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Monday, February 14, 2022
On Our Weekly "Virtual Route 66" : On the Week That Was in Our World (and a Milestone)
We have achieved a milestone this week here in our Perspectives Property: This is our 1600th Posting as we continue to aim to compile a snapshot of the week that was courtesy the Financial Times, the Washington Examiner, the Economist, and leading thinkers in America leading Marc Cooper and Heather Cox Richardson. We hope we continue to live up to Judy Blume's admonition as we present our weekly curated aggregation of the week that was before us:
French President Emmanuel Macron’s effort to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin not to launch a military offensive against Ukraine is repeating the mistakes that Neville Chamberlain made in his Munich Agreement with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, according to a senior Ukrainian diplomat.
The 30 years since the Maastricht treaty was signed and 43 since Iran’s Islamic revolution put today’s political challenges into perspective
FEBRUARY 6, 2022by Jonathan Moules
Senator Angus King of Maine has been sounding the alarm on the deficiencies of the Electoral Count Act.Ryan David Brown for The New York Times
‘Jan. 6 is a harbinger’
The Electoral Count Act is both a legal monstrosity and a fascinating puzzle.
Intended to settle disputes about how America chooses its presidents, the 135-year-old law has arguably done the opposite. Last year, its poorly written and ambiguous text tempted Donald Trump into trying to overturn Joe Biden’s victory, using a fringe legal theory that his own vice president rejected.
Scholars say the law remains a ticking time bomb. And with Trump on their minds, members of Congress in both parties now agree that fixing it before the 2024 election is a matter of national urgency.
“If people don’t trust elections as a fair way to transition power, then what are you left with?” said Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine who has been leading the reform efforts. “I would argue that Jan. 6 is a harbinger.”
‘Unsavory’ origins
The Electoral Count Act’s origins are, as King put it, “unsavory.”
More than a decade elapsed between the disputed election that inspired it and its passage in 1887. Under the bargain that ended that dispute, the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, agreed to withdraw federal troops from the occupied South — effectively ending Reconstruction and launching the Jim Crow era.
The law itself is a morass of archaic and confusing language. One especially baffling sentence in Section 15 — which lays out what is meant to happen when Congress counts the votes on Jan. 6 — is 275 words long and contains 21 commas and two semicolons.
Amy Lynn Hess, the author of a grammatical textbook on diagraming sentences, told us that mapping out that one sentence alone would take about six hours and require a large piece of paper.
“It’s one of the most confusing pieces of legislation I’ve ever read,” King told us. “It’s impossible to figure out exactly what they intended.”
King has been working through how to fix the Electoral Count Act since the spring, when he first started sounding the alarm about its deficiencies. His office has become a hub of expertise on the subject.
“It just so happens I have a political science Ph.D. on my staff,” King said. “And when I assigned him to start working on this, it was like heaven for him.”
Last week, King and two Democratic colleagues, Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Dick Durbin of Illinois, introduced a draft discussion bill aimed at addressing the act’s main weaknesses.
King said he hopes it will serve as “a head start” for more than a dozen senators in both parties who have been meeting to hash out legislation of their own.
One leader of that effort, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a Democrat, vowed on Sunday that a reform bill “absolutely” will pass. Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican of Alaska, said the lawmakers were taking “the Goldilocks approach” — as in, “we’re going to try to find what’s just right.”
But finding a compromise that will satisfy both progressive Democrats and the 10 Republican senators required for passage in the Senate won’t be easy. Already, differences have emerged over what role the federal courts should play in adjudicating election disputes within states, according to people close to the talks.
Mr. Worst-Case Scenario
Few have studied the Electoral Count Act more obsessively than Matthew Seligman, a fellow at Yale Law School.
In an exhaustive 100-page paper, he walked through nearly every combination of scenarios for how the law could be abused by partisans bent on stretching its boundaries to the max. And what he discovered shocked him.
“Its underexplored weaknesses are so profound that they could result in an even more explosive conflict in 2024 and beyond, fueled by increasingly vitriolic political polarization and constitutional hardball,” Seligman warns.
He found, for instance, that in nine of the 34 presidential elections since 1887, “the losing party could have reversed the results of the presidential election and the party that won legitimately would have been powerless to stop it.”
Seligman refrained from publishing his paper for more than five years, out of fear that it could be used for malicious ends. He worries especially about what he calls the “governor’s tiebreaker,” a loophole in the existing law that, if abused, could cause a constitutional crisis.
Suppose that on Jan. 6, 2025 — the next time the Electoral Count Act will come into play — Republicans control the House of Representatives and the governorship of Georgia.
Seligman conjures a hypothetical yet plausible scenario: The secretary of state declares that President Biden won the popular vote in the state. But Gov. David Perdue, who has said he believes the 2020 election was stolen, declares there was “fraud” and submits a slate of Trump electors to Congress instead. Then the House, led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, certifies Trump as the winner.
