424

Scott Sumner said it very well back in May, 2017 on  the very naughty Republican party. 

“Last October I was premature with this prediction:

We are currently in the circular firing squad phase.  I eagerly await the “Hitler was so pissed the generals let him down that he decided to destroy Germany when he knew that he was going to lose” phase.

“But I still think that’s coming.  When a political party has been naughty, there’s a high price to pay.  And the GOP has been very, very naughty.”

Steve Schmdit says it best right after Trump fired Comey:

“Joining MSNBC’s Brian Williams Wednesday night, former John McCain 2008 campaign staffer & MSNBC “GOP strategist” Steve Schmidt said that Republicans who support President Trump have become “faithless to their oaths” and suggested some members of the GOP like Senators Lindsey Graham, Ben Sasse, Richard Burr, and John McCain might be forced to support the Democrats in 2018 on grounds of “national security.”

Though he was way too optimistic about Sasse and especially Graham who have been fully complicit with Trump’s Russia House; Graham has emerged as  Trump’s Goebbels-and even Burr while running the one Russia investigation with some credibility-though notable that the hearings were behind closed doors so as to minimize Trump’s political pain-is refusing to even support a bill to protect Mueller.

UPDATE: In retrospect Richard Burr has been given way too much benefit of the doubt-just because he hasn’t as blatantly obstructed and co-conspired as Devin Nunes. In truth the trust in him is misplaced. 

End of UPDATE.

“Any Republican member of Congress who takes the president, his spokespeople’s assertions that [Comey was fired] because he was unfair to Hillary Clinton is either a fool, or they have so lost sight in this era of tribal politics, of their responsibilities to the country, that they have become faithless to their oaths,” Schmidt said about the president’s memo detailing his reasons for firing FBI director James Comey.

Schmidt next refers to this tweet from longtime chief of staff to Sen. John McCain, Mark Salter, suggesting that “the security of the United States might now depend on electing a Democratic Congress in 2018.”

Here we are post November 6, 2018 and Americans elected to do just that. But based on the level that the GOP has indeed been ‘faithless to their oaths’ and put party over country arguably they deserve to lose a lot more than just one election-or even just the coming elections in 2020-which I believe they will lose, by the time Mueller releases his report and the Dems have done their public hearings-at some point hopefully they open a full Select Committee on Russia-as Benghazi got a Select Committee the idea that Russiagate-not to mention Comeygate-doesn’t get a Select Committee is perverse-Trump’s approval rating will be 23% rather than 43%.

But like Sumner says, as naughty as the GOP they deserve to be in the penalty box for more than an election or two-they deserve to be in it for a decade or two.

One way to look at the history of American politics is as a morality tale-the American people penalize parties who get on the wrong side of history: the Federalists were routed out of politics in the early  19th century for their royalist and aristocratic pretensions. After that the Democrats via the South dominated American politics for the next 60 years-winning the WH 56 out of 60 years before the Civil War. In the Civil War the Democrats chose the wrong side of history-the cause of the slave holding, seceding South and then they paid a steep price.

There’s been a good deal of discussion about political realignment in the age of Trump-are the parties realigning? The results of 2018 certainly suggest yes-educated, suburban Whites left the GOP in droves in 2018 while the GOP has become more and more a party of the rural districts and the Deep South-though Georgia is clearly stirring after Stacey Abrams shockingly close finish for Governor.

There have also been some interesting analogies drawn between America in the 1850s leading up to the Civil War and the current state of American politics today. Indeed, Greg Sargent speaks of Americans today being engaged in an uncivil war. 

Certainly 1860 proved to be as momentous a realignment as there’s ever been in our history. After the Democrats via it’s Southern wing had dominated American politics for 60 years prior to the Civil War, Lincoln’s win in 1860-without a single Southern state-begun a 72 year period where the Democrats held the WH just 16 of 72 years and where the GOP held not just the WH but both Houses of Congress 42 out of the 72 years. Clearly the Democrats were on the wrong side of history and were punished accordingly by voters. Indeed, amazingly, into the 1920s the GOP was still waving the bloody shirt of Free Soil-vs. the ‘seditious,  rebellious, seceding Democrats.’

So what finally ended the Dem’s time the the penalty box of American politics? The Great Depression. Voters put the GOP in the penalty box for Herbert Hoover and the  economic policies that led to the Depression.

It’s hard to argue that the Democrats didn’t deserve their punishment. Still, you at least say there were extenuating circumstances for the Dems. Yes they were on the wrong side of history but the thing to understand is that throughout most of its history the Dems weren’t really one party but about three different parties: the Southern Democrats who had dominated politics between 1800 and 1860, but then there were the old Yankee Democrats-who bear at least some family resemblance to the later progressives and liberals of the modern Democratic party-then there was the Tammany Hall Democrats-run by the party bosses in the ethnic White immigrant districts.

The Democratic party of the time was far from one mind on things-the Northern Democrats tended not to like slavery and would have preferred to oppose it-but allowed craven political opportunism to carry the day-they turned a blind eye to slavery and were therefore complicit-and so deserved being in the penalty box for nearly three quarters of a century.

Still there was not the unity of perspective in the Democrats of the time like in the modern GOP-who can forget the absolute clown car the 1924 Democratic primary was where you had four different candidates including an outright former Klansman along side a ‘true progressive’ and no one could secure the nomination? The modern GOP starting from the time of Nixon was particularly full of malice as it was the view of the entire party-unlike Will Roger’s old disorganized Dems who acted less out of pure malice than just craven political cowardice and confusion.

The modern GOP, the party of Richard Nixon-and Roger Stone-on the other hand has with eyes wide open vowed to put partisan power over any other value, to seek partisan power by any means necessary.

