Election Countdown, 271 Days to Go: ‘Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?’
That's what manager Casey Stengel asked about the hapless 1962 Mets. It's a question worth asking about the 2024 GOP.
One political party has decided to run against Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. Good luck! (Rob Carr / Getty Images.)
Backstage note: I wrote this dispatch today after the morning’s Supreme Court oral arguments, but before the release of Robert Hur’s Comey-like Special Prosecutor report. And before the shameful spectacle a few minutes ago of the White House press corps baying at Joe Biden. I’ll get to those matters tomorrow, no kidding, plus a few other bonus items.
For now, here is how things stood as of the afternoon of February 8:
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What happens to a democracy when a major political bloc loses interest in or respect for basic operating competency in the tools of politics, governance, and civic life in general?
The Trump-era Republicans are in the middle of this deteriorating process, as I am not the first to point out.1 But the speed of decline is increasing, as this week has showed. And while the long-term effects will be worst for the Republicans themselves, they’re creating problems for everyone else as well.
The past few days’ events that bring this to mind:
Five moments in February—and we’re only 8 days in.
1) The outlier: Competence in court.
This morning the US Supreme Court heard arguments about Colorado’s decision to bar Donald Trump from its ballot. I’m not an expert, but it certainly sounded as if the Court is headed for a one-sided ruling in Trump’s favor.
Let’s set aside the Roberts Court’s checkered history involving elections, and its immunity from ethical standards plus other problems that have brought its approval to a historic low.2
Instead let’s talk about what happened in the courtroom: The Trump team sounded as if they knew what they were doing. They had answers, citations, illustrations. They were of course playing to a friendly audience, but they seemed aware that the audience members who mattered were those wearing judicial robes. Not the spray-tanned figure huffing and venting online.
We’ve gotten used to Trump legal teams run by the likes of Rudy Giuliani in the olden days, or Alina Habba now. These were “advocates” who played only to their patron, and who were slapped down by juries and judges again and again.
When listening today, I realized what a shock it was to hear Trump being defended intelligently. Which brings me to…
2) The norm: Incompetence in court.
Just two days ago a three-judge panel of the DC Circuit Appeals Court slapped down Trump’s imperious claim of “absolute immunity,” through the rest of his life, for anything he did while in office. The unanimous decision was full of ringing declarations against the Trump position, for instance this cite from a 140-year-old case:
No man in this country is so high that he is above the law… All the officers of the government, from the highest to the lowest, are creatures of the law and are bound to obey it.
The whole opinion is (actually) worth reading. You can download it here. What people looking back on this week might note is the contrast between the augustness of the ruling, and the clownish “SEAL Team six” claims that Trump’s advocate had made when presenting the brief for Trump. I wrote about that spectacle here.
Trump’s advocate in this case, Jack Sauer, had a much fancier legal pedigree3 than Alina Habba, who represented Trump in the latest E. Jean Carroll decision. But in fealty to Trump, all become equal.
Meta point: This is how it looks when you start viewing courts mainly as settings for grievance-pleas—as with Trump’s victimized emails after each legal setback, and his references to the January 6 felons as “hostages”—rather than as safeguards of civic standards.
3) ‘The Mess at the Border,’ and the mess in DC.
The secret to political posturing is hypocrisy. It’s “the tribute that vice pays to virtue,” as they say, and it has an honored long history:
-When Congress threatens to block the whole federal budget or freeze the debt ceiling (and thus default on the national debt), budget-blockers from Newt Gingrich onward don’t go on TV and say, “We want to put the president in a bind.” Instead they say, with furrowed brow and stern affect, “We are guarding our children against the nightmare of federal debt.”
-When Mitch McConnell blocked Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court eight-plus months before an election, he didn’t say on camera, “Damned if I’m going to let Obama have this seat.” Instead he piously talked about the “tradition” of pausing nominations in an election year. Then when he rammed through Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination two weeks before an election, he invented a new “tradition” to rely on. Again he didn’t say on TV what he was saying in private: “We’re doing this because we can.”