Even if Democrats controlled the Senate and rejected Perdue’s electoral slate, it wouldn’t matter, Seligman said. Because of the quirks of the Electoral Count Act, Georgia’s 16 Electoral College votes would go for Trump.
“When you’re in this era of pervasive distrust, you start running through all these rabbit holes,” said Richard H. Pildes, a professor at New York University’s School of Law. “We haven’t had to chase down so many rabbit holes before.”
Now, for the hard part
The easiest part in fixing the Electoral Count Act, according to half a dozen experts who have studied the issue, would be figuring out how Congress would accept the results from the states.
There’s wide agreement on three points to do that:
Extending the safe harbor deadline, the date by which all challenges to a state’s election results must be completed.
Clarifying that the role of the vice president on Jan. 6 is purely “ministerial,” meaning the vice president merely opens the envelopes and has no power to reject electors.
Raising the number of members of Congress needed to object to a state’s electors; currently, one lawmaker from each chamber is enough to do so.
The harder part is figuring out how to clarify the process for how states choose their electors in the first place. And that’s where things get tricky.
The states that decide presidential elections are often closely divided. Maybe one party controls the legislature while another holds the governor’s mansion or the secretary of state’s office. And while each state has its own rules for working through any election disputes, it’s not always clear what is supposed to happen.
In Michigan, for instance, a canvassing board made up of an equal number of Republicans and Democrats certifies the state’s election results. What if they can’t reach a decision? That nearly happened in 2020, until one Republican member broke with his party and declared Biden the winner.
Progressive Democrats will want more aggressive provisions to prevent attempts in Republican-led states to subvert the results. Republicans will fear a slippery slope and try to keep the bill as narrow as possible.
King’s solution was to clarify the process for the federal courts to referee disputes between, say, a governor and a secretary of state, and to require states to hash out their internal disagreements by the federal “safe harbor date,” which he would push back to Dec. 20 instead of its current date of Dec. 8.
The political obstacles are formidable, too. Still reeling from their failure to pass federal voting rights legislation, many Democrats are suspicious of Republicans’ motives. It’s entirely possible that Democrats will decide that it’s better to do nothing, because passing a bipartisan bill to fix the Electoral Count Act would allow Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate minority leader, to portray himself as the savior of American democracy.
Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who heads the Committee on House Administration, has been working with Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican, on a bipartisan House bill. But she stressed that their ambitions are fairly limited.
“We’ve made clear this is no substitute for the voting rights bill,” Lofgren told us. “The fact that the Senate failed on that shouldn’t be an excuse for not doing something modest.”
The challenges posed by Russia are evident in the economic, diplomatic, governance, and security domains. However, a peaceful, prosperous Russia is a distinct possibility if we approach US policy realistically, and that starts with a clear-eyed look at the global system and Russia today.
Global Strategy 2022: Thwarting Kremlin Aggression Today for Constructive Relations Tomorrow, the latest in the Atlantic Council Strategy Papers series, offers a comprehensive strategy to manage and develop US relations with Russia over the next twenty years. This strategy seeks to thwart current Kremlin efforts to undermine the international system that the United States helped create after World War II and revise after the Cold War; to cooperate in the short and medium term on issues of mutual interest, in particular arms control; and to establish in the long term a broad cooperative relationship once Moscow recognizes that its own security and prosperity are best realized in partnership with the United States and the West.
The crisis in Ukraine poses an extraordinary challenge, but it also represents a rare window of opportunity to rethink and stabilize European security. Though policymakers are understandably hesitant to negotiate with a clearly aggressive Russia, history suggests that such crises often provide the impetus for major diplomatic achievements.
Engagement Reframed, our newest publication series, outlines specific, constructive recommendations for a new, more balanced and effective US global leadership role. These concise policy briefs propose new initiatives for employing a wide range of non-military tools at the disposal of the United States in close cooperation with its like-minded network of allies and partners.
Russia continues to bolster its forces in Belarus, Crimea, and along the border with Ukraine. Those forces are now at a heightened state of readiness, with satellite imagery indicating field operations and ongoing live-fire exercises, including with artillery. Russia’s exercise in Belarus has so far focused on integrated air and ground operations. This signals that a major focus of any operation would be air support to a mechanized offensive.
This morning’s news that former president Trump apparently clogged a White House toilet repeatedly with discarded documents was overtaken this evening by the news that some of the records Trump took from the White House were clearly marked as classified, some of them “top secret.”
The news of the flushed documents came through Axios from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, whose book about Trump will be out in October. By law, the records of a presidential administration belong to the American people; there are strict laws about how they should be handled and preserved. That Trump ignored the Presidential Records Act was known because of stories of how he ripped up documents that others tried to tape back together, but the idea that he was flushing so many documents he periodically clogged the toilet seemed a commentary on his regard for the American people who owned those documents.
