Happy New Year

I know; I’m late.  It’s January 6^th, and I’m wishing folks a “Happy New Year”.  But from a political standpoint, the unfinished business of the dreaded year 2020 still hung in the air on New Year’s Day.  It took until this week for that business to be resolved.  And, as a Democrat looking forward to the new day of the Biden Presidential Administration, the Tuesday was good:  so Happy New Year!!!

Deliverance

As a long time Democrat it still amazes me that Democratic “deliverance” was delivered by the state of Georgia.  Not California, not New York, not even Virginia or Michigan – it’s Georgia that’s “on my mind” and delivered Senate control to Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Party.  It was only two years ago that voter suppression in that state prevented Stacy Abrams from gaining the Governorship.  Her opponent, current Governor Brian Kemp used all the procedural powers of his previous job, Secretary of State, to make sure black people found it hard to vote.  

Mr. Kemp woke a sleeping giant.  Abrams and others have worked incessantly to make Georgia a state where everyone votes.  And “everyone” voting, including people of color, isn’t good news for a Republican Party that lashed itself to an aging white voting population.  The results of Abrams’ efforts are clear:  a Democrat, Joe Biden, narrowly won Georgia for the Presidency, the first time since 1992.

Georgia was important in Biden’s victory, but the “stars aligned” to make Georgia even more significant to Biden’s actual Presidency.  Through happenstance, Georgia had both Senate seats open for election in November.  And that was because of Georgia’s 50% rule.

Historic Racism

In 1962 Georgia instituted a law requiring officeholders to win 50% of the popular vote.  If they failed in the “general election” to get a majority, then the top two candidates would compete in a “runoff” election several weeks later.  While this “runoff” system may seem harmless, it actually was designed to reduce the power of minority voting blocks in the electoral process.  In plain terms – it was about keeping black votes from counting.  And make no mistake; it was segregationist Democrats that wrote Georgia law.

But Republicans co-opted the segregationist Democrats in the late 1960’s, and have benefitted from that racist position for decades.  Meanwhile Democrats became the Party of minority participation and advancement.

If Georgia didn’t have the runoff system – then in November incumbent Republican David Perdue would have won a six year term, and Democratic challenger Raphael Warnock would have defeated Kelly Loffler, and served the remaining two years of that term. 

But neither Perdue nor Warnock received 50% of the vote.  So both competed in a runoff election, Perdue against Democrat Jon Ossoff, and Warnock against serving Senator Loffler.  And as a result of November’s election in the rest of the nation, those two Senate seats determine which political party will control the US Senate.  If Republicans won one of those seats, then they would have a 51-49 majority in the Senate.  If Democrats won both, then it would be a 50-50 tie, with the new Vice President, Democrat Kamala Harris, breaking ties in the Democrats’ favor.

What Goes Around

In Tuesday’s runoff, Democrat Warnock gained 50.6% of the vote over Loffler’s 49.4%, defeating her by over 55,000 votes.  The runoff between Ossoff and Perdue was closer.  As of writing this essay, Democrat Ossoff has 50.2% of the vote to Perdue’s 49.8%, and a lead of over 17,000 votes.  While those results aren’t finalized – it is clear that two Democrats will represent Georgia for the next two years.  And that will give the Democrats control of the United States Senate.

It’s not just Biden’s cabinet selections or judicial picks that can now be approved.  Democratic control guarantees a hearing for the Democratic agenda.  Any single Democratic Senator will have control over those decisions (Joe Manchin).  But what it does mean is that the death lock that Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has kept on legislation just even being discussed is now over.  Proposals will go “to the floor”.  They will be debated, compromised, voted up or down. But the business of the Congress will now move forward, and not be left in a heap on the Majority Leader’s desk. 

The 1962 runoff law designed to disenfranchise minorities, elected the first Black Senator from the State of Georgia.  And the Party of disenfranchisement and voter suppression, the Republican Party, lost control of the Senate. 

Comes Around

And meanwhile the President of the United States invited a mob to Washington to defend him.  He is encouraging that mob to storm the Capitol Building, where the Congress is going through the process of certifying the election.  I am watching the crowd storm the Capitol steps, the Vice President evacuating the Senate Chamber, and the protestors enter the Capitol Building.  

And it strikes me:  if this were a Black Lives Matters protest instead of a Trump protest, would a protestor with a gas mask be gaily wandering through Statuary Hall?  Or would the tear gas and pepper spray and more have been deployed long before they entered the building?  Need a definition of white privilege – here it is.

We still have a long way to go.

