REPUBLICAN REJECTION OF THE JANUARY 6 COMMISSION: IS THIS WORSE THAN MEETS THE EYE?

Why would President Joe Biden say on Memorial Day that “Democracy itself is in peril?” No modern president has issued a comparable warning.

Military veteran and former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a one-time Republican Senator from Nebraska, suggested a military coup could occur in America when he said, “The real threat is internal.” He added that America’s future is “in jeopardy.” What are Biden and Hagel worried about? What are they telling us?

Are they afraid one of our major political parties – the Republican Party – has become the anti-democracy party?

If not Treason, What?

On January 6, hundreds of mostly white people stormed the U.S. Capitol. They hoisted the Confederate flag, constructed a hangman’s noose, and overcame Capitol police with guns, knives, bear spray, clubs, and

poles. They took over both congressional chambers and chanted things like “Hang Mike Pence” and “Kill Nancy Pelosi.” Their invasion ultimately caused five deaths.

For more than four hours, the mob disrupted

congressional certification of Electoral College votes. Securing the Capitol took that amount of time. In all American history, the United States Capitol building had never been taken over by domestic invaders and only once –during the War of 1812 – by foreigners.

Though many in the crowd wore Trump

clothing and carried Trump signs, some in the right wing media claimed the insurgents were actually Black Lives Matter and Antifa members masquerading as Trump supporters. Some suspect

Republican members of Congress may have helped organize the invasion or at least enabled it.

 

Who’s Complicit?

House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and the ranking

Republican on that committee, New York’s John Katko, drafted bipartisan legislation that would have created an independent commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection. House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy regularly consulted Katko during that process and Thompson gave Katko all he asked for in the negotiations. Still, McCarthy withdrew his support and urged that Republicans vote against the measure. Only 35 GOP members ended up voting with Democrats when the measure passed the House.

In the Senate, Republicans launched a filibuster, meaning the legislation needed 60 votes. Just seven Republicans joined 50 Democrats in voting yes, so the measure failed.

               

Why would 43 of the 50 Republican senators not

want answers to the questions surrounding the insurrection? Who organized it, for example? Why were the invaders determined to overthrow the democratic process by violent means? What were Republican senators afraid of? Why would they not support bipartisan legislation aimed at getting the facts about such an unprecedented domestic attack on the American Capitol?  Something is clearly afloat.

One obvious answer lies in the control Donald Trump still exerts over the base of the Republican

Party. In controlling that base, he controls members of Congress it elects. “He has a grip over politicians because he has a grip over voters,” says Carol Leonnig, author of Zero Fail: The Rise and

Fall of the Secret Service. These elected officials want to maintain their offices  and the benefits that go with serving the interests of movement conservatism. An interlocking set of institutions and alliances wins elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety while using its power in pushing an elitist economic agenda, as  Paul Krugman writes in Arguing with Zombies. Since Republicans want to regain control of the House and Senate, they know they can’t do so without the white lemming that makes up the Republican base.

In the wake of the GOP’s rejection of the January 6

commission measure, former Trump national security adviser Michal Flynn, once a three-star general in the U.S. Army, told a QAnon conference a military coup “should happen” in the United States. Flynn referred to events in Myanmar, where the military overthrew a democratically elected government on the basis of unproven allegations of voter fraud. Other similarly disturbing statements from Trump supporters haven’t gotten the attention Flynn got, but it appears treasonous comments are becoming common place among Republicans and Trump supporters.

 

So What’s the Bargain?

Lyndon Johnson, the nation’s 36^th president, once said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Donald Trump ran for president in 2016 as the

champion of the little guy. His only significant legislative achievement, however, was a tax cut for the rich that ripped a hole in the social safety net his blue-collar supporters need. So, what do those supporters get out of the deal? Mostly, it seems, what President Johnson told us – a chance to look down on someone.      

Trump no longer pretends he’s going to make life better for working class whites in his base. They get xenophobic diatribes and racist venom directed at blacks, browns, and Asians but not much else. In the final analysis, Trump gives them someone they can look down on. Meantime, with the support of that base, the Republican Party has become the anti-democracy party. It seeks to deprive all but white people of the benefits of democracy. That’s the Faustian bargain. So they can look down on blacks, browns, Asians, and other out groups, Trump supporters discard democracy, with the complicity of their leaders.

So, we ask again – what do Biden and Hagel know? If we ignore the clear and present danger this “deal,” this “bargain” Trump’s supporters and GOP leaders have struck, we could all lose.  

