The Carpentariat

Many former Republicans should party-hop

​​​​​The Bulwark's Jonathan Last joins Republican refugees and drops an ideological shroud, certifying "that … as a functional matter, [modern conservatism is] dead":

"I have many conservative friends who will … say that True Conservatism is [still alive and] grounded in ideas about human flourishing: gratitude, conservation, caution, prudence. And surely, those ideas exist in the world and have a great deal of wisdom. But they are no longer 'conservative' ideas. They are something else."

The something else is traditionally liberal ideas — that old-school, pragmatic retention of FDR and Obama Democrats who perforce reject utopian progressive ideas and opt for circumspect, necessarily incremental, Whiggish Burkean governance.

I have noticed that every Trumpism-disgusted Republican has to date claimed the self-identification of "Independent." But here is a choice that calls for no incrementalist steps; they could instead directly leap into the moderate Democratic camp, where human flourishing, gratitude, conservation, caution and prudence still reign.

Someday a more comfortable center-right party will emerge from the profane ashes of Republicanism. There the politically orphaned of today — officeholders, NeverTrumpers, operatives, think tankers, columnists, and others of a moderate bent and capable of nuanced thought — can enlist. Till then, there's no sound reason to be shy.

Wile E. Coyote, a political mentor

The stampede begins. One can always count on Republicans to rush for antidemocratic cover by floating all possible ways to suppress the votes of American citizens.

Georgia's Gov. Brian Kemp, for one, has "strongly endorsed" his party's demand that photo IDs accompany absentee ballot requests. "It’s a simple way to make sure that type of voting is further secured," said Kemp, "and it’s a good first place to start" (emphasis mine). "It’s completely reasonable in this day and time," he continued, "and in light of what’s going on, it would give all voters peace of mind and wouldn’t be restrictive."

Although one recent study found that voter ID laws have essentially no effect on voting, its Harvard and University of Bologna authors concluded, logically, that "this result weakens the case for adopting such laws in the first place."

Also, if Gov. Kemp and friends wish to "give all voters peace of mind," they need advertise little more than their own secretary state's audit that "found zero cases of fraud among 15,000 Cobb County absentee ballot envelopes reviewed by law enforcement." But Kemp knows that his party's troubled minds can never be peaceful, unless they "secure" all possible methods that might eliminate any formidable opposition.

Moments ago, while writing this piece and pondering as well yet another session with cable news, I saw alternatively in an online guide that on MeTV, Wile E. Coyote was "tr[ying] to catch the Road Runner using a cooking pan, a mallet, and a TNT stick." Likewise our poor, desperate Republicans. Notwithstanding their sundry attempts to rig elections, they're as doomed to self-explosions as Mr. Coyote was in trying to annihilate his nemesis. 

Let's try to quantify, as best we can, the madness

In the United States there are roughly 210 million adults. According to Gallup, in December, 25 percent of them, or more than 50 million, self-identified as Republicans, who, overwhelmingly, are constitutive of about one-third of all the Americans who trust Trump "to protect our democracy," according to an Ipsos poll released yesterday.

Only 13 percent of Republicans agreed he should be removed from office, before he blows up another setting of "peaceful protest" against election fraud that never happened.

So we can reasonably, I think, say that about 43 million Americans (87 percent of 50 million) are OK with a homicidal, bomb-throwing arsonist in the White House.

And that should cause you to see, as near I can calculate, a full one-in-five sidewalk passersby as the psychotic imbeciles they are. But don't panic for fear of flunking enemy-perambulator identification tests. Their Viking horns and animal furs should give them away. 

One Republican's resignation, but enduring blindness

Now here's a shocker, at least to me, but then again I haven't visited the conservative HotAir's Ed Morrissey for a while. This morning he writes:

"In the wake of the trauma of the last two months, two inescapable questions emerge. First, what does it mean to be republican? And second, does the Republican Party represent those values at all any more?

