Don't Assume Republican Will Is Indomitable
Inside the mailbag: Gavin Newsom... John Thune ... CA-Gov
Matt Colbert: Dem Senators continue to vote for Trump’s judicial nominees. Why?
Are they lazy? Do they think they’re buying some kind of goodwill for the next time there is a Democratic president? Do they just... support his nominees? I would love to hear a reason, even a bad one.
The reasons, plural, are the same you’ll hear whenever members of the Senate minority vote for the other party’s presidential nominees. Some mix of:
Like it or not, this nominee is qualified.
This nominee is a constituent of mine, and has support from his or her community (plus maybe some of my donors).
I have received concrete promises from this nominee relating to my agenda or important home-state concerns.
[on truth serum] This nominee was going to be confirmed anyhow and providing him or her a meaningless surplus vote is an incredibly cheap way to bolster my bipartisan bona fides, which I’m assured are very important to voters.
In the abstract these aren’t terribly objectionable rationales. They’re not inspiring by any means. But being a legislator, particularly a member of a legislative minority, is all about choosing from among uninspiring options.
And you can see why going along to get along in certain instances seems worth it: Politics is still transactional, even if Donald Trump’s untrustworthiness means all transactions must have enforcement mechanisms. Establishing credibility with a subset of swing voters and voters in the other party clearly has some value. Susan Collins dominated Maine politics by being the kind of moderate who’s always there for Democrats when they don’t need her. She takes every free, low-stakes vote with the Democrats that she can.
But we do not live in the abstract. We live in Trump’s America. And in Trump’s America, every single executive and judicial branch nominee has passed a loyalty test in which they agree to lie or spread doubt about the 2020 election.
And so every vote for a Trump nominee is a vote for the idea that the 2020 Big Lie is not disqualifying. Something we can live and work with. As my recent commentary about the Jared Polis/Tina Peters fiasco makes clear, I think that’s crazy; that tolerating soft election denial is a big error with a decades-long tail. It’s why I published this piece more than a month before Trump’s second inauguration.
Absent the loyalty test, I would not really care about this much at all. There’s an argument in progressive circles that Dems should resist massively wherever they can because Trump is a fascist and there’s symbolic value in denying him votes no matter what—even if we’re talking about bills that will become law anyhow, or nominees who will be confirmed with Republican votes alone.
That’s not really how I think about effective resistance. Effective resistance, in my mind, is compatible with some level of pragmatism.
We saw this in Republican resistance to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and we see it in the fact that Republicans still occasionally defy Trump. It’s just not the case that Republicans always go full tilt, anymore than Dems always curl into the fetal position at the first sign of hostilities. Republicans voted for a pretty large number of Joe Biden’s bills, and even at the height of Obama-era GOP obstruction, his nominees would usually get some GOP support. We see this week in South Carolina, as we saw in Indiana last year, that Republicans still occasionally show faint glimmers of integrity or independence. They love owning the libs, but they have other priorities, too—some of which require cooperating with the opposition.
But Obama’s nominees were not civic degenerates to a person. Obama’s nominees did not all make deals with the devil. Obama and Biden could each be trusted to honor bipartisan agreements.
Life in Trump’s America is nothing like that, and so it does not make sense for Democrats to adhere to outmoded standards of faithful opposition. No votes for the annual budget if the administration’s policy is to break budget laws. No votes for the president’s nominees if they so much as wink at election deniers.
Now obviously a non-decisive Democratic vote for some random judge or sub-cabinet official is less consequential than clemency for Tina Peters. But whether we’re talking about nominees or monuments to Trump or leniency for insurrectionists, I think it’s very important for Democrats to treat the truth about the 2020 election as non-negotiable, just as much as Trump insists on lying about it. They should have zero tolerance for the Big Lie, unless they want to consign all of us to accommodating modern day Redeemers for the next century or so. Unless they want generations of American children to read from history textbooks that treat the truth about 2020 as contested and unknowable.
Democratic senators should not offer their votes to election deniers in exchange for political chits, anymore than Democratic governors should bend to Trump’s extortion in exchange for his magnanimous leniency. If they feel the need to establish a record of bipartisanship, they should look elsewhere.
Ben Y: I’m really struggling with your increasing advocacy for procedural radicalism. Part of it is that I think my views have evolved away from taking hard line positions on court packing , and democracy reforms equivalent to the H.R. 1 of the early 2020s. But I really just want to understand your theory of the case. In trying to play this out in my head, Democrats win a trifecta. They abolish the fiilbuster and pack the courts, and pass a ton of progressive legislation, and make it much easier to vote etc. If the history of the past several administrations has taught us anything, it’s that the backlash to perceived overreach is always strong. The only counterexample seems to be Roosevelt in 1934, when he delivered for people in such tangible ways that the normal midterm backlash didn’t happen. But that was nearly a century ago! Even in-parties that have had decent/good midterms (Dems in 1998, GOP in 2002, Dems in 2022) saw it collapse within a few years. Odds are that the perceived radicalism will do far more to motivate the right-wing base. It will be a tea party on steroids. They will vow to strike back harder, and if material conditions don’t radically improve (which probably can’t happen in four years), then they will get their own trifecta. They will pack the courts themselves with ideologues that make Sam Alito look like a squishy moderate statesman. They enact their version of the SAVE America Act, to vastly restrict voting, and no court will stop them. Then it REALLY might be impossible for Democrats to win another election. At best, we will have this increasing tit for tat where we lurch from one extreme to another. And in that case, I can’t see Democrats winning in the long run because a) they have the more favorable political geography given that we can’t abolish the Senate and b) they have the guns.
Totally fair question. Here’s my extremely long answer. (Get comfortable, it’s really long…)
At some level we can’t get around the fact that different people have different temperaments, different risk tolerances, and different tolerances for unfairness. For my part, I admit to being more stubborn than most. But I don’t think it’s poisoned my judgement here.
Is it possible that life under the status quo, in all the ways it disadvantages our half of the country, is more sustainable than my preferred future, where Democrats insist on fair play, and start changing the rules unilaterally?
Yes it is.
But that’s just another way of saying that if Republicans want fascism more than the rest of the country wants democracy, sooner or later they’ll accumulate enough power to impose fascism in fullness. At that point we’d exist in a new, worse paradigm, where freedom lovers live lives of oppression until something happens to collapse the regime, at which point we’d have to rebuild from the studs.
I can’t promise a future like that isn’t possible, or that my vision of democratic reform wouldn’t accelerate us toward it. But I don’t assume we’re doomed to fail! By the same token, procedural moderates can’t promise that we’ll avoid dictatorial fascism simply by looking forward, tolerating intolerable double standards, governing through one-sided road blocks, and hoping Republicans eventually discover enlightenment. Barack Obama and Joe Biden made peace with the status quo and Republicans lurched toward fascism anyhow.
What I can say is that taking a bygones approach would amount to terrible appeasement, and (it seems) would not be acceptable to many (if not most) Democratic voters. They are tired of leaving problems unaddressed simply because trying to fix them might not work out in the long run.
It’s almost always better, in my experience, to study problems, envision new arrangements that would alleviate or eliminate them, then make those changes. To do what’s right, in other words. Yes, this will often generate turbulence. But you’ve mastered the problems! You’ve put a lot of thought into the remedies! You can justify your actions even to your angriest critics.
So here’s my theory of the case: What I want, what problems my program would remedy, and how I imagine reform leaving us better off than we are.