Junkie

I guess I really am a political “junkie”.  I read the Mueller report, cover to cover, and I watched almost every minute of Mueller’s testimony (poor man).  And I read the “whistleblower’s report” and sat through every step of the impeachment process.  I can’t say I started as an “unbiased” juror of the Trump Presidency, but I can definitely say that I found him guilty on every count.

So it was with some reluctance and fatigue that I faced losing thirty minutes of my life, reading another transcript.  This time it was of another “perfect call”, made to the Georgia Secretary of State.  I would have just listened to it, but I knew that way led to somnambulism.  So I sat and read through every “um” and misquoted figure.

My first impression is the same that one that I got from the President’s conversation with Zelensky of Ukraine:  how can this be the PRESIDENT of the United States, the “leader” of the free world?  The dialog wasn’t diplomatic; it wasn’t even professional. Mario Puzo should have written it for The Godfather movie.  There clearly was the gangster, “…I’m making an offer you can’t refuse,” tone throughout.

Intent 

Did President Trump commit a crime in this conversation?  The answer is a firm “maybe”.  As Michael Cohen testified so long ago, Donald Trump never actually says what he’ll do: he just implies it.  So when he told the Georgia Secretary of State that he could “be in big trouble” it implied a threat but didn’t technically make one.

At best, the conversation was that of a whiny loser begging for the counters to change the count.  At worst, it was the President of the United States threatening a state official to get him to “rig” an election.  But after wading through the entire conversation, I’d think there’s a third conclusion that gets Trump “off the criminal hook”.

I think Donald Trump believes everything that his sycophants are telling him.  He believes that the Democrats pulled off the greatest election fraud in American history.  And he also believes those Democrats were stupid enough to rig the election for Biden, but failed to bring the rest of the Democratic ticket along. 

Feeding a Delusion

We always knew that the Trump staff scheduled rallies to make the President “feel better”.  We know he needed the adoration of the crowd, the MAGA hats and “lock her up” chants.  So it isn’t a stretch to believe that Trump thinks that since thousands came to his rallies, he should have won the election.  His thought process:  it was true in 2016, why wouldn’t it be true today. (That wasn’t true then either).

And that’s scary in so many ways.  It means that Trump’s thinking completely discounts the pandemic’s impact on the election.  He compared his rallies to Biden’s, when Biden specifically determined NOT to do rallies in order to control the spread of COVID.  Sure the President ridiculed the “drive-in” rallies of the Democrats, but that should have been just rhetoric.  But it wasn’t:  Trump really didn’t get it.  He thought that Biden made a political decision that he couldn’t compete in drawing the crowds, and so didn’t try.  

Worse than Criminal

Donald Trump is the President of a United States that is losing over 3000 citizens a day to COVID.  That’s more than a Pearl Harbor or a 9-11, every day.  But when it came to the campaign, Trump operated like it wasn’t even happening.  And now we can see that wasn’t just a tactical decision, it was a denial of reality.  And (sorry Trump haters) it wasn’t a cold blooded “I don’t give a damn”: it was a real belief that those deaths weren’t important, and maybe not even happening.

In the last days of Watergate back in the summer of 1974, Richard Nixon was drinking heavily.  He wandered the halls of the White House, talking to the portraits of deceased Presidents.  He told them how unfair the nation was, and how all “the good” he could do was now gone.  His Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, made sure that any military orders from the White House came through his office first.  The executive staff made sure that a deluded or drunk President couldn’t start a war.

Donald Trump believes:  he believes that he won the election, he believes that the Republicans in Georgia and Arizona and the other states are cheating for Biden, he believes that COVID should be ignored.  The most powerful man in the United States, the Commander-in-Chief, the leader of the free world isn’t a criminal:  he’s delusional.  And his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, is right there along with him, encouraging the delusion.  Absolute Trump loyalists recently replaced the civilian leadership of the Defense Department.

That shouldn’t make anyone feel better.

Just the Facts

I am not a Republican, so I don’t “ have a dog” in this fight.  In previous essays, I told Republicans to stay out of internal Democratic fights, so I shouldn’t be “kibitzing” into this one.  But as an historian and an observer of current affairs, the question is fascinating.  Are we seeing the schism of the Republican Party?

The fault lines are clear.   There are Republicans who are in favor of contesting the Presidential Election of 2020 in the Congress, and there are Republicans who are not.  On the “Trump” side, Republicans claim that the 2020 election was “rigged” and that the Democrats cheated to win.  They make this claim regardless of the facts – there is NO evidence that the Democrats really cheated.