"The answers to both have led me to disaffiliate myself from the GOP after the disgrace that took place in Congress last week…. At this point it’s impossible to act as though Republicans are republican, especially while its leadership makes clear that it doesn’t care one whit about the party’s own foundational principles."

Good for Mr. Morrissey. On the other hand, in his disaffiliating rage he commits two sins: He implies that republicanism has somehow been the exclusive intellectual property of the Republican Party, and perhaps more dumbfounding than sinful, he asserts, "What we have seen from Republicans over the last two months … has violated every single one of [republicanism's principles]."

Morrissey's boa-constricted timeline of Republicans' "journey" from dismissing republicanism — in brief, good citizenship and sober governance — to embracing neofascism ranks among the blindest of commentaries I have ever read.

It may be that since a bloody insurrection is what it took to compel the partisan withdrawal of so many recusant conservatives, then conservatism as we once knew it is dead, dead, dead.

How low can they go?

There is no bar of human pettiness too low, no feature of hyperpartisan immaturity too off-putting, no display of tradecraft gamesmanship too repugnant for House Republicans.

No doubt minority leader Kevin McCarthy smiled when he read — assuming he reads — this, in the Washington Post:

"In a signal of how the [Capitol Building security] investigation could become partisan, a freshman House Republican, Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana, sent a letter to Pelosi on Friday, noting that the top House security official, the sergeant at arms, 'works under the direction of the Speaker.'

"'Please advise what processes were directed by you to provide enhanced security … in light of the known and anticipated major public demonstration on January 6th,' she wrote."

Also please be advised that Rep. Spartz framed — in a telling understatement — a sprawling insurgency as a "demonstration." 

In capping off her petulant little assault on the speaker, who has had a few rather urgent things to do of late — supervising presumed professional House security officials not being among them, understandably — "Spartz made no mention of the Senate sergeant of arms, who works under the Republican majority leader."

How can one accelerate the emotional and intellectual maturity of a House Republican? One can't.

Meanwhile, Rep. Spartz does nothing to alleviate the vile ignorance of her supportive constituents. The loose-hanging Republican piñata of Nancy Pelosi is an uncostly, and thus far more appealing, target.  

Can we defuse the volatile "underlying forces" impelling Trump, Hawley, Cruz and others?

A solution to stemming our rolling national meltdown, commonplace descent into Stalinist-Hitlerian Big Lies, and now a chilling turn toward violence that large segments of a major political party can't bring themselves to condemn, keeps evading us.

Perhaps it's because there is no solution — not one to be acted on straightaway and pointedly. Only time and withering exhaustion among the ethically vacant may bring a calming. And neither are those a guarantee. Even more Americans are distressingly ignorant of, or blithely indifferent toward, republicanism's virtues, leaving demagogues and shame-incapable snake oilers to fill the psychic void and don the habiliments of power.

We read innumerable articles, editorials, columns and op-eds — and this commentary — decrying the bovine mentality and unconcerned grazing of America's great unwary. Yet none offers a serviceable solution to what afflicts us. See: preceding paragraph, first sentence.

Enlightened-as-possible observers merely note with jackhammering regularity that nation-corroding demagogues are unsustainable without a populace to feed them. The most recent I read muses that Josh Hawley — and by extension, all like him — "is a symptom, not a cause. He is a product of the same underlying forces that brought us President Trump and the present crisis of American democracy."

But then the rub. The columnist goes on to reflect that "unless we find a way to address these" unAmerican scoundrels …

Others opt for a quick and easy kill of the mad king, although, I concede, their rather stupefying writings are forgivable, in that they don't even pretend a proffered solution to quelling the "underlying forces" of "Trump and the present crisis of American democracy." Write, for instance, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe and former House Judiciary Committee counsel Joshua Matz this morning: "The very pendency of [impeachment] articles — and the possibility of trial and conviction — may itself chill Trump’s worst impulses as he contemplates his final days as president." I disagree, but maybe a third or fourth impeachment might do the trick.