And yet, by the end of the day, the flushing was not the big story.
In the 15 boxes of material the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) recovered from the former president’s Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, archivists discovered top secret documents. Top secret clearance is applied to documents whose disclosure “could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security” of the United States. They are supposed to be kept secure, and to be seen only by authorized individuals. NARA officials had been trying to retrieve missing documents since last summer (never, never, mess with archivists—they keep meticulous records), and Trump refused to hand them over. When they found the mishandled documents, they called the Justice Department.
Reid J. Epstein and Michael S. Schmidt in the New York Times recalled that Trump’s handling of sensitive national security documents was so lackadaisical that when he was White House chief of staff, General John F. Kelly tried to stop Trump from taking classified documents out of the Oval Office out of concern that he would jeopardize national security. Epstein and Schmidt recounted how Trump used to rip pictures out of the President’s Daily Brief, the daily bulletin of national security threats. Now, it appears he took secret material and did not keep it secure.
Certainly, Trump knew he was breaking the law. White House counsel Donald McGahn warned him about the Presidential Records Act. So did two chiefs of staff, Reince Priebus and Kelly. In 2017, internal White House memos warned against destroying presidential records, noting that such destruction is a crime. The editorial board of the Washington Post called Trump’s mutilated records, “a wrenching testimony to his penchant for wanton destruction.”
This story is about the stealing of our records and the endangerment of our national security—and the heroism of archivists—but it is also a story about the media. The defining narrative of the 2016 election was about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails, allegedly mishandled. Again and again, the email story was front-page news. A 2017 study in the Columbia Journalism Review by Duncan J. Watts and David M. Rothschild found that the New York Times in six days published as many cover stories about Clinton’s emails as they did about “all the policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.” The network news gave more time to Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.
Today, Matthew Gertz of Media Matters for America noted that the Trump story should mean that finally “political journalists should stop pretending to believe Republicans when they pretend to be outraged about purportedly illegal or unethical behavior by Democrats.” He compiled a long list of all the Fox News Channel stories about Clinton’s emails and said, “Based on the 2015–16 baseline, Trump flagrantly violating the Presidential Records Act should be a massive story.” Aaron Rupar, author of the newsletter Public Notice, tweeted the obvious: “If two prominent reporters broke news that Joe Biden was flushing documents down White House toilets, [Fox News Channel personality Sean] Hannity would anchor special Fox News coverage that would last through 2024. Trump flushing documents down WH toilets has been mentioned twice on Fox News today, once in passing.”
The House Oversight Committee has announced it will investigate the “potential serious violations” of the Presidential Records Act. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo was more to the point, saying that Trump’s destruction of evidence amounted to “willful and deliberate destruction of government records for the purpose of concealment.”
That analysis agrees with the discovery by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol that the White House phone logs for the day of the insurrection have gaps in them: calls they know Trump made to lawmakers are missing. This may be in part because he used his own private cell phone or the phones of aides.
The destruction of documents in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s hamstrung the investigation, but it is not clear that, in this era, the concealment will be so effective. Yesterday, lawyers for the Department of Justice provided 19 pages of information to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, outlining how they are getting through the massive amounts of information they have, using cell phone records, internet records, geolocation, data aggregators, and so on. It doesn't seem like much is slipping by.
While the investigation by the January 6 committee and the angry split in the Republican Party after the Republican National Committee excused the insurrection as “legitimate political discourse” have gotten all the headlines, the Biden administration has been working to rebuild and redefine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for a new era.
Dr. Mike Martin, a war studies visiting fellow at King’s College London, notes that it is hardly a secret that Russian president Vladimir Putin wants a buffer around Russia of states that are not allied with his enemies. If they cannot be allied with Russia, at least they will be chaotic and neutral, rather than pro-democracy and anti-corruption.
Martin notes it is not a coincidence that Putin decided to test NATO right as German leadership shifts from former German chancellor Angela Merkel to Olaf Scholz, as the U.K. is reeling from scandals surrounding Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and, I would add, as Biden is trying to rebuild the U.S. in the face of open hostility from Republicans after we have suffered far higher Covid death rates than other large, wealthy nations—63% higher since December 1, according to the New York Times.
But the allies surprised Putin by pulling together, in large part because of a sustained and thorough effort by the U.S. State Department, an effort that European diplomats told journalist and political scientist David Rothkopf was “unprecedented.” In a piece for the Daily Beast, Rothkopf notes that the dissolution of the USSR left NATO, along with other international institutions, adrift. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, fed the U.S. sense that it could and should act on its own, getting us into the quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq, which then shaped President Barack Obama’s caution as he tried simply not to screw up on the international stage. Then Trump actively worked to weaken international alliances.
Now, Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan are trying to rebuild NATO and international alliances, focusing on diplomacy. Recognizing that we cannot combat the crises of climate change, pandemics, and emerging technologies without cooperation, they are emphasizing a rules-based international order, and working with others, whose voices matter: “nothing about us without us.”
