Where Do We Go From Here?

Where Do We Go From Here?

February 16, 2021

 

We are in a situation we’ve never faced before. American politics have been severely disrupted and changed by the phenomenon of Donald Trump and his rabid, unthinking supporters. One of our two major political parties has been shaken to its core by what the media always call “Trump’s base.” It appears possible that the party will not survive. We face enormous challenges with the COVID pandemic, the economic disaster it has caused, a utterly inadequate health insurance system, a decaying infrastructure, and the environmental crisis that has been pushed off the front pages but is still an existential crisis for all of us. Where do we go from here? It is a question of immense importance today; but it is not fully answerable yet, the pain of the Trump years still being too fresh. Nonetheless, we must be working at finding answers. Even to begin to do that we must understand how the disaster named Donald Trump has affected our politics and especially how it has affected the Republican Party. We’ll start this analysis there, then see where else it is possible to go.

In the four years he was in office Donald Trump did everything he could, in no particular order,  to harm the environment, benefit the wealthy and make life more difficult for the poor, destroy our relations with our traditional allies, ignore and violate the law, commit crimes against humanity at our southern border, and turn the presidency into an autocracy. Congressional Republicans almost if not quite without exception kowtowed to him and were afraid ever to cross him. They enabled all of his destructive policies and actions. Trump had caused immense harm by the time the 2020 presidential campaign began, but then he turned our electoral process into a clown show—or perhaps even a horror show. Trump’s actions during his 2020 campaign and after the 2020 election created much of the mess that our political system is in today.

Trump has weakened the American public’s confidence in our electoral system, the very foundation of our democracy. At least by mid-2020 he began to say that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him and that the only way he could lose that election was through voter fraud. When he lost the election he said over and over again that he’d really won, by a landslide even, and that his victory had been stolen from him. He did everything he could think of to reverse the election’s result. First he tried to get federal and state courts to overturn those results. The courts dismissed case after case, often with sharp comments about how baseless the suit that had just been dismissed had been. Trump got nowhere with the courts, so he tried pressuring state election officials and legislators to change the results of the voting in their states. They wouldn’t, and Trump may have violated election laws in one or more states in his efforts to get them to do it.

So he turned to his base of fanatic supporters. He told them over and over again that the election had been stolen from them. He told them they had to fight to reverse the election of President Biden, not that Trump called him President Biden of course. He knew that some of his supporters were prone to violence. He did nothing to stop them from resorting to it. Trump thought, or at least hoped, that the electors of the electoral college would change the outcome of the election and make him the winner. They did not.

There was just one more step in the process of electing a president, one many of us didn’t even know existed, it being as ceremonial and perfunctory as it is. The Twelfth Amendment to the US Constitution provides that the Senate, presided over by the vice president as president of the Senate, counts the electoral votes of the states (and of Washington, D.C., which also has electoral votes). The Senate was scheduled to do that on January 6, 2021. Trump saw the Senate’s counting of the electoral votes as his last chance to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. He told Vice President Pence that he, Pence, had the authority under the constitution to send the election back to the states for a revote or at least a recount. Pence knew he had no such authority, and he told Trump that he did not. So Trump turned on Pence, blaming him for not doing what he had no authority to do.

Trump also began organizing a large crowd of people to come to Washington, D.C., on January 6 to “stop the steal.” A great many people came, some of them armed and ready to use violence to keep Trump in office. As the Senate was starting to count the electoral votes Trump spoke to a large crowd at the Ellipse, just down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol. In his speech Trump used the word fraud over and over again, perhaps as many as one hundred times. He asserted, as he had been doing for two months by then, that there had been fraud in the election and in the states’ certification of their election results. He told them that they had to “fight like hell” to overturn the certified results of the election or they would have an illegitimate president and no country left. He sent the crowd off down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to do God only knows what to stop the Senate from counting the electoral votes and certifying former vice president Joe Biden as the 46^th President of the United States.