Thus we are caught in an intellectual straitjacket. We can't work at deflating the multitudinous windbags of national degradation, since we're constrained in our incomprehension of how to deflate them. We can't even reach them, entrenched and invulnerable as they are in their own squalid world of unknowing knowingness. The solution? Beats me — and everyone else who cares about this country.

Although, as noted, there is no guarantee, I do believe we'll survive this era of mass decadence. Just give it time, and the exhaustion that will come with it.

Let a congressional call for Trump's arrest go forward

California's Rep. Ted Lieu, a co-drafter of articles of impeachment, says that "unless Trump resigns" — which he won't — "Congress must impeach to hold him accountable" — which a mere indictment does not.

Not in any substantive way. It would be but a symbolic gesture — and, often observed 11 months ago, impeachment is always and fundamentally a political act; absent equally swift conviction and removal, a partial remedy for Trump's high crime of sedition would be squandered. His disciples will characterize his indictment as nothing more than Democratic revenge, and cheer the failure of conviction as vindication.

While avoiding the fraught issue of impeachment, scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder notes that "Trump is, for now, the martyr in chief, the high priest of the big lie." And letting him off the hook by deploying symbolism over punishment is, to be somewhat redundant, an impotent maneuver.

Impeachment "historically will be important," says Andrew Weissmann, former deputy to Special Counsel Robert Mueller (and here I'll forego the usual lament about Americans and the "importance" of history). "But," he adds, "the danger is he is acquitted and the momentum of condemnation now is lost." I would add that that danger is more of a high probability than speculation.

More than the "momentum of condemnation" would be lost, however. Also lost would be that critical spark of prosecutorial detonation: the absolute necessity of principled members of Congress demanding, above all else, that the Department of Justice immediately do more than promise "a careful look" at Trump having seditiously acted in flagrante delicto. The fulgent proof of his crime is as if there were video-taped evidence of O.J. Simpson's murderous deeds. One needn't be all that careful to see what's right in front of one's nose, as Orwell remarked.

If symbolism is all that Congress can muster, then by all means, let it dabble in substantive emptiness. But if more than symbolism is to be realized, then congressional action must be devoted to a stentorian campaign calling for the ex-president's arrest at 12:01 p.m., 20 Jan., for seditious conspiracy, punishable for up to 20 years in prison — for Trump, a life sentence. (To hell with his imminent self-pardon, an act awaiting the courts' nullification.)

Impeachment is a weak proxy for actually doing something. I, for one, intensely favor — actually doing something.

Is a second Trump impeachment advisable?

There's no doubt the prospect of Trump being the first president to undergo a second impeachment is appealing, and, for sure, not without merit. His initial impeachment more than a year ago came much too late — for three prior, awful years he had relentlessly demonstrated his unqualified unfitness for office — and for the House to again impeach him for even worse, unrehabilitated behavior appears only proper. (The official condemnation would stop there, however, since the only remaining impossible dream these days is that the Senate would convict.)

The speaker of the House also appears prepped: "He’s unhinged," said Nancy Pelosi yesterday. "We can’t move on. If we think we can move on then we are failing the American people." A multi-hour call with her caucus revealed that they, too, mostly agree with not moving on; that is, moving on with what amounts to another indictment of this nation's most deplorable human being, of a sort.

No uniform consensus prevails, though. Some Democrats fear that a historic, second impeachment would firm up Trump's support just as it's disintegrating; that he'd convincingly don a Phoenixlike mantle of martyrdom. They're also uneasy about such a concentrated effort crushing the urgent imperative of promoting President-elect Biden's agenda. "My bet would be there is not a single adviser around Joe Biden who doesn’t believe Trump should be impeached," said liberal activist Brian Fallon. "But there is also no one who wants him to spend a single bit of political capital on this. And they are right" — and Fallon is right.