One diplomat for the European Union told Rothkopf these qualities are “refreshing and, in a way, revolutionary.” A scholar of diplomacy put it like this: “When there are lots of moving pieces in play, when there appears to be the chance for seismic shifts in power, these can call forth a golden age of diplomacy. And the coalition builders, the conceivers of grand alliances, the ones who work well with others, these almost always prevail in the face of a bullying despot.”
Still, no one knows what Russia will do, although as the ground softens, an invasion becomes more difficult. Yesterday, Russia expert and former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul added another piece: “Putin knows…NATO won’t accept new members who have Russian soldiers occupying parts of their countries, because NATO members don’t want a war with Russia. That's why Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 & Ukraine 2014.” Russia currently has troops in Belarus that it says are only there temporarily.
At 5:01 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 2, Tim Ramthun was sitting in his living room with the TV on when his cellphone rang. He turned to his wife of four decades, Carolann. “Oh, the president’s calling,” he told her. She scoffed. “Hello, Mr. President,” Ramthun said to the caller. “This is Representative Ramthun. May I help you?” Carolann still didn’t believe him, until she heard the voice on the other end and almost fell out of her chair. She started recording a video of her husband, a junior member of the Wisconsin state Assembly, receiving praise from the 45th president of the United States.
Ramthun wasn’t surprised by Donald Trump’s call. A few weeks earlier, Trump had left a message on his work phone at the state Capitol at 6:30 in the morning. Trump had wanted to thank Ramthun for his continued efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, something Trump proceeded to do later that day in a written statement praising Ramthun for “putting forward a very powerful and very popular, because it’s true, resolution to decertify the 2020 Presidential Election in Wisconsin based on the recently found absolute proof of large scale voter fraud that took place.”
Now, with his wife recording the conversation, Ramthun listened as Trump asked what he could do to be helpful. He offered to endorse Ramthun, and Ramthun knew how powerful that endorsement could be running for reelection to the Assembly or seeking a higher office. Trump wasn’t the only conservative luminary to dangle an endorsement: Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow and a leader of the growing election-fraud movement in America, had twice said he’d back Ramthun.
Ramthun told Trump he appreciated the pledge of support, but he wanted the former president to know that the fraud he believed he’d uncovered, and the conspiracy that tied it together, required all of his attention at the moment. First, he would pass his resolution to decertify the last presidential election, and then he would help other states follow his lead.
“If one state does this, I think others will follow,” he remembers telling Trump.
“You’re my kind of guy,” Trump replied.
This is Trump’s guy. Full wooly-MikeLindell-level crazy.
Wisconsin’s GOP has been tossing bits of red-meat to the MAGAverse in the hope that it will keep the real crazies under control. In an attempt to appease the MAGAverse, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos launched an expensive and pointless investigation of the 2020 election, headed by a former state Supreme Court Justice named Michael Gableman.
Accusations of slander. Leaked documents. Fake news pushed by a right-wing conspiracy website. Staff forcibly reassigned. Angry warnings from former President Donald Trump.
Just last week, TFG put out a statement attacking Vos: “ICYMI: “Wisconsin Speaker Vos Is Secretly Pushing Legislation to Increase Number of Drop Boxes After Judge Ruled Them Illegal in State.”
This comes in spite of an aggressive campaign of sucking up by Wisconsin’s GOP. Behold this display of self-humiliation.
For months now, the Wisconsin GOP has tried desperately to keep the real insanity at bay — and by real insanity, I mean Timothy Ramthum. After Ramthum tried to introduce legislation decertifying the presidential election, the assembly’s majority leader, Jim Steineke tweeted:
The GOP leadership then stripped Ramthum of his lone staffer “for lying about fellow GOP members and using taxpayer resources to put out political screeds.”
But that move has simply made Ramthum a martyr and a rock star for much of the increasingly Trumpified GOP base. The Iowa County Republican Party released a statement praising Ramthun, and accused of Vos of being “impotent to accomplish anything of significance.” When Ramthum spoke at a meeting of the Sheboygan County GOP earlier this month, he got a standing ovation.
And, of course Ramthum’s got Trump.
So, here it comes.
The GOP’s craziest legislator is running for governor.
MADISON – A state lawmaker who was disciplined by the Assembly leader over false election claims and who has repeatedly called on his colleagues to take the impossible action of overturning Wisconsin's 2020 presidential election results, appears to be running for governor.
A new campaign website says Rep. Timothy Ramthun, a Republican from Campbellsport, is running on a platform of election scrutiny and is endorsed by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive who has heavily promoted baseless election conspiracy theories.
(Weirdly enough, he pulled the website down within minutes. But he’s still expected to run.)
This, um, complicates things for the Wisconsin GOP.
