The GOP is corrupt but what happens next?

 Last night, the entire country (except for people watching Fox News) found out why Republicans were desperate to quash the investigation into the January 6 insurrection and Donald Trump’s two-month-long campaign to steal the 2020 election by tossing out selected electoral votes. The evidence from Trump’s own allies that Team Trump knew that it had lost a free and fair election was damning. If you’ve been reading this column since January 6, 2021, none of this came as a surprise to you, but if you get your news from partisan sources it may have come as a shock. Trump’s unfitness for office went far beyond mean tweets.

The real question is not whether the Republican Party acted corruptly in 2020 (and since), but what that is going to mean going forward. How will the revelations about the attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election, the Capitol insurrection, and the subsequent attempts to cover up Republican responsibility for both affect the upcoming elections?

By Tyler Merbler from the United States - DSC09156, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98780310

I’m not one of the people who say that the hearings are going to stem the Republican tide that is building for this year’s midterms. However, I’m also not one of the people who say that exposing MAGA’s dirty deeds won’t have an effect. As with many things, the truth is probably going to lie somewhere in the middle.

To be sure, the evidence won’t sway most Republicans, who will stick their fingers in their ears and scream “LA LA LA” rather than hear anything critical of Trump. Fox News didn’t air the hearings and “conservative” pundits and sites won’t discuss them honestly. The MAGA insurrectionists could have lynched Mike Pence on national television and the Republicans would still have groused that they were concerned but that the “demon rats” were a much bigger threat.

Beyond the coup attempt, we have a strong economy but many of the most visible indicators on our individual personal finance dashboards are flashing red. Gas prices are up and the stock market is down. Inflation has slowed but isn’t going away and food prices may spike soon. It doesn’t matter that Joe Biden is not responsible for any of this. The president and the majority party are a lightning rod that gets the credit or the blame for whatever is going on.

If we look solely at the economy, we would expect an electoral bloodbath for Democrats this year. It may not be that simple.

In several races, Republican primary voters have picked very weak candidates. There are also a number of incumbents who may be directly linked to the improprieties surrounding January 6. It is even possible that some sitting Republicans may find themselves under indictment for their behavior with respect to Trump’s attempt to steal the election. These developments could affect the outcome of certain races.

Fringe MAGA candidates like Herschel Walker, Dr. Oz, Doug Mastriano, J.D. Vance, and the newly indicted Ryan Kelley may find themselves in very difficult races against seasoned and sane Democrats. Bad candidates can still struggle in a year that favors their party. For examples from the past, look no further than Todd Aiken and Christine “I Am Not a Witch” O’Donnell. On the other hand, we have plenty of recent examples of embarrassingly bad candidates getting elected in highly partisan districts as well.

Another example of a campaign that might be undone by illicit behavior after the 2020 election is Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah). Lee, a self-professed constitutionalist, nevertheless has been implicated in an effort to create a constitutional crisis by having red states that Trump lost submit competing states of electors. Utah is a deeply red state, but Democrats have thrown their support behind independent conservative Evan McMullin in an effort to unseat Lee. Recent polling suggests that it could be a close race.

In close races, the revelations of MAGA corruption that are now reaching independent voters, many of whom are just starting to pay attention to the election, may tip the scales. Candidates who cozied up to Trump and MAGA in primaries will be forced to distance themselves from the corrupt fringes of the party in the general election, but that may prove to be difficult.

The present conundrum for voters is whether they will give more weight to economic conditions that are affecting the entire world or the lurid details of Donald Trump’s refusal to accept his loss and allow a peaceful transfer of power. The average voter shares my disdain for the more radical progressive policies pushed by the Democrats but also reviles the rampant deceit coming from Republicans. The question is going to be which of these two evils voters will determine to be the lesser.

I think that determination will vary depending on a number of different factors. Is the district deep red or blue? Deep red will be more likely to excuse MAGA excesses while deep blue will excuse the economic problems. Is the local candidate tied closely to Trump? Is the local candidate directly implicated in any wrongdoing?

Beyond 2022, a more far-reaching implication may be that the January 6 revelations put the final nail in the coffin of Trump’s aspirations for re-election. There is some evidence that Republicans are finally looking beyond Donald Trump. The bad news is that the focus seems to be on Ron DeSantis, who seems to be nearly as bad from a constitutional standpoint while possibly being competent enough to pull off abuses of power that Trump could not.