                            

IMPEACHMENT: IT’S THE REAL DEAL NOW

Impeaching President Donald J. Trump now seems inevitable.  On a party-line vote, the House of Representatives last week endorsed a resolution opening a formal impeachment inquiry. The vote never would have

been taken if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wasn't confident she has the votes for impeachment. Soon public hearings will begin, followed by approval of at least one article of impeachment in the judiciary committee. If the full House supports

at least one article, action would shift to the Senate for a trial. There, conviction and removal from office require a two-thirds vote, admittedly an unlikely prospect now.   

Mounting evidence Trump abused his office by withholding aid from a beleaguered ally while demanding help from that foreign government in digging up dirt on a political opponent has persuaded about half the country Congress should remove him. Though

Trump’s sins as described in the report of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller didn’t produce widespread support for impeachment, shake-down of a foreign leader for personal domestic political advantage appears to have broken through.

The story isn’t complicated. A White House  summary of a call between Trump and the Ukrainian president

told most people all they needed to know. When House investigators began taking testimony from people involved in U.S. – Ukrainian relations the doubts about Trump’s constitutionally prohibited behavior fell away.  A host of credible witnesses, like Ukraine Ambassador William Taylor and a decorated National Security Council official, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, have given the Ukraine scandal gravitas and staying power with the public. House leaders, like intelligence committee chairman Adam Schiff, indicate Taylor, Lt. Col. Vindman, and perhaps even former National Security Advisor John Bolton may testify in the public hearing phase. History suggests increasing public support for impeachment would likely result from public hearings.

Our Say

We return to impeachment now because it’s real. In four previous posts we looked at it under abstract circumstances. This isn’t hypothetical anymore. This will happen.

We began writing about impeaching Trump in March 2017, just two months into his presidency. Early signs of corruption  produced Woodson’s prediction that impeachment proceedings against the President would begin “in the next year.”  It took a little longer, but even then the road pointed in the direction we’re now headed.

                   

Three months later, in June 2017, Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey induced from us a piece on the history of the Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings. We speculated about what might happen politically if Trump were impeached and removed. As things move forward in 2019, we realize we’ll have to revisit the political calculus.  It’s different now that we’re on the cusp of an election, but no less important in developing an understanding of what all this means for American politics.

In July 2018, we briefly revisited impeachment in the wake of Trump’s shameful performance in Helsinki alongside Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. With former State Secretary Madeleine Albright’s

book Fascism as a backdrop and organizing principle, we asked if impeachment “could reign in Trump’s behavior,” even if the Senate didn’t remove him from office.

Finally, in April 2019, evidence of Trump’s scandalous behavior became clearer and clearer. We learned of so many sins, we asked, “Impeachment Anyone?” We addressed the issue in terms of political reality versus the country’s need for a moral response, in the process revealing our own varied views on the issue.

Ukraine Changes the Game

Throughout the now nearly three years of the Trump presidency, as the specter of impeachment lurked beneath the surface and the bad acts piled up, there has always been the idea of relying on the 2020 election as the best way of ridding the nation of Trump disease. Wait, counseled people like Rob, who for most of that time, thought the political price of impeaching Trump wasn’t worth it. We could tough it out until the election in the belief limiting Trump to one term wouldn’t permanently damage the country. Trump’s behavior in connection with Ukraine calls the morality of that view into serious question.

Woodson and Henry now offer compelling

observations about why leaving it to the election isn’t a good idea. Woodson notes the possibility of tampering with the 2020 election. Mueller told Congress he was sure the Russians were, as he spoke, readying their next attack. Trump, by saying he’d welcome dirt on his opponent from foreign sources, invited just such interference. It happened in 2016. It could happen again.   

Henry, a former federal magistrate judge who says perhaps the best part of his job was swearing in new citizens, reminds us morality commands we not betray the brave citizens like Ambassador Taylor, Lt. Col. Vindman, and the original

whistleblower who stepped forward and told what they knew, sometimes at great personal cost. Trump and his allies vilified these men and women for doing nothing more than honoring their duty under the constitution.

 

All three of us learned in law school the venerable principle that the law is entitled to every person’s evidence. People like

Ambassador Taylor and Lt. Col. Vindman followed that principle with their closed-door testimony and probably will again when the hearings go public. In the absence of impeaching Trump, we will have done those individuals and the principle they followed a great disservice. We cannot afford the price of doing that.   