A Ramthun entry into the race would scramble the Republican primary for governor. Ramthun has been praised publicly and privately by former President Donald Trump for his push to undo the 2020 election result, a legally impossible task.
The National Archives and Records Administration has asked the Justice Department to examine Donald Trump’s handling of White House records, sparking discussions among federal law enforcement officials about whether they should investigate the former president for a possible crime….
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi joins a bicameral and bipartisan group of lawmakers on the East Front of the U.S. Capitol for a moment of silence for the more than 900,000 people who have died from Covid-19. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
THE VIRUS VOTERS— Joe Biden always said he’d “follow the science” on Covid, and with few exceptions — such as the White House’s premature declaration of victory over the pandemic — he’s spent the past year doing just that, largely with the support of Democrats in Congress and in the states.
But from the beginning, politicians have weighed the politics of the pandemic along with the science. And in a Monmouth University poll last week, 7 in 10 Americans — including 47 percent of Democrats — agreed with the idea that “it’s time we accept that Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives.” The poll was in line with other surveys suggesting people are tired of their restriction-altered realities. Almost on cue, Democratic-led states throughout the country started paring back mandates.
Biden was elected president in part — perhaps largely — because he promised to defeat the virus, to take more aggressive measures instead of punting the problem to the nation’s governors, as President Donald Trump had done. But since he took office, the pandemic has been a persistent drag on Biden’s presidency. Public approval of his handling of the virus has fallen underwater.
Republican strategists have described the pandemic to Nightly as a godsend, with its effects on both inflation and education, two of voters’ top concerns, as well as on Biden’s dismal public approval ratings.
GOP strategists are vowing to run on unpopular Covid restrictions even if they’ve been taken away. They gleefully predict that Biden’s party will pay a price in the midterm elections for, in their view, waiting too long.
“They are waving the white freaking flag, after they’ve completely lost the war and have nothing else to do besides retreat,” said Jeff Roe, the Republican strategist who managed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign in 2016 and helped elect Glenn Youngkin governor of Virginia last year. “The female suburban independent, college educated voter? Good luck. Add people who are married with kids, and put them in the Republican camp. [Democrats] did more damage to that coalition in the last 14 months than any Republican has done in the last 14 years.”
Fred Davis, a Republican ad maker, said that in the November elections, “People will remember that the supply chain was broken down, that kids didn’t go to school … that the world closed up.”
The prospect that people will remember school shutdowns and mask mandates — and punish Democrats for them — is one possible outcome of pandemic politics, assuming the lull continues. But let’s stipulate that, in November, children aren’t wearing masks in schools, that families have spent the summer posing for pictures at Disney World and hugging Mickey Mouse.
In that Clorox-free scenario, it’s not clear that Republicans are the party that will gain an advantage.
Take Covid away, and it’s not unreasonable to think the mood of the electorate may improve, and that Biden’s approval ratings might tick up — and perhaps help to limit Democrats’ losses in the House.
“If Covid is in the rearview mirror and there’s a return to, quote, normal, whatever normal is, the occupant of the White House will benefit,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion.
The other possibility — the more likely one, judging by recent history — is that if the pandemic really does subside, it may quickly fade from our politics altogether. In the run-up to last year’s gubernatorial race in Virginia, politicians and strategists of both parties were bracing for the pandemic to feature heavily. But several weeks before the election, as Covid conditions improved, polling showed Covid receding as a priority for voters. Campaign advertising related to the pandemic nearly vanished.
And by the time Youngkin defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe, exit polls showed Covid lagging behind education and the economy and jobs as a top issue of concern. The pandemic still mattered to the extent that it infected those facets of life. But as a stand-alone issue, it was not all that salient.
This year, a pandemic-stayed November may look a lot like that — with Republicans likely to win back the House, but not because of Covid.
Republicans probably don’t need it. They will have Biden’s legislative difficulties to talk about — and gas prices and crime and critical race theory. And then there’s whatever else happens — or whatever else the right can dream up — in the nine months before the election. By November, voters may have other things to worry about.
“I think what will be top on their minds is what they’re seeing — inflation, gas prices,” said Bob Heckman, a Republican consultant who has worked on nine presidential campaigns. “I don’t even think they’ll be thinking about Covid, to be honest.”
Congressional budget negotiators said they reached an agreement on an omnibus budget “framework” on Wednesday, paving the way to pass the first new spending levels under President Joe Biden before March 11.
To fully appreciate this edition, please properly prepare.
As we are about to engage in legitimate political discourse, you must not only marshal your arguments and debate skills but you must also gather up your brass knuckles, spears, tazers, stun guns, bear spray, hammers, tire irons, fire extinguishers, zip ties, body armor, pipes, pipe bombs and a couple of hand guns.
According to what is possibly the most extremist statement ever issued by a major American political party, the RNC voted last Friday to now classify the events of January 6, 2020 as “legitimate political discourse.”
