Welcome to the day before the Anniversary of January 6.
The current ongoing debacle in the House is both entertaining and terrifying. It’s entertaining to see Republicans reaping the whirlwind after sowing it for decades. Who would have thought we’d see “Republicans in Disarray” as a headline, or this one: ‘Nobody Is in Charge’: A Ragged G.O.P. Stumbles Through the Wilderness.
There’s also a bit of schadenfreude watching the mainstream media try to cope with what they can no longer both-sides away. Richard H. Pildes, a professor at New York University’s School of Law, has a guest opinion piece in The NY Times where he tries to explain away the chaos as a breakdown of traditional party discipline in the new media age.
It’s terrifying to contemplate what will happen once the GOP circular firing squad breaks up and gets on with its goal of destroying the ability of government to function — which is what they are there for after all. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has a much clearer take on the problem than Pildes. From his latest newsletter The Dispatch No. 19: The Real GOP Steps Forward.
...Donald Trump revealed more than he changed. During the Obama years, most D.C. conventional wisdom treated the House radicals as crazies who were loud but basically marginal to the GOP. That wasn’t real politics. That was grandstanding and performative nonsense. But, in fact, that was the Republican Party. That was who ran it. And when a presidential candidate emerged ready to run openly on their platform, he won hands down.
It’s not the case that every Republican member of Congress is the same as Jim Jordan or Matt Gaetz. But virtually all of them rely on a coalition of voters that wants to support Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz. That’s really all that matters. The GOP is a balkanized party made up of elected officials who either are Jim Jordan or aren’t willing to cross Jim Jordan.
So, as Saletan famously put it, the GOP is a failed state and Donald Trump is its warlord. Now Trump is at least partly pushed off the stage. Trumpism — which is really Freedom Caucusism — gave Republicans their dismal result. What is really happening with the 20 rebels is that the Freedom Caucus, the Trump caucus, is saying again that they rule the GOP, which they do. The narrowness of the GOP majority, which they are responsible for, has brought the fracture into the open in a way that is as yet unbridgeable.
...The Trumpists of the GOP do not care about policy. (Remember Trump’s infrastructure week and his cheaper-and-better health care plan?) They care about power—and increasingly GOP legislators have defined their chief task as engaging in partisan warfare via shitposting and trolling the libs. (My colleague Tim Murphy did a deep dive on this.) They will exploit their majority status in the House to continue their fact-free hyperbolic assault on their political foes. There will be few, if any, guardrails.
Political warfare in Washington and nationally is not a both-sides-are-equivalent matter. Only one side has promoted lies to overturn an election and spread bizarre and bogus conspiracy theories to demonize and dehumanize the other. House Republicans, egged on by right-wing media and activists (and Trump!), will leverage their control of that body to further pursue these dangerous and divisive aims.
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There’s a basic problem in the GOP that goes back to Reagan. When he declared war on government, he committed the party to a path that led inevitably to the current situation. Any Republican who actually tries to use government constructively becomes a traitor in the eyes of the base who have been told for decades that Washington and government is their enemy. You can see this in those complaining loudly about McCarthy because Democrats actually managed to get things done on his watch and keep government running. How dare he allow that to happen!
The party is post-policy… and post-fact. A man of lies like George Santos is the embodiment of what the party is today. Timothy Snyders latest Substack offering Thinking About — Life as a Lie discusses the parallels between Trump, Putin — and Santos.
...Yet there is a deeper point to be made about the nature of politics, which is that it can be transformed by big lies issued from positions of authority. One of the more interesting sections of the January 6th report is a graph that demonstrates that Trump, time after time, lied about specific claims of fraud right after being informed that they were false. His big lie about the election, once believed, summoned forth countless smaller lies or fantasies that seemed to support it. Trump repeated these more specific lies because it was precisely fiction that he wanted. He couldn't think them all up himself; he needed help. He waited for the various inventions to reach him, made sure that they were not true, and then repeated them to millions of people.
In Trump's world, there is no true and false, there is only a kind of Darwinistic competition of belief. If a lie made it up to him on the food chain, then it must be a good one that people will believe.
So the lying by Trump was more than a deliberate falsehood. It was a preference for a Big Lie over reality, and then a search for smaller lies to promote that would cast basic elements of reality into doubt, and thereby create a sense of grievance. The coup attempt that resulted was, in this sense, entirely predictable. Big Lies demand violence, since they command the faith of some, but cannot overcome the common sense or lived experience of others. The smaller lies within the Big Lie, by generating distrust of institutions, create a sense that only violence can restore the righteous order of things. People who believe Big Lies act on the grievances the smaller lies generate. The January 6 committee demonstrates that Trump urged people to violence directly. But it is also important to understand that the deliberate generation of an alternative reality is itself incompatible with democracy.