The evidence of MAGA corruption that was aided and abetted by most of the Republican Party is overwhelming at this point. We can expect that there will be a steady dribble of embarrassing information between now and the election. The bombshells will continue.

Republicans have put themselves into this situation by abandoning their principles and hitching their wagon to the most corrupt man to ever hold the office of president. Future historians will write volumes on what the heck exactly Republicans hoped to gain by such transparently unethical behavior.

Despite all that, Democratic incompetence and a perfect storm of global crises have combined to save Republicans from themselves. Some Republican voters have already risked that advantage by nominating fringe candidates, who are often endorsed by Donald Trump.

Republicans don’t deserve to be trusted with power after their blatantly dishonest antics of the past two years. The Democrats’ own problems may act to give the GOP a reprieve, but if they score a victory this fall, Republicans should acknowledge that it wasn’t their popularity that put them over the top but rather a fluke of unrelated events.

But don’t hold your breath.

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Tweet of the Day: Chronological video of the events of January 6 presented by the January 6 committee.

January 6th Committee @January6thCmte

June 10th 2022

34,086 Retweets78,022 Likes

Radical chickens come home to roost... again

 I’ve been critical of the right in the past for their inflammatory rhetoric. Talk of Flight 93 elections (I think we’ve had about four in a row now) and how we are perpetually in the last moment to prevent the country from crossing the tipping point into socialism/communism/authoritarianism/despotism/name-your-ism has fueled the belief among many Republican voters that violence is not only acceptable but is necessary to save America from itself.

We saw the culmination of this belief on January 6 with MAGA’s attack, not on the Capitol, but on the constitutional process that was taking place inside the halls of Congress. We saw it again last month when a white nationalist attacked patrons of a grocery store in Buffalo, New York because they were black.

Photo by William Moreland on Unsplash

There are ample examples of right-wing extremist violence, but people on the left should not assume themselves to be innocent of political diatribes that incite violence. In the past, we’ve seen the Bernie Bro attack on a congressional baseball practice in 2017. The shooter, who also had a long list of personal problems, left an online trail of anti-Republican hate.

Yesterday, another incident occurred that can be linked directly to inflammatory leftist rhetoric when the FBI arrested a California man who was apparently attempting to kill Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Per FBI filings, Nicholas Roske was detained by officers outside of Kavanaugh’s home at about 1 a.m.

US Marshals observed Roske get out of a taxi near the Kavanaugh residence and then walk away when he saw them. He then called 911 and told the operator at the Montgomery County (Md.) Emergency Operations Center that he was having suicidal thoughts, was carrying a firearm, and planned to kill “a specific United States Supreme Court Justice.”

Officers were dispatched and took Roske into custody. They found that he had a backpack that contained a Glock 17 pistol, ammunition, burglary tools, pepper spray, and zip ties.

On questioning, Roske confessed that “he was upset about the leak of a recent Supreme Court draft decision regarding the right to abortion as well as the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Roske indicated that he believed the justice he intended to kill would side with Second Amendment decisions that would loosen gun control laws.”

The logic is basically the same on both sides. There is a crisis and the system is broken so extralegal violence is required.

It’s beside the point that most people in both parties reject the violence by some of their more extreme members. (Even Democrats disapproved of the BLM violence while supporting the demonstrations, which were peaceful in most places.) The majority of both parties probably reject the notion that the fate of the country hinges on the next election or the next Supreme Court decision and realize that it’s all a game to gin up election turnout.

The problem is on the fringes. There are an unknown number of people on both sides who take the sky-is-falling, hair-on-fire, cats-and-dogs-living-together rantings seriously. And when someone tells you that your country is going to be destroyed unless you act and you believe them, the next logical step is to take the law into your own hands.

The problem is then made worse when the partisans feel the need to excuse the bad behavior of people on their own side. The January 6 insurrection wasn’t a coup attempt and the investigation is only a Democratic attempt to make Republicans look bad. BLM violence is wrong but justified because of bad police behavior. Killing black people is wrong, but the white majority is threatened with extinction. Nicholas Roske is a crazy man, but that’s what Republicans get for trying to take away a woman’s right to choose.