The GOP’s torpedoing of its own border-control bill this week was as if they had never listened to Gingrich or Mitch. They hadn’t learned the trick of the high-toned, “we’re doing this for the right reasons” facade. Republicans were for the bill—and then all of a sudden they were against it, purely because Donald Trump said that it would give Joe Biden a “win.” And as collateral damage, they took the Ukraine (and Israel) aid packages down with them, without even trying to conceal why they were doing so.
Again to emphasize the point: they don’t care any more how this looks. That’s the significance. For the GOP core it’s no longer even worth the hypocrisy of claiming that you’re acting “on principle” or appealing to people not already on the team. As with most of Trump’s failed lawyers, you care about an audience of one.
4) The Mayorkas ‘impeachment’ fiasco.
Mike Johnson, for now the House Speaker, called an impeachment vote for the DHS secretary over the “crisis at the border.” And he called it without being sure that he had the votes to pull it off. Which he did not.
At the tactical level, a Speaker’s or leader’s job is to count votes, and deliver them. Not knowing how to do this is on a par with ‘swinging gate’ incompetence for an NFL coach. But at a broader level, it’s a sign that the GOP didn’t really care about the impeachment. What it wanted and needed were the posturing TV clips about how bad Mayorkas has been.
5) Running against Taylor Swift (and Travis Kelce).
I know that it is wrong these days to use the word “moron.” And I know that claiming that your opposition is “living in a cocoon” is a MAGA prerogative.
But… seriously? How much does this side want to look like scolds, incels, morons, and weirdos?
The unifying theme.
It is bad for democracy when a major party no longer cares about attracting majority-rule support. When it is resigned to working around democracy—through voter-suppression, gerrymandering, and the rest—rather than through the bigger-tent logic of majority rule. That’s what items #2 through #5, above, indicate. It’s an inward-directed cult, rather than an inclusive-minded party. And it means that political disagreements become more tribal, more resentment-driven, harder to resolve.
“While we shake our collective heads in disbelief and understandably even laugh at the sheer incompetence of the GOP, there’s also a dangerous downside to these political failures,” the lawyer and tech official Jay Kuo, blogging on The Status Kuo, wrote today. He continued:
This dysfunction feeds into Donald Trump’s favored narrative: that he alone can fix everything…
The greater the chaos, and the more Congress seems like it is wasting time, money and resources, even if it’s all coming from the GOP, the more Americans will shrug and think, “Maybe we should just let Trump take full control.” This is a common ploy out of the authoritarian playbook, and many Americans are sleepwalking their way right into it.
A party going down, and taking a system with it. More to say on this, and on the latest Special Prosecutor report and Biden response, tomorrow. When there will be 270 days to go.
Mike Lofgren, a long-time staffer for Republicans in Congress, wrote his seminal book The Party Is Over back in 2013. Stuart Stevens, long-time Republican strategist, wrote It Was All a Lie in 2020 and The Conspiracy to End America last year.
Its landmark decisions in this realm are of course Shelby County, which largely dismantled the 1965 Voting Rights Bill, and Citizens United, which brought on the new era of dark money in politics. As for the ethics morass, here is one of many places to start, and this.
While I’m at it: Between 1910 and 2005, not a single serving member of the Supreme Court had been chosen by a president who first came to office via the Electoral College. Now five members, a majority, arrived that way.
For the Court’s deservedly plummeting approval ratings, see this: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/07/21/favorable-views-of-supreme-court-fall-to-historic-low/.
Duke undergrad; Rhodes scholar; Harvard Law; Appeals Court and Supreme Court clerkships; solicitor general of Missouri. When serving Trump, all become equal.
"The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it." - P J O'Rourke, "Parliament of Whores," 1991
Freaking scary isn't it? One party , elected to govern, does not want to govern.