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Snyder traces the parallels with Putin’s Big Lie that there is no Ukraine, and all the smaller lies that follow from it, with Trump’s Big Lie.
If Ukraine does not exist, then we, the Russian invaders, are the real victims. There should not be anyone there holding us back from what we think is right. This was the same sense of grievance expressed by the Americans who invaded the U.S. Capitol: we are the real victims, we are only restoring what should have been. No one should be holding us back from seeking justice with our own hands. Just as there was a natural affinity between Putin and Trump, there is a natural affinity between those who support Trump's Big Lie and those who support Putin's.
Here’s the kicker:
Trump's Big Lie opened the way for Santos, who repeats it, and who attended the rally to, in his own words, “overturn the election for Donald Trump.” Trump was a model of a man who came to power and gained money on little beyond mendacious schtick. Santos is following that lead. But it is also important to understand the new context in which Santos functions. By lying constantly during the first campaign and during the presidency, Trump set an example, one that is most relevant to members if his party. For two years now, Trump's Big Lie has functioned the way that the Stalinist line used to function in the communist party. What Stalin said had to be treated as true, even if party members knew at some level that it was not. They had to engage constantly in what George Orwell called double-think, living in one lie, and preparing themselves for the next one, all the while imagining that somehow the process served some greater good.
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To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, a statement of the true state of affairs these days would be: “Government by Republicans is not the solution to our problems. Government by Republicans IS the problem.” It goes with the original Big Lie: “I’m from the Republican Party and I’m here to help.”
This is something the mainstream media is still grappling with — how to acknowledge this. Snyder in Life as a Lie addresses the bigger crisis in the press.
...Perhaps most fundamentally, truth needs everyday champions. In every case I have mentioned -- Putin's war in Ukraine beginning in 2014, Trump's 2016 campaign, Santos's 2022 campaign -- we simply lacked the foreign correspondents or investigative journalists. The only pre-election coverage of Santos's lies was in a local newspaper, which contradicted his claims to great wealth. No larger medium picked it up in time. If we had more newspapers, and if we had more reporters, this story would likely have developed, and Santos would likely not have been elected.
This is the underlying sadness in the media brouhaha about Santos. Once a few facts were revealed (in a New York Times story on December 19), the television talk shows and social media could unleash a firestorm of indignation. But that was too late. The point of journalism is not to be outraged afterwards, but to prevent outrages from happening. It is not our role as citizens to be angry after an election. It is our role to vote calmly on the basis of what we should know. And we just don’t know what we should.
The problem is not that media are not alert. The problem is that the correct media are ceasing to exist. Talk shows can only talk about what someone else investigates. The internet can repeat, but it cannot report. We speak about the news all day, but pay almost no one to get out and report it. This rewards people who lie as a way of life. Every political career demands investigation at its beginnings, and most American counties lack a daily newspaper. That is where we are, and it has to change.
What Price a Remedy?
Where we are now is not a good place. There are people actively working to subvert democracy for the sake of power, and they’ve been doing it for decades. They inflicted a totally unfit leader on us, and incited violence in an attempt to overturn an election and the government. They have made division and demagoguery a constant. They have flooded the public space with lies. They have not gone away — so how do we deal with them?
We’ve been here before as a country. Charles P. Pierce wrote about it recently before the current debacle in the House began: The Leg-Shaped Lamp That Is the 14th Amendment. The issues it was meant to address are still with us; the Civil War didn’t put an end to the divisions within the country.
The shining beacon that is the 14th Amendment
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution has been treated like the leg-shaped lamp in A Christmas Story, if the leg-shaped lamp were a motion-sensitive high-intensity laser that would vaporize you if you got too close. Certainly, it has its uses.
If it hadn't had its uses, conservatives would not have been so dedicated to dodging its requirements, minimizing its importance, and otherwise stashing it in the old constitutional attic in the hopes that nobody notices it still works if you turn it on. As my friend, the constitutional scholar Garrett Epps put it in Democracy Reborn, his exemplary history of the 14th:
By the first decade of the Twentieth Century, white Southerners had found dozens of ways to lock black Southerners, and their white allies out of political power. They had begun to rebuild the "intellectual blockade," enforcing ideological unity on the region[...]Meanwhile, the federal courts, which were to be the backstop for Congress, had refused even to try and make the states live by Republican rules.
Of course, that’s when the Republicans still had rules, and were still the party of Lincoln, not the Former Guy.