We can look back in history and see that many times the course of events hinged on the actions of one individual or a small group. World War I began with one assassin. There are Americans who are today acting to touch off a civil war because they think that such a conflict would purge the opposition.

America is only beginning to reap the whirlwind of violence that incendiary rants on both sides are inciting. Unless we begin to acknowledge that both sides should comply with the rule of the Constitution and the rule of law with no excuses we are headed down a bloody road. The simple answer is to turn down the rhetoric and hold our own side accountable for the planks in their eyes, not just point fingers at the specks in the eyes of the opposition.

The problem is that the breathless end-of-the-world “reporting” generates engagement, votes, and cash in the form of both political donations and media revenue. Who cares if it’s killing American democracy as well as a growing number of actual, flesh-and-blood Americans?

The answer is that any American who loves their country - and their countrymen - should care. If we want to save America, we should tune out and turn off the rhetorical bomb-throwers for whom everything is a crisis (that is always directly attributable to the other side) and who can never find fault with their own favorite politicians. Don’t reward their inflammatory lies with clicks and views and definitely don’t spread them.

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Steve and I are normally pretty close to being on the same page, but I have to disagree in the strongest terms with his post this morning. The January 6 hearings, which in reality cover a lot more than just the culmination of The Former Guy’s coup attempt and the attack on the Capitol, are not a show trial.

For starters, they are not a trial. The information uncovered by law enforcement and this and other investigations have led to many trials and will lead to many more, such as the upcoming trials of several Proud Boys for seditious conspiracy, but the January 6 committee hearings, televised or not, are part of an investigation rather than a trial.

Further, there is a big difference between the show trials of the Soviet Union and the present hearings. Namely, a dictatorship’s show trials are almost always based on trump-up (pun intended) charges, while the January 6 hearings focus on a very real and very alarming criminal conspiracy.

Many Republicans deny that there was a crime at the root of the investigation. Many others just don’t want to talk about it because they view the culture war as a bigger issue and Democrats Bad. The fundamental problem for the Republicans is that the facts being uncovered by the January 6 investigation are uniformly appallingly bad for the Republican Party and the Trump Administration.

The Republican view is that the end, checking the Democrats and progressives, justifies the means of using whatever illicit, underhanded, and illegal methods are needed. Of course, this attitude is a breeding ground for corruption and authoritarianism.

I’m aware that some will think it ironic that I spent the first section of this missive talking about inflammatory political rhetoric and then go on to talk about the dangers of the Republican attempt to rationalize away January 6, but at present, the biggest internal threat we face is the fact that one party has made a calculated decision to ignore a coup attempt (and yes, January 6 meets the plain definition of a coup) and is adopting a political strategy of laying the groundwork to overturn the will of the voters in future elections. If anything can kill the American Republic, this is it.

Steve asks, “In these times, who cares what a former president did or didn’t do 18 months ago? He didn’t succeed, did he?”

Well no, but that doesn’t excuse his attempt to steal a second term by intimidating the vice president into fraudulently throwing out electoral votes. This defense reminds me of Sideshow Bob’s complaint on the “Simpsons” that he was convicted of a crime he didn’t commit: “'Attempted murder, now honestly, did they ever give anyone a Nobel prize for attempted chemistry?”

Attempted murder is still a crime, as Richard Noske is finding out, and attempted coups are still a serious matter. Not least because an unpunished coup will encourage others, who are perhaps more competent than The Former Guy, to try again. And the next plotters may not be people who would be sympathetic to MAGA Republicans.

The January 6 investigation is legitimate and necessary. Americans should examine the results of the hearings and take them to heart if they value the peaceful transfer of power that was our custom until 2020 and want to keep the constitutional republic that we currently enjoy.

It’s very disappointing that Republicans, who claim to be a law-and-order party, are bent on ignoring the crimes against the Constitution that their MAGA faction have committed.

On a related and breaking topic, shortly before press time, the news broke that the FBI had arrested a Michigan gubernatorial candidate in connection with the insurrection. The Detroit News reports that Ryan Kelley, the frontrunner in the Republican primary, was arrested on four charges stemming from participation in the January 6 riot.

In a recent poll, Kelley led a crowded field in the contest for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. I’m honestly not sure whether the arrest will help him or hurt him.

From the Racket