Aside from concurring with that politically sensible view, I have come around to believing that a second impeachment is the wrong way to go — again, from a political view. Consider the upsides to letting it pass. The absence of House Democrats' formal retaliation — however justified — would rob Trump supporters of alleging mere revenge and thus leave a larger and more lasting blot on the GOP's already besmeared reputation; would help to keep the GOP field fractured — not only in the 2024 presidential race, but in 2022 congressional primaries as well; and that would offer Democrats the opportunity to pick up the electoral pieces, or simply discourage Republican voters from reengaging.

To be clear, I certainly appreciate the avowed reasons for forging ahead with another impeachment. Yet those reasons also seem to be playing a less productive, shorter game.

Sedition, Trump, and prosecution

18 U.S. Code § 2384 - Seditious conspiracy:

"If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both."

But we'd send you chocolates, Donald.

This is now outdated, and I've no idea of what he may believe now. But in his forthcoming book, Saving Justice: Truth, Transparency and Trust, former FBI director James Comey advises against the incoming Justice Department's investigation of, hence inevitable prosecution of, Trump.

Comey writes that Joe Biden's DOJ — or Merrick Garland's DOJ, or more accurately, our DOJ — must stay "above the partisan scrum."

Federal prosecution of Trump, however, would in no way constitute mere "partisan scrum" — especially now that even elected Republicans are calling for his head. Indeed, such a characterization offends the nation's highest principle: the rule of law, above which sits no man.

Sedition also sits among the nation's highest of crimes. The constitutionality of a preemptive, presidential self-pardon is in serious legal doubt — opined the DOJ's own Office of Legal Counsel: "the President cannot pardon himself" — so to summarily dismiss even the idea of prosecuting Trump's high crime of sedition, let alone reaching a conviction, seems unserious.

The faces of the antidemocratic Republican Party

The photos don't include four members of Congress who had planned to vote against American democracy, but, most enigmatically, changed their minds after their president committed sedition.

Among the 147 who soldiered on in a display of raucous unAmericanism, I count 15 women and one black face. Gee, will the party of little more than dyspeptic, petulant, dishonorable and disloyal white men be able to expand their base of the likewise subversive? A real puzzler.

Soon, a three-party system, which will narrow back to two

"They could not find Mr. Schumer’s office. He said they asked a Capitol Police officer, who" — get this — "tried to direct them. But they appeared to have gotten nowhere near the minority’s leader’s office. They ended up smoking a few cigarettes inside the building … and one of [them] joked that he had gone to the bathroom and not flushed."

These are the now-visible subterranean fanatics who have devoted their mental vacancy to the Trumpian Cause, but under their rocks you'll find swarming colonies of the equally brainless. A YouGov poll found that nearly half (45 percent) of Republican voters support the recent insurrection and invasive defilement of American decency. A Harris poll found that 64 percent of Republican voters support the chief instigator's handing of the insurrection.

No longer is the question, Will the radical, pseudoconservative Republican Party survive? The question now is, How long will it take for the party to divide like a human cell, spawning a third, credibly conservative party — then a return to two?

The answer is in the offing.

At the Republican National Committee's winter conference in Florida, one attendee said "people are freaking fed up. Repeatedly, what I kept hearing over and over again was that the president is responsible for the loss in Georgia and the president is responsible for what happened [Wednesday]." The RNC's communications director tweeted a formal statement "calling the riot 'domestic terrorism' and denouncing as 'unfounded conspiracy theories' the false claims of election fraud peddled by Trump."

This too, however: An RNC member from Nevada rose and declared that Trump must stay integral to the GOP and pleaded that his voters are not "disenfranchised," an extravagantly meaningless entreaty. "The crowd applauded loudly after her comments," reports the Washington Post. What's more, Trump "was showered in adulation when he called in to" the meeting.