TRUMP’S TRUE BELIEVERS: WHAT THEY THINK AND WHY THEY WON’T CHANGE

As the impeachment story moves forward, evolving by the hour, we find the arguments offered by President Trump’s defenders increasingly outlandish, less and less effective but incredibly interesting. Polls show support for impeachment and conviction

growing in the wake of Trump's phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and a whistleblower complaint that produced Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s announcement that the House of Representatives had, in fact, begun an

impeachment inquiry. As the calendar turned to October, half the respondents in some polls favored Trump’s impeachment and removal from office. With the pressure ramping up, the number of Americans favoring impeachment and conviction will likely increase, not diminish.

Trump’s defenders kept spinning, despite being confronted by reporters, talk show hosts, and others who demonstrated their infidelity to the facts and the illogic of their conclusions. With the narrative about Trump’s actual conduct seemingly so clear, the interesting part of the story for us became how Trump and his people approached defending the indefensible.     

Three Lines of Attack

Though Trump’s backers offered a range of reasons why Congress shouldn’t impeach him, their main arguments fell into three broad categories: (1) Joe Biden did it too; (2) what Trump did was okay; and (3) attacks on the whistleblower who started all this with a complaint under established whistleblower procedures. The facts support none of these approaches to Trump's defense.

Several media organizations looked into the Biden-did-it-too claim and all turned up nothing. No evidence exists the former vice president improperly

used his office while promoting Obama administration policy. Along with European leaders, Biden advocated the ouster of a prosecutor because of his failures in investigating corruption in that former Soviet  republic. Additionally, no evidence surfaced that Biden exerted inappropriate influence related to the board position his son held with a Ukrainian company.

No basis exists for declaring the substance of Trump’s call to his Ukrainian counterpart

Phone transcript of Trump/Ukrainian call 

acceptable. Having already frozen U.S. military assistance to Ukraine, Trump asked for two “favors”:  (1) help with a probe into the origins of the Mueller  investigation and (2) finding dirt on Biden, the obvious conclusion being the

release of funds dependent on performing the favors. Anybody reading the White House-released notes of Trump’s call who won’t acknowledge those facts illustrates the old adage about no one being blinder than one who will not see.

Trump and his allies have railed against the whistle-blower, demanding the person’s identity, clearly a violation of U.S. law. This nation has had – for obvious reasons – laws protecting whistle-blowers since the 1700s. Now is not the time for abrogating those laws.

Why They Persist

We get Trump’s self-preservation instinct, hence his own defense of his actions and his personal strikes at Biden and the whistle-blower. That’s what we’d expect. Understanding why Republican members of Congress stay with Trump will become increasingly difficult as more information comes out and as public support for impeachment grows. Richard Nixon didn’t resign until his approval rating fell to about 25 per cent, putting Republican members of Congress in the position of choosing between Nixon and their own political survival. They chose at least trying to save their own necks, though the massive GOP losses in the 1974 mid-terms suggest only modest success in that endeavor.

What we find really intriguing is trying to figure out why ordinary Americans buy into

arguing on Trump’s behalf. In our discussions, we’ve suggested a number of reasons, most of them unflattering and we realize that’s not always fair and perhaps not enlightening either. Trump has found something in a swath of the American nation that allows him unwavering support from a significant part of the voting public.

One can debate the size of that swath, while recognizing its importance. Woodson, for

example, thinks its 40-45 per cent.  Rob thinks the rabid Trump base lies somewhere in the low 30s, with the rest of his approval rating coming from committed, baseline

Republicans and people who support some of his policies but won’t man the barricades for him. Henry thinks it falls somewhere in between. Since we usually

occupy space on the other side of the political divide, we need to understand the why of this.

Some of this, in all likelihood, resides in devotion to Trump’s positions on social issues 

like abortion and gay rights. We know Trump supporters so invested in assuring Trump’s pursuit of an anti-abortion, anti-gay judiciary, they cannot break with him for any reason.

For others, we think immigration produces the same dedication. Trump’s determination

to build a wall (or his latest scheme, construction of a moat with snakes and alligators) on the south-
ern border and his detention policies regarding immigrants generate so much popularity among some voters, they stick with him despite whatever bad act he’s committed.

Such explanations probably account for the attitudes of many Trump defenders and they aren’t changing. We think there are other  reasons we have not, and perhaps cannot, tease out, given our commitment to rules of reason and fact-based analysis. We can’t read documents like the notes of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Zelensky and reach conclusions the facts laid out in that document don’t support.  

We keep searching. As long as Trump occupies the White House, understanding the why of the Trump phenomena will remain an important job for all who care about our politics and our democracy. Any ideas?