It’s tough to say the GOP hasn’t been very naughty. Think about it-three GOP ‘wins’ in Presidential elections facilitated by collusion with a hostile foreign power-NIxon and South Vietnam in 1968;  Reagan and Iran in 1980; and Trump and Russia in 2016; but three other elections have asterisks next to them: 1972 with the Canucks letter that drummed Edward Muskie the Democrat Nixon saw as his biggest competition out of the election as well as some pretty bare knuckled tactics to nudge George Wallace into running as a Democrat in the 1972 primary-rather than as an independent spoiler as the segregationist from Alabama had been in 1968; then there’s the Brooks Brothers riots to shutdown the Florida recount in 2000-codified by the GOP Supreme Court-and just recently as documented in (Chapter A) Bush Sr’s campaign operative, Lee Atwater, setting up Gary Hart-who Bush’s team saw as their biggest Dem challenger in 1988.

And then there’s the more mundane GOP tactics of voter suppression-redistricting, gerrymandering, aggressive voter id laws, etc, ,used every two years at the state and local as well as national level.

And then there’s the despicable obstruction of Trump’s GOP friends in Congress the last two years where they prematurely shutdown the Russia probe and opened up a parallel investigation into the investigators.

What’s interesting is that the GOP still really hasn’t paid the piper for being on the wrong side of history regarding the Great Depression and then opposing the New Deal. In the 1930s the GOP fully acknowledged that most Americans supported the New Deal yet Republicans pointedly refused to adjust to changes in public opinion regard the role of government in American society.

There’s the old lawyers’ saying: if you don’t have the facts on your side pound the law, if you don’t have the law on your side pound the table. The GOP in the post New Deal era has gotten very good at pounding the table.  And it would be very nice to say it’s been unsuccessful that bad faith, demagoguery, and down right lies and cheating were roundly rebuked by voters but this has been anything but the case.

In 1952 the GOP must have feared it would never win a Presidential election again. How would they win elections in the New Deal era as they refused to support it despite its popularity with the public?

As it turned out the short answer was to nominate a WWII war hero like Eisenhower with total transpartisan appeal. Indeed, before the 1952 campaign, the public really hadn’t known anything about Ike’s partisan leanings. Ike actually was a conservative Republican-he didn’t like the New Deal though he also realized it had public support and so the best the GOP could hope to do was expand it at a slower rate than a Democratic Administration would-he sill expanded it-in particular Eisenhower greatly expanded SS and conceded that it had overwhelming popular support and indeed was the third rail American politics-Ike held his views so close to his vest; indeed the Dems had inquired about having him run on their ticket. 

If only nominating a Dwight Eisenhower were a repeatable thing the GOP could do every 4 to 8 years. Alas they weren’t able to find an assembly line where you could bottle that. It would be Ike’s VP, Richard Nixon, who would end up setting the strategy for the modern post New Deal GOP.

Nixon who Ike didn’t even really  want on the ticket and had hoped to drop in 1952 until Nixon’s Checker’s Speech ended up being a hit. Indeed, that speech in itself was a master class in winning an argument via sheer ad hominem logical fallacy. 

Nixon put on a clinic in terms of pounding the table while ignoring the facts, a technique the GOP would master over the next 66 years.

Then in 1956 Ike had urged Nixon to ‘chart your own course.’

In 1959 when asked about what major WH decisions Nixon had an important role in Ike infamously declared if you get back to me in a week I might have something, I don’t remember. 

Trouble is the GOP couldn’t bottle Ike so they had to settle for Nixon’s dirty tricks. Having said that, the last 66 years hardly prove crime doesn’t pay. Quite the contrary. Starting with Ike’s twin landslides over Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956-the 1956 version was just that little bit more lopsided to add insult to injury-the GOP has held the WH 38 of 66 years through 2018 after 20 years of FDR-Truman. They’ve essentially held the Supreme Court since 1968-and in many ways dominating the judiciary is more important than the executive or legislature. To be sure, after the Dems had the House for 40 years through 1994, since then the GOP has held the House 20 of 24 years and the Senate 16 of 24-thankfully the Dems just broke the long time recent GOP dominance of the House.

Will what happened in 2016-and the level and magnitude of both Trump’s abuse of power and the GOP’s obstruction on his behalf-finally be where the American people give the GOP its comeuppance?

If not now when?

What all  Americans of good will and sound reason regardless of ideology need to do is boycott the GOP like they did in 2018 over the next 20 years or so. I’m a Democrat so I’m magnanimous that way-honestly the way the GOP has rigged elections you could forgive someone thinking 20 years is way too light a sentence.

It makes me think of what Bill Maher said regarding the Democrats: if you can’t make treason a political issue maybe you should give it up as a party. Similarly, if the GOP doesn’t get 20 years in the penalty box after all these rigged elections and all this collusion with hostile foreign powers then maybe the pessimists are right when they declare after Trump nothing matters. 

As noted in Chapter A 2018 might have been the start of this GOP in the penalty box stage. I know Obama said the arc of history that he believed bends toward justice is curved but wow if  this has been a very sharp bend.

UPDATE: I’ve decided since that 20 years is way too short-when you see  what Bill Barr is doing now, in trying to bury the Mueller Report this is a party that belongs nowhere near any actual power easily for 100 years.

Is this too draconian? Well remember in this book I’m speaking for the prosecution. We have a better chance of getting 20 years if we ask for 100 than asking for 20-shoot for the moon you’ll get something. Shoot just for something you may get nothing.

 

License

October 28, 2016: a Day That Will Live in Infamy Copyright © by . All Rights Reserved.

Share This Book