As an honest-to-God Republican once said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." Fifty-four years later, another Republican divided the party — in a manner in accord with the 16th president's progressive-conservatism — railing against the ruling GOP's corporate and booboisie ultraconservatism. That, too, could not stand. The party survived, but only in a peevish, malcontented, no-to-any-progress fashion, which has managed to stumble its way into the 21st century.

That same GOP will undoubtedly survive a bit longer, but only with about half its numbers, which means no more will it be a major political party in a two-party system. A third will scramble for its spread-wide refugees. And when the original partisans are too scattered and pathetically few to bother noticing, the third will have finally swallowed what was once the Grand Old Party.

That, anyway, is how I see it.

Pence: "After all the things I’ve done for him"

Is the vice president really this naive? It appears so.

Said Sen. James Inhofe Tuesday night to a Tulsa, Oklahoma newspaper: "I’ve known Mike Pence forever" and "I’ve never seen Pence as angry as he was today. I had a long conversation with him. He said, 'After all the things I’ve done for (Trump).'"

No recitation of Trump's unremitting betrayals of friends, allies and even family is needed; his entire life — from screwing siblings and their offspring out of dad's fortune to the moment right up to screwing Pence — is too famously plastered with a history of perfidy. Though the vice president should receive no praise for merely doing this week what the Constitution demanded of him, neither did he deserve Trump's opprobrium. But who, other than Pence, thought this president's ineluctable betrayal was unexpected?

Purely political creature that he is, the vice president, I'm sure, was less upset by hurt feelings than furious at Trump for having sabotaged his own White House plans. For four years he imagined himself as the heir apparent of preening Republican degradation. With only a few words of denunciation, the still-reigning obscenity put an end to it all. White morons with Viking horns and ungodly evangelical Christians would now sooner vote for Rep. Ilhan Abdullahi Omar than, in their minds, Trump's turncoat of a deep-stater.

No poor bastard was ever left unscorched by Trump's personal treachery. And since, it seems, Pence believed he would be the singular exception, well, his naiveté proves just how remarkably unfit he is for any public office.

Is our child learning?

You bet! the president is capable of learning. After Twitter informed him that no more violence-inspiring malice and flagrant lying about nonexistent election fraud would be tolerated, but he could still tweet if he behaves like a good little boy, there is this and only this on his Twitter feed:

With the 25th Amendment, Congress is playing a mind game

Politico: "A growing number of lawmakers are calling on the United States government to immediately remove President Donald Trump from office for the safety of the nation."

Have these lawmakers actually read the 25th Amendment, Section 4? It's packed with delays, timeouts, immediate reversals, 48 hours of this and four days of that and 21 days of whatnot — with 13 days left in Trump's term — topped by the sheer impossibility of getting two-thirds of both houses of Congress to agree that the president of the United States is fucking nuts.

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

If politicians in Washington were more than casually concerned about ridding this country of its worst pathogen since the Confederacy, they would advocate instead the demented Beelzebub's immediate impeachment and just as immediate conviction and removal from office, with a dash of forever-debarment from public office. This would of course be as impossible a task as invoking the 25th Amendment, but at least the lawmakers would sound more serious.

The Rime of the Haggard Mariner, Trump

This morning commenter Peter G. remarked, Trump "became and will remain the Albatross hung about [Republicans'] necks for the foreseeable future." His comment, naturally, reminded me of the albatross in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's allegory, "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

In the poem, the latter shoots and kills an albatross, whose appearance had historically been regarded by seafarers as an omen of good luck, just as Republicans believed Trump would prove himself to be for their party. Because of the bird's brutal slaying, the ship and its crew suffered all manner of misfortune, which led them to force the killer — read: the now outraged, Trump-denigrating GOPers — to wear the dead albatross around his neck, in shame and humiliation.

Mirabile dictu, should many Republicans persist in demanding that those other Republicans wear the albatross of Trump, the party meanwhile will be plagued by relentless internal dissension and civil war. So here, at last, happy times — the one upside of Trump and the GOP's limitless degradation and self-humiliation.