By that logic, perhaps a small armed vanguard actually seizing state power might simply be called “winning a political argument.” The RNC also moved to formally censure the two Republicans who sit on the January 6 Select Committee, Reps. Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney.
The startling, openly insurrectionary vote by the near 200 members of what is essentially the Republican central committee, set off a shock wave inside the party, widening some cracks that have recently appeared in the appearance of a Trump-unified party.
By early this week, the RNC vote was rebuked by more than 100 big name Republicans (including much of what is left of the Reaganoids), it drew a rebuke from no less than the Grim Reaper himself, Mitch McConnell, who reminded everybody that January 6 was, indeed, a “violent insurrection.” Other top Senate Repubs like John Cornyn also offered criticism of the scolding dished out to Cheney and Kinzinger.
The House leadership, meanwhile, seemed to lean much more in Trump’s direction and Speaker McCarthy weighed demands from the Gaetz-Greene Extremes to actually banish the two dissident Republicans from the party caucus.
Add to this the high-profile statement by Mike Pence last week defending his refusal to go along with Trump’s coup plans for January 6 and we are now faced with this burning question: In this run-up to dramatic and historic mid-terms, is the Republican Party actually splitting apart?
The answer: Yes and no and probably eventually yes.
Driving these new, somewhat frantic and frazzled divisions are a combined force of the unexpected efficiency and aggressiveness of the January 6 committee and a series of bombshell revelations on the one hand and on the other, the accelerated craziness and extremism of Trump.
It had been conventional wisdom that voters would ignore the January 6 investigation and that its findings would appeal only to the political choir of liberals and Democrats.
That calculation is changing. The revelations that the Trump White House was considering everything from the Insurrection Act to having the military seize ballot boxes to calling in the NSA to provide intel on American voters, to months of plotting by a cabal of Republicans and allied neo-fascists to overturn the 2020 election could not and cannot be ignored. Add to that what we have learned about Trump tearing up official records and stashing 15 boxes of White House docs in a closet in Mar-a-Lago.
Some pundits might not be taking the work of the committee very seriously. Not so for Donald Trump. The defeated ex-president, also under mounting law enforcement pressure in Georgia and New York, is clearly trying to beat back the work of the committee. That’s why he suddenly declared the quiet part out loud ten days ago when he very clearly declared that he had been plotting to “overturn” the election. Not at all a lame way to defuse the committee work.
Trump’s confession had a strategic side to it, believe it or not. Precisely worried that the dirt uncovered by the January 6 committee might start getting the attention of more Republicans, the Great Orange One raised the stakes; his “confession” was an all-in, with me or against me move
There are now two Trump-imposed pre-requisites for being considered a Republican in good standing and, much more importantly, for being a Republican candidate worthy of a Trump endorsement.
While till recently the price of admission was to agree that the 2020 election was stolen, you must now also agree that the mob riot on January 6 was actually a pro-democracy peaceful demonstration staged against The Insurrection of November 3rd i.e. the rigged election of Joe Biden.
Trump took out his rhetorical Sharpie and with his revision of January 6, drew a bright line that he hopes will separate Real Trump Republicans from RINOS, traitors, and softies. He was the force behind that eye-popping RNC statement that he clearly hoped would snap the Republican world back into absolutely loyalty.
Mitch and his pals have an election to win in November and they would much rather spend their time beating up a faltering Joe Biden and talking about crime and inflation, rather than looking backward with the Man-Baby and whining about a stolen election and playing footsie with the Proud Boys.
The toughest Republican statement on the insurrectionary RNC vote came, rather pointedly, from Senator Mitt Romney, the uncle of RNC chair Rona Romney McDaniel.
(Just for the record, let’s note that Miss Romney McDaniel, as she was legally called, excised her family last name once she was seated as RNC Chief. She apparently was fine erasing the name of a legacy political dynasty just to please Trump).
Moreover, the McConnell Gang rightfully fears the sort of candidates being encouraged and supported by Trump in this spring and summer Republican primaries. “A very unfortunate decision by the RNC and a very unfortunate statement put out as well. Nothing could be further from the truth than to consider the attack on the seat of democracy as legitimate political discourse,” said Sen. Romney. Even Super Slime Lindsay Graham mumbled a criticism of the RNC move saying it was leading the party in “the wrong direction.” A dozen Republican senators contacted by Politico all condemned the RNC statement (except for the gentleman Senator from the Great State of Mendacity, Ron Paul).
This Republican food fight comes at a time when the GOP was feeling confident that it would deliver a crushing blow to Democrats come November. But a near consensus of Republican operatives say, at least in private, that the RNC’s redefinition of January 6 along with Trump now owning the plot that led to the siege, plus whatever new loads of Trump trash to be publicized by January 6 committee hearings in April or May, will absolutely cut into Republican gains in the fall.
