Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦

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Category Archives: History

Crime and Punishment

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Given the extreme rhetoric Republican politicians and pundits have been spewing this week, it was predictable that somebody from the former president’s cult would try to kill an FBI agent or some other government official. Fortunately, the criminal is the one who died. Does likely violence mean T____ should be left alone? Michelle Cottle of The New York Times answers that question:

It took many accidents, catastrophes, misjudgments and mistakes for D____ T____ to win the presidency in 2016. Two particularly important errors came from James Comey, then the head of the F.B.I., who was excessively worried about what T____’s supporters would think of the resolution of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

First, in July 2016, Comey broke protocol to give a news conference in which he criticized Clinton even while announcing that she’d committed no crime. He reportedly did this because he wanted to protect the reputation of the F.B.I. from inevitable right-wing claims that the investigation had been shut down for political reasons.

Then, on Oct. 28, just days before the election, Comey broke protocol again, telling Congress that the Clinton investigation had been reopened because of emails found on the laptop of the former congressman Anthony Weiner. The Justice Department generally discourages filing charges or taking “overt investigative steps” close to an election if they might influence the result. Comey disregarded this because, once again, he dreaded a right-wing freakout once news of the reopened investigation emerged.

“The prospect of oversight hearings, led by restive Republicans investigating an F.B.I. ‘cover-up,’ made everyone uneasy,” The New Yorker reported. In Comey’s memoir, he admitted fearing that concealing the new stage of the investigation — which ended up yielding nothing — would make Clinton, who he assumed would win, seem “illegitimate.” (He didn’t, of course, feel similarly compelled to make public the investigation into T____’s ties to Russia.)

Comey’s attempts to pre-empt a conservative firestorm blew up in his face. He helped put T____ in the White House, where T____ did generational damage to the rule of law and led us to a place where prominent Republicans are calling for abolishing the F.B.I.

This should be a lesson about the futility of shaping law enforcement decisions around the sensitivities of T____’s base. Yet after the F.B.I. executed a search warrant at T____’s beachfront estate this week, some … have questioned the wisdom of subjecting the former president to the normal operation of the law because of the effect it will have on his most febrile admirers.

Andrew Yang, one of the founders of a new centrist third party, tweeted about the “millions of Americans who will see this as unjust persecution.” Damon Linker, usually one of the more sensible centrist thinkers, wrote, “Rather than healing the country’s civic wounds, the effort to punish T____ will only deepen them.”

The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta described feeling “nauseous” watching coverage of the raid. “What we must acknowledge — even those of us who believe T____ has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so, and deserves full prosecution under the law — is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences,” he wrote…. The former president relishes his ability to stir up a mob; it’s part of what makes him so dangerous.

We already know, however, that the failure to bring T____ to justice — for his company’s alleged financial chicanery and his alleged sexual assault, for obstructing Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation and turning the presidency into a squalid influence-peddling operation, for trying to steal an election and encouraging an insurrection — has been disastrous.

What has strengthened [him] has not been prosecution but impunity, an impunity that some of those who stormed the Capitol thought, erroneously, applied to them as well. [His] mystique is built on his defiance of rules that bind everyone else. He is reportedly motivated to run for president again in part because the office will protect him from prosecution. If we don’t want the presidency to license crime sprees, we should allow presidents to be