The Calm Before the Storm
It must be eerie, wandering the halls of the Congress with no one there. The offices have cleared out, an NBC reporter, standing in one of the office buildings, yelled for anyone to answer. No one did, it’s as empty as a college dorm on vacation. It’s Christmas, and in our representative democracy, everyone is home – not in Washington, DC.
Everyone, that is, except our “lonely” President, all by himself (well, there’s his staff, his wife, and his son) in the White House. He has “shutdown” the government, at least twenty percent of it, to get his “Wall.” In shutting down the government, he has trapped himself in Washington, unable to leave for his home in Florida. The “optics” of the President playing golf while the government is “shut down” is too much even for Mr. Trump to take. So he’s miserable, watching cable news, tweeting, and wanting to be anywhere else than in DC. He’s like the exchange student at college, with nowhere to go for the holiday.
In Washington, some of the tourist sites are closed. You can still wander the mall, and walk up to Mr. Lincoln on his chair, or Mr. Jefferson watching over the city. But you can’t get into the restrooms there, or at the MLK or FDR memorials. The Smithsonian museums are still open, at least until the 1stof the year.
Congress is due back on Thursday, to try to work out some kind of arrangement with the President. While both sides claim to be immobile right now, there was a deal on the table a couple of weeks ago, a deal that could resolve the shut down. If everyone gets miserable enough, perhaps those immovable forces will become ambulatory once again. If not, a titanic struggle between the Democratic House and the President is coming soon, when Nancy Pelosi takes the gavel on January 3rd.
Still in the background are the next steps in the Mueller investigation. The Supreme Court is hearing an unusual “sealed” appeal from the DC Appellate Court, fighting a Mueller subpoena. It’s some kind of business, operating in the United States but owned by a foreign government. The best bet is that it is a bank, perhaps Russian, refusing Mueller’s orders. The Supreme Court is to make a decision before New Years.
However that turns out, it seems clear that Mueller will soon release a series of indictments: Roger Stone, Jerome Corsi, and maybe even Donald Trump Jr and Jared Kushner. NBC news claims to have information that Mueller will release his “report on the President” sometime in February, though it’s odd that this is one of the few pieces of information leaking from the Special Counsel’s office. Maybe the Acting Attorney General will let us see it, but more likely the House Judiciary Committee will have to force it out of him.
And there’s still the fallout from the President’s Syria withdrawal order, and the proposed Afghanistan plan to withdraw, and the resignation of Defense Secretary Mattis, and the new Attorney General to be appointed.
So maybe it’s a good time for some quiet reflection. We are poised on the brink of 2019, a year when many things will be figured out. Our nation, in turmoil just as we were in December of 1973, will be a nation resolved, one way or another, in December of 2019. We will need to weather the storms, perhaps of impeachment, perhaps of Court Trials and Congressional Hearings, perhaps of intrigue and plots involving foreign governments. Those storms will lead to crisis, but crisis also will lead to resolution. For those who’ve been waiting since November of 2016, this is going to be the year.
Regardless of that, we will need to prepare for the elections of 2020, to prevent our foreign and domestic enemies from manipulating our electoral process and our social media to reach some pre-determined outcome. We are not innocent, even our own political parties the Democrats and Republicans, are “experimenting” with the same processes that Cambridge Analytica and Russian Intelligence used. We might stop the Russian Internet Research Agency (where most of the Russian social media attacks originated) but we may need to stop actors here in our own country.
Those attacks will continue to try to pry further wedges into our political divisions. Not only will Trumpers be pushed by Republicans, but Bernies will be pushed from the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Some of the dissension will be real and heartfelt, but pressure will be generated from the outside. We need to be careful to keep our differences internal.
So enjoy the holidays, the calm before the storm. When it all begins again, it will be for real and for good. Senator Robert Kennedy, living in the tumultuous time of 1968 often spoke of the old Chinese curse: “may you live in interesting times…” He’d follow it up with – “…like it or not, we live in interesting times.” 2019 is our “interesting times;” so Happy New Year; and, as Rachel Maddow would say, “buckle up.”
