooting random people because they are Black–that respondent is more likely to see the problem as people being labeled “Karens” for less blatant behaviors.

A recent column in the Guardian reacting to the recent racist shooting in Jacksonville, Florida illustrates what we might call the continuum of racism.

As the article noted, Jacksonville’s murders followed a larger mass shooting of Black Americans in Buffalo, New York. Both were motivated by an explicit desire to kill Black people.

The gunmen’s ideology of white supremacy, revealed in their rants, revolved around the perceived threat to White people from higher birth rates among non-whites, and included  animus against gays and Jews. The Buffalo gunman’s manifesto, for example, included his belief that gender fluidity is a plot by Jews to subvert the west (AKA White civilization), and that critical race theory is a Jewish plot “to brainwash Whites into hating themselves and their people.” 

Plenty of those who think American racism is overplayed harbor similar, albeit modified, versions of those beliefs: As the article points out, the idea that Whites face a threat of replacement by non-Whites explains much of the brutal treatment of immigrants, emerges in the mass incarceration of Black Americans, and helps explain the lack of action on America’s vast racial wealth gap and militarized police force. 

As the essay notes, politicians like Ron DeSantis “recenter the world through the lens of an America defined by whiteness and Christianity.”

Through this lens, it certainly does appear that America is under threat by non-white mass immigration. Critical race theory is indeed a threat to such a perspective, as is an education that also allows a Black perspective on US history, or one that normalizes LGBTQ+ citizens. It is a politics that has justified DeSantis’s treatment of immigrants as things. More recently, DeSantis has essentially suggested shooting migrants even suspected to be drug smugglers – here, he connects immigrants to crime, and uses that connection to justify killing some of them on sight.

It’s easy to make sense of the Pew survey. If you are a Republican White Christian American who  thinks “racism” is defined as overt violence against people who aren’t White Christians, then America is indeed overhyping its prevalence. If you dismiss as irrelevant the defense of privilege and the persistence of structures that operate to disadvantage those “others” then concerns about systemic racism are clearly overblown. 

Right.

Today’s Americans don’t just occupy different realities; we speak different languages.

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