As Matt Continetti, the former editor of the Free Beacon, a conservative website, is quoted saying in The New York Times, “Any minute Republicans spend re-litigating 2020 or downplaying the events of Jan. 6, 2021, is an opportunity lost.”
That said, the most vocal and strident members of the House are, predictably, doubling down in support of Trump and his hard line. Tuesday morning the Republican House caucus met behind closed doors to plot strategy and to shore up their pro-Trump position.
It appears that Leader [sic] McCarthy came up with what he thinks is a “compromise” that would not further enflame divisions. He beat back the demand that Kinzinger and Cheney be formally expelled from the party. Instead, the caucus decided instead its new goal was to make sure Cheney did not win re-election in Wyoming.
“People want them kicked out,” said Georgia’s Qanon Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. But, she added, “it’d be really ridiculous to kick them out of the conference, but not work hard to make sure Liz Cheney is defeated.”
OK. So where does this leave us? Is Trump really sliding and did that RNC vote cast him more in the shade? Well, I am not going to make any predictions on this score. I will say, however, that the split is real and might, I repeat MIGHT, have greater consequences.
No question that this Republican division can best be understood by seeing which constituencies support either side. There is no question that what I am calling the McConnell Gang – Mitch, most of the GOP Senators, some other elected officials, a few House members and former exiled Republican officials—are precisely the faction most distant from base Republican voters. And that’s always a perilous place to be. They might represent a more rational position but it is hardly a majority view inside the party.
Trump, by contrast, is the hero of the masses, he is the leader if not the idol of the activist and activated Republican base voters.
How this shakes out in the long run, of course, will depend a great deal on the outcome of the midterms. If the Red Wave materializes, the Trump faction will be victorious and the course of the GOP will be set for some time to come. If, conversely, the GOP performance falls short in the fall because moderate and independent voters have been turned off by Trump’s single-minded nuttiness and his hand-picked candidates and/or by the RNC’s Stalinist turn, it could easily sink any Trump plans for 2024.
One other possible pitfall for Trump: Now that he has successfully polarized the party along pro and anti insurrectionary lines, it is not fully obvious just how integral Trump is to Trumpism and the broader insurgent movement. That insurgency now is real and it is much stronger than a year ago. Trump has already ruffled a few feathers among his base by suddenly becoming a vax advocate.
As Lider Maximo of a movement he has now pitted against the establishment of both parties, and as his movement grows, he will be closely scrutinized by his followers. It’s not impossible that down the road his own movement jettisons him as a RINO. Please remember the case of suck folks as Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan. For now, that’s a stretch. But stranger things have happened, like Trump getting elected in the first place.
Perhaps, the most unsavory aspect of this Republican squabble has been the absolute, stone-cold, refusal by the Biden administration and the Democratic Party to intervene and make the most out of all this. The party seems to be hiding under the same table which has given shelter to Merrick Garland. If only he had the courage of a Liz Cheney!
The fabulous work of the January 6 committee, something totally unexpected and unlike most other congressional investigations, has laid a rock solid groundwork to go after Trump and the Republican leadership (i.e. both factions) for pushing the country toward more political violence. If and when the Democrats do get shellacked in November, we will have plenty ways of understanding what happened.
There’s very little suspense left in the January 6 investigation. For anybody who wants to know what happened, we pretty much already know all the grotesque basics. The question is: Anybody gonna do anything about it? ++
Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has unveiled a new ballistic missile with a range of 1,450 kilometers (900 miles), which enjoys high agility and is capable of striking its designated targets with pinpoint accuracy.
More Democratic governors are lifting masking requirements as the omicron wave subsides. The governors, who have been hawkish on maintaining COVID-19 restrictions, are acutely aware that the public is eager to ditch masks and return to a sense of normalcy now that the pandemic has shown signs of calming.
It appears that the Republican National Committee’s censure of Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), along with its declaration that the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, was “legitimate political discourse,” has created a problem for Republican lawmakers as they try to position the party for the midterms and the 2024 election. Coming, as the statement did, just after former president Trump said that Pence had the power to “overturn the election” and that if reelected, Trump would pardon those who attacked the Capitol, it has put the Republican Party openly on the side of overturning our democracy.
Trump loyalists have been insisting that the rioters were “political prisoners,” and clearly the RNC was speaking for them. This wing of the party got a boost this evening when venture capitalist Peter Thiel, the libertarian whose wealth Forbes estimates to be about $2.6 billion, announced that he is stepping down from the board of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to focus on electing Trump-aligned candidates in 2022. Thiel famously wrote in 2009 that he “no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible,” and deplored “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women” after 1920.
It also got a boost today when the Supreme Court halted a lower court’s order saying that a redistricting map in Alabama violated the Voting Rights Act by getting rid of a Black majority district. Alabama’s population is 27% Black, which should translate to 2 congressional seats, but by the practice of “packing and cracking”—that is, packing large numbers of Black voters into one district and spreading them thinly across all the others—only one district will likely have a shot at electing a Black representative. The vote for letting the new maps stand was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John Roberts siding with the liberals against the new right-wing majority, in control thanks to the three justices added by Trump.