Many, though by no means all, of the people at Trump’s rally did indeed walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. There they rioted. They erected a gallows in front of the Capitol. They pushed past an overwhelmed Capitol police line and broke into the building. Many of them were chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” among other things. They killed a Capitol police officer. They got into Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and the Senate chamber. Only quick reactions by Capitol police and the Secret Service kept them from capturing Vice President Pence, Senator Mitt Romney,  and others. They terrified members of Congress, congressional aids, Capitol police, journalists, other Capitol workers, and anyone else who was in the building at the time. They didn’t get Pence’s “black box,” one just like the president’s with codes to launch the nation’s nuclear arsenal, but they came close to grabbing it. Quick action by Senate staff kept them from getting the submissions by the states that the Senate was counting. Five people died at the Capitol that day. In subsequent days two Capitol police officers took their own lives.

This was no ordinary riot, if there is such a thing. This was an attempt by an angry mob to overthrow the government of the United States. It was an attempt to keep in office a president who had lost the recent presidential election and who had thereby been denied a second term. It was all set up and instigated by a sitting President of the United States. . During his 2016 presidential campaign Trump had said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters. On January 6, 2021, he didn’t fire a gun. He did something arguably worse. He shot a frenzied mob at the US Capitol in an effort to stop the exercise of the Senate’s constitutional duty to count the electoral votes. On that fateful day the President of the United States attempted a coup against the government of the United States. That he committed high crimes and misdemeanors is beyond question. So is the fact that on that day Trump grossly violated his oath of office. He violated it more egregiously than any American president, even Richard Nixon, had ever done before. This country has never seen anything like it.

In short order the House of Representatives impeached Trump for his actions that day. Trump became the only president in US history to be impeached twice, a dubious distinction he so thoroughly deserves. Trump was still in office when the House impeached him, but Senator Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader in the Senate because two new Democratic senators from Georgia hadn’t been sworn in yet, refused to start the impeachment trial until after Trump was out of office. When the trial did start the House impeachment managers put on a brilliant case that proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump was guilty of inciting a seditious attack on the constitution and government of the United States. Trump’s lawyers at the trial were worse than incompetent. They lied and they lied. They talked about almost anything except anything that would have exonerated their client. It is true that they were there to defend in indefensible, never a happy place for a lawyer to be. Still, their performance disgraced the entire legal profession in this country. They did next to nothing actually to defend their client.

On Saturday, February 13, 2021, the Senate voted 57 to 43 to convict Trump of the impeachment charge against him. Seven Republican senators joined all forty-eight Democratic senators and the two independent senators (who caucus and usually vote with the Democrats) in voting to convict. The Constitution, however, provides that a two-thirds vote is necessary to convict in an impeachment trial. Trump therefore was acquitted though a significant majority of the senators voted to convict him. He got away with it at least as far as being impeached for it is concerned. Many of the senators who voted to acquit Trump said they did it because the Senate lacked jurisdiction to hear the case because Trump was no longer in office when the trial was held. I have become convinced that the Senate had jurisdiction, but no court has ever ruled on the constitutionality of an impeachment of a former federal officeholder. It is virtually certain that the 43 senators who voted to acquit Trump would never have voted against him for political reasons and found the jurisdictional issue, flimsy as it is, to be a good shelter to hide behind.

Senator McConnell, who had become the minority leader in the Senate after those two new senators from Georgia were sworn in, voted to acquit Trump. After the vote he gave a speech to a mostly empty Senate chamber in which he said pretty much the same things about Trump as the House impeachment managers had said and proved against him. He said that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the January 6 assault on the Capitol It seems as if McConnell, who had slavishly supported Trump the whole time Trump was president, was trying to split the baby. Trump’s base, which has essentially become the base of the entire Republican Party, will like his vote to acquit Trump. Several commentators have said that McConnell’s attack on the man he had just voted to acquit was designed to keep more traditionally conservative Republicans and their money in the party. Although I don’t know how big money Republicans actually think about Trump, I will assume that the commentators who said these things are correct, they knowing more about the matter than I do. McConnell was trying to placate  two different types of Republicans at the same time. He may have ended up placating neither of them.