It's indeed a whopper, passed in the wake of the Civil War and aimed at eliminating all of the proximate and long-standing causes of that war, particularly slavery and white supremacy. To wit: That is some serious constitutionalizing there. No wonder it scared the galluses off of hayshaker racist politicians and Gilded Age plutocrats the way it did. No wonder they rigged things so that the 14th didn't mean what its authors plainly meant. But damned if the 14th didn't fight back. It was central to the winning arguments in important civil rights and civil liberties cases, including Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade. Its guarantees of due process have been central to every decision concerning a right to privacy, even though there is no specific right to privacy mentioned in the Constitution, which drives conservatives batty.
As has been pointed out, many of the Republicans in the House and Senate refused to vote to accept the election results. Some of them we now know were actively engaged in supporting the efforts by Trump to overturn the election, up to and including the events of January 6 and afterwards — yet there they sit today.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment seems to provide a remedy — if we dare use it.
Section 3: No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Section 4 would also seem to provide an answer to the Republican blackmail technique of refusing to fund the government over the debt ceiling.
Section 4: The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
There is much that might be addressed by the 14th Amendment — such as the blatant attempt to restrict voting in Wisconsin:
As Meltsner observes, there is currently a case, Citizens for Constitutional Integrity v. Census Bureau, that seeks to rectify what he calls "155 years of indifference."
It is alleged in the suit that Wisconsin’s strict photo ID law, which former GOP staffers have acknowledged was intended to disenfranchise Democrats, results in abridging the votes of some 300,000 voters, approximately 9 percent of the state’s registrants. If Section 2 were applied as intended, Pettinato argues that Wisconsin would lose a congressional district due to this disenfranchisement, a seat that New York, for example, would gain.
This longshot suit, of course, would be a valuable weapon in cracking the death grip on democracy that unfettered gerrymandering has placed upon it. Which is probably why, sooner or later, some judge is going to see its merits, get righteously terrified, and turn it down while hiding under his bed.
There is no question that the Roberts Court would have a fatal hissy fit if forced to rule on this.
The problem with the 14th Amendment is that it addresses core issues with democracy in America and all the ways we have fallen short of realizing its ideals. Pierce closes with this:
The same goes to the more celebrated references to Section 3, which clearly states that any elected official hallowed by oath to defend the Constitution who then attempts to obstruct or overthrow constitutional government doesn't get a second chance at federal office. As Rep. Jamie Raskin explained to The New York Times, "We have to dust it off."
Not Being Able To Run For Office is a pretty light punishment for attempting a coup, especially relative to what happens to leaders of unsuccessful coups elsewhere. As the forgotten hero of the original drama, Rep. John Bingham, who has been called the Madison of the "Second Founding," the father of the 14th Amendment, made exactly that point at the time of the congressional debate, saying that former elected federal officials who had gone over to the Confederacy, should consider themselves lucky that they only would be disqualified from office. They were lucky not to be hanged.
I could be wrong, but I don't think any of our constitutional institutions have the guts to use the 14th Amendment the way John Bingham and his colleagues intended. The 14th Amendment has always been scary because it calls every bluff in American politics from the Declaration of Independence forward. It demands aggressive engagement not only by elected politicians, but also by the people who elected them. Far better to leave it up there in the attic, where the children can't find it and hurt themselves.
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Read The Whole Thing by Pierce, and see what you think. Given the chaos ahead from Republicans in the House, on the Supreme Court, and everywhere else, it may be time to pull the trigger on the 14th and see what happens, before we find out what not using it will cost us.
UPDATE:In a post today, Pierce refers to the Freedom Caucus as “the Angry Children’s Brigade.”
...Remarkably, on Thursday, the Angry Children's Brigade of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives embarked on its third day of successfully making a lie out of this hoary maxim. ["You can't beat somebody with nobody."] They have nobody who plausibly can be elected Speaker, but they certainly are beating the hell out of Rep. Kevin McCarthy with said nobody. According to the Washington Post, McCarthy agreed to even more concessions to the ACB on Wednesday night, including one by which he could be elected speaker and then immediately fired if he looked at Lauren Boebert cross-eyed.
[...]in a stunning reversal, McCarthy offered to lower from five to one the threshold of members required to sponsor a resolution to force a vote to oust the speaker — a change the California Republican had previously said he would not accept. McCarthy also expressed a willingness to tap more members of the conservative Freedom Caucus to the House Rules Committee, which debates legislation before it’s moved to the floor. And he relented on allowing floor votes to institute term limits on members and to enact specific border policy legislation.
McCarthy has now lost 7 votes, with another on the way.