But the backlash against the RNC’s statement suggests that most Americans see the deadly attack on our democracy for what it was, and Republican lawmakers are now trying to deflect from the RNC’s statement.
RNC chair Ronna McDaniel said that media quotes from the resolution are a “lie” and says the committee did not mean it to be taken as it has been. But other Republicans seemed to understand that the RNC has firmly dragged the Republican Party into Trump’s war on our democracy.
National Review called the statement “both morally repellent and politically self-destructive,” and worried that “it will be used against hundreds of elected Republicans who were not consulted in its drafting and do not endorse its sentiment.” If indeed the RNC simply misworded their statement, the editors said, “its wording is political malpractice of the highest order coming from people whose entire job is politics.”
Sunday, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who seems to entertain hopes for 2024, said on ABC’sThis Week that “January 6 was a riot incited by Donald Trump in an effort to intimidate Mike Pence and Congress into doing exactly what he said in his own words—overturn the election.”
But others, like Senator Todd Young (R-IN), seem to be trying to split the baby. Young told Christiane Amanpour that those saying the attack was legitimate political discourse are “a fringe group,” although the RNC is quite literally the official machinery of the Republican Party. Young is up for reelection in 2022. He is also from Indiana, as is former vice president Mike Pence, who seems to be positioning himself to take over the party as Trump’s legal woes knock him out of the running for 2024.
On Friday, Pence told the Federalist Society that Trump was “wrong” to say that he, Pence, had the power to overturn the election. But he did not say that Biden won the election fairly. Then, on Sunday, Pence’s former chief of staff Marc Short seemed to try to let Trump off the hook for his pressure on Pence, telling Chuck Todd on Meet the Press that the former president “had many bad advisers who were basically snake oil salesmen giving him really random and novel ideas as to what the vice president could do.”
They seem to be trying to keep Trump’s voters while easing the former president himself offstage, hoping that voters will forget that the Republican leadership stood by Trump until he openly talked of overturning the election.
Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, seems unlikely to stand by as the country moves on, as the National Review editors indicated they were hoping. As he said in his closing at Trump’s first impeachment trial: “History will not be kind to Donald Trump. If you find that the House has proved its case, and still vote to acquit, your name will be tied to his with a cord of steel and for all of history.”
The other big news of the past day is that it turns out that Trump and his team mishandled presidential records, suggesting that we will never get the full story of what happened in that White House.
By law, presidential records and federal records belong to the U.S. government. An administration must preserve every piece of official business. Some of the documents that the Trump team delivered to the January 6 committee had been ripped up and taped back together, some were in pieces, and some, apparently, were shredded and destroyed. Legal commentator Asha Rangappa noted that Trump’s impeachments mean that such shredding could have amounted to an obstruction of justice.
Today we learned that the National Archives and Records Administration had to retrieve 15 boxes of material from Trump’s Florida residence Mar-a-Lago, including correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and the letter that former president Barack Obama left for Trump (which would have brought a pretty penny if it were sold). Trump aides say they are trying to determine what other records need to be returned.
Former Republican Kurt Bardella noted, “If this had happened during a Democratic Administration while Republicans were in the majority, I guarantee you [the Oversight Committee] would be launching a massive investigation into this and writing subpoenas right now to any and every W[hite] H[ouse] official that was involved in this.”
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used the story to raise money for her progressive organization, Onward Together. She linked to the story as she urged people to “Take a sip from your new mug as you read the news.” With the tweet was the picture of a mug with her image and the caption “But Her Emails.”
House January 6 committee member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) says that the committee is planning to hold public hearings in April or May. They have been slowed down by the reluctance of the Trump team to cooperate.
“RNC should take a lesson from Mike Pence,” National Review, February 5, 2022 (I won’t link to this because it always crashes my computer, and it might do the same to yours).
Sens. Joe Manchin and Lisa Murkowski endorsed each other in their reelection campaigns, reinforcing their positions as two of the senators likeliest to buck their parties' preferences.
When the world's largest consumer of fossil fuels teams up with one of the world's largest suppliers, the planet is the biggest loser.
Black History Month How the USO served a racially segregated military throughout World War II
The first USO brick-and-mortar locations were erected in November of 1941 in Fayetteville, N.C., and despite challenging times, the USO found ways to serve all men and women in uniform to include 1 million Black soldiers during WWII. Read more.
We conclude this weekly "virtual Route 66" with the following #RandomThoughts:
Aaron Rupar @atrupar
Matthew Gertz @MattGertz
emptywheel @emptywheel
Dr Mike Martin 
@ThreshedThought
Michael McFaul @McFaul
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