Ron Johnson, Senator from Wisconsin, made the issue clear on Meet the Press yesterday.  “Millions of Americans have questions about the election results, and we need to stop the process and examine what really happened”. His logic is that the questions alone are enough to create the need to stop the election, even though he could not produce any evidence that fraud occurred. 

 NBC’s Chuck Todd called him out. Todd stated that the millions were only questioning because Johnson and his compatriots told them to question.  Johnson’s response was to deflect and accuse the Mainstream Media, “like you,” of covering up fraud.  But he couldn’t answer the question – because there is no evidence to back up the charges.

Started the Fire

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley claims that he only is exercising his Constitutional duty to investigate and represent the 72 million Americans who voted for Trump.  First, he overstates the numbers.  Polling shows that as many as 68% of those Trump voters think the election was rigged.  That’s 49 million.  But Senator Hawley, like Johnson, has been a leader in raising questions about the election, again, without evidence.  He is putting out a fire that he helped to start (WAPO).

Currently twelve Republican Senators will object to the results in the Congress on Wednesday.  Nineteen have stated that they accept the election outcome, and twenty have not made it clear where they stand.   And there will be as many as one hundred and forty Republican House of Representative members who will object to the count.  

Process and Procedure

But to stop the election of Joe Biden as President, it requires a majority of both the House and the Senate.  Democrats control the House, who of course will support Biden.  Republicans control the Senate by the narrowest of margins, 51 to 48, at least through Wednesday.  But unless all of those Republicans, including Sasse, Romney, Murkowski, and Toomey agree to vote against him, Biden will be President.  And those four Senators, and several more, have made it clear they will not vote against Biden.

Joe Biden will be inaugurated as President on January 20^th.  So what is this all about?

Fault Lines

For five years, there has been a segment of the Republican Party who stood against Donald Trump.  Former Ohio Governor John Kasich was an early critic, refusing to withdraw from the 2016 Republican primaries.  But there were many others, including John McCain, former Republican Presidential nominee. And over Trump’s term others have emerged. Mitt Romney actually voted to remove Trump from office in the impeachment trial.  

A segment of the “political operatives” of the Party broke officially away from Trump.  Former RNC Chairman Michael Steele spoke out against him.  McCain Campaign Manager Steve Schmidt helped organize “The Lincoln Project” that was instrumental in campaigning against both Trump and his supporters in the 2020 election. 

And now the Electoral Vote certification process is forcing others to take a stand.  Former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and seven former Republican Secretaries of Defense, including Vice President Dick Cheney, have come out against interfering with Biden’s election.  

Super Power

Donald Trump dominates the Republican Party through the power of his influence.  It is the “Sanford Effect”.  With a single tweet, Donald Trump caused the defeat of South Carolina Congressman Mark Sanford in the Republican primary.  Trump voters dominate Republican primaries, and as South Carolina showed, Trump can alter the results with a “word”.  

This “super power” has led former Trump opponents like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio to become sycophants.  But no one has reversed course harder than Lindsey Graham, who now hugs Trump as tightly as he can.  And the “Sanford Effect” has reached even farther, silencing Republicans like Nikki Haley, Rob Portman, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

For many of the non-Trump Republicans, this fight is about what the Republican Party stands for.  They are “traditional” Republicans like Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, worrying about Constitutionalism and deficit spending.  But for others, this crisis is about raw politics.

2024 Begins

The Presidential election of 2024 is already on.  Here’s the scenario:  Joe Biden will be eighty-two, and may chose not to run for a second term. Vice President Kamala Harris will be his “heir apparent”.  Unlike Biden, it will be easy to paint Harris as a “radical liberal” (to use Kelly Loeffler’s phrase).  So potential Republican candidates are maneuvering for position.  Some see themselves as the inheritor of the “Trump core”.  Others think the Party will revert back to the Romney-McConnell-Ryan Party of 2012. 

But what if the GOP becomes both?  The “Lincoln Project” Republicans are never coming back to a Trump-like Party.  Will they continue to lead the “schism” into two political forces, Trumpism and old-school Republicanism?  And if that happens, how will that impact the electoral future of America?  Will the division of the Republican Party push the “moderate Republicans” (think Kasich, or Governors Hogan of Maryland and Baker of Massachusetts) into a physical split with the Trumpers? 

Democratic Choices 

Democrats are left with a couple of choices as well.  A split Republican Party could encourage a split in the Democratic Party.  The “Sanders” progressive wing of the Party could decide to branch out on their own, leaving the more moderate Biden wing behind.  The moderates might be tempted to move even more to the middle, to “poach” the “middling Republicans”, as they tried to do in the 2020 election.