Therein lies the big problem for today’s Republican Party and therefore for American politics in general. For the last one hundred years at least the Republican Party has been the party of traditional American conservatives, business people mostly, who favored limited government, little regulation, spending as much money on the military as possible, using that military freely even in instances where doing so made no sense like the situations in Vietnam and Iraq, and spending as little money as possible on anything else. Starting at least by the 1970s it became the party of conservative evangelical Christians as well, mostly because it took a position against abortion and gay rights in order to appeal to them. Richard Nixon made it the party of southern racists, who had previously always voted Democratic, through the thinly veiled racism of what he called the southern strategy.

The Trumpists who have taken over the Republican Party include many of those conservative evangelical Christians who have been Republicans for a long time, but they present different issues as well. They are mostly white working class men of limited education and financial means, the kind of men who used to vote for Democrats before the Democrats became the party of civil rights and other progressive causes and Ronald Reagan appealed to their simplistic American patriotism and covert racism. They represent a class of people who fear that the country is changing in ways disadvantageous to them. As American demographics change they are losing their former social position that in the past at least put them ahead of Black and Latinx Americans. They are afraid, and their fear makes them angry. Their anger makes them dangerous. The executives of big corporations and old-fashioned Main Street conservatives didn’t invade the Capitol on June 6. The Trumpists did.

The fundamental split in the Republican Party between old-time conservatives and populist Trumpists presents a big challenge to those who want the Republican Party to survive and remain a significant force in American politics. For all of their holding onto the past in so many ways, American conservatives have typically believed in and supported American democracy and the US Constitution. Trumpists don’t. They would be perfectly happy to grab power by force (like they tried to do on January 6), tear up the Constitution (which they were in effect trying to do on January 6), and have their guy rule as an unlimited autocrat (which he might have had their January 6 insurrection succeeded). Traditional American conservatives want no part of violent insurrection. Trumpists are satisfied with nothing less.

Which raises the question of whether or not the Republican Party can survive with this split right through its heart. Perhaps it can, but if it does survive it will only be because the different factions within it know that the consequences of the party splintering would be worse for them than the party holding together. If either the traditional conservatives or the Trumpists split off from the Republican Party and create a new political party, neither those who split off nor those who remain in the party will win many elections at all. The Democrats would be able to gain and hold onto power in a great many states and at the national level. So for now at least we have a Republican Party that includes both the traditional conservative Mitt Romney and Josh Hawley, the latest darling of the Trumpists.

So where do we go from here? It all depends on what becomes of the Republican Party. The two party system that has characterized American politics essentially from the beginning is not written into the Constitution or any other American law. It is however what we’ve had, and the conventional wisdom (which is often neither conventional nor wise) is that American politics are healthier when two political parties are healthy enough to compete against each other more or less equally. Today we have a Democrat in the White House who wants to do many good things. President Biden is not as progressive as I am, but he’s substantially better than any Republican president we’ve had and orders of magnitude better than Trump. The Democrats have a narrow majority in the House. The Senate is equally divided, with Vice President Harris hold the deciding vote. The balance of power tips toward the Democrats, but only slightly; and it wasn’t long ago that it tipped toward the Republicans. In the Senate the Democrats can pass everything they want that all fifty senators of the Democrats’ bloc will vote for. A few of those Democratic senators are however quite conservative, especially Senator Manchin of West Virginia. Biden can probably get anything through the Senate that Manchin will vote for and nothing that he won’t. That balance of power will probably last only until the 2022 midterm elections. The party of the sitting president almost always loses seats in both houses of Congress in midterm elections. Anything Biden wants to accomplish he will probably have to get done in the first two years of his presidency.

The longer term future is very uncertain. Will the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party get stronger or weaker? Will the Republican Party hold together and survive or will it split into two or even more political parties? Only time will tell. Will the Republican Party maintain its current position of prominence in American politics? Will the Democrats hold together, or will the progressives who have supported Senator Bernie Sanders for president break away and form a new, more progressive party? Once more only time will tell. For now the Democrats will be able to get some constructive things done as long as they can keep the votes of all fifty senators in their senatorial bloc. If the Republicans gain control of either house of Congress in the 2022 election all progress will cease as it always does when the Republicans control any of the decisions. So where do we go from here? Only time will tell.