Or the Democrats could unite to take advantage of a divided GOP.  But don’t bet on that. After all, we are Democrats, and that would be far too easy.

Budding Politician

I spent much of my late adolescence and earlier twenties around politicians.  I was one myself, stepping onto the first rungs of the ladder that led to a political career.  At fourteen I was helping to strategize a local judge election.  By eighteen I worked to orchestrate a Congressional “Get Out the Vote” operation.  At twenty, the Carter/Mondale Campaign “handed me the keys” to six counties in Southwestern Ohio, and gave me major responsibilities in Cincinnati as well.  I went from there to work “on the Hill” for a Congressman in Washington and then again back at home in Cincinnati.  Four years later I was managing a Cincinnati City Council Campaign.

So I was around politicians a lot.  And while all of them did what they had to do to win the next election, many were looking forward to “making things better” when they got the opportunity to govern.  Even the folks “on the other side” seemed to be serious about improving the lives for their constituents, though they might have very different ideas about how to do it.

Divisiveness

Politics could still be divisive.  I “cut my teeth” at the end of the Vietnam War era.  One mentor campaigned for Ed Muskie in New Hampshire of 1972, and another learned his job from the Humphrey general election campaign in 1968.  There was nothing so divisive as Vietnam and Civil Rights, and both of those issues were still part of the environment when I started.  

Surrounded by politics and those that practiced the art from both sides, I grew to believe that most (not all) were indeed patriots. Sure they wanted to win and would do almost anything to succeed.  But they also wanted to help “their people”.   That included the folks that voted for and against them.  They cared about our history and traditions, and knew which lines to cross and which ones to respect.  And they ultimately saw themselves in the tradition of the Founding Fathers:  trying to continue and improve the American Experiment.  

In today’s polarized world, that view sounds antiquated and naïve.  But I still cling desperately to it.

Denial

But the current actions of many of our Congressmen and Senators are challenging my view.  They are purposely furthering a world where facts are no longer important, only fanciful stories of their leader.  It’s been going on for five years.  Before we ever got to the 2020 election, we ignored Robert Mueller.  His report was convoluted and afraid to reach conclusions.  But a plain reading of the four hundred some pages lead to two undeniable conclusions:  the Russians were involved in the 2016 Trump campaign, and the President and his men engaged in a two year campaign to obstruct that fact.

Whether it was enough to “convict” or “impeach” might be arguable – but the facts Mueller presented were clear to read.

That those same “respected” and “old school” Republican politicians would echo the Trump theme of “Russian Hoax” was saddening.   And the same was true with the Impeachment.  Again, the facts were clear, we all knew exactly what the President wanted Ukraine to do, and how he was going to get them to do it.  Some of the Republican Senators at least acknowledged the plain truth of that and then simply said it wasn’t enough to remove the President.  But others fell in line with the Trump “perfect call” defense.

It’s Over

And now there’s the election of 2020.  In the United States, we measure our winners and losers in terms of Electoral votes.  We were reminded of that again in 2016.   Who wins the majority of popular votes really doesn’t matter:  ask Hillary Clinton or Al Gore.  But “them’s the rules that we play by”:  that’s what we were told in 2016 and 2000.  And Gore and Clinton swallowed hard and did the “American thing”.  They stood in front of the nation and acknowledged their loss.  Bothdid what the folks I grew up with would do.  They were “pros”; good politicians, even though it was the hardest thing they would ever do.

That Donald Trump refused to do so isn’t a surprise to anyone.  And that he would create a false narrative of widespread fraud isn’t surprising either.  He set that fake scenario up from the beginnings of the 2020 campaign.  Americans, and politicians, should look at him and see him for what he is:  an amateur. 

Not Just Politics

What is incredibly concerning is that so many other Republican politicians have made the decision to go along with this rank amateur for one more time.  It’s not about being “true believers”. They aren’t all stupid (though Congressman Gohmert might be the exception).  Those Congressmen and Senators understand the facts, but they reached a political conclusion making their career more important than the course of the nation.  They are more afraid of losing their “seat”, than the fate of the American experiment. 

These “politicians” are the antithesis of patriots.  Their self-interest is more important than their country.  Instead of “leading” their followers, they are following them.  They have more in common with Benedict Arnold than George Washington (and yes, I just called them traitors).

And it’s not just in statement and tweets.  On Wednesday they will actually stand for something that they must know is false.  They will question the results of the American election – the core basis of our Constitutional system.   And they will do it in the full knowledge that they are lying.  

It won’t change the outcome – Joe Biden will be the next President.  But it will damage the fabric of our nation once again.  What else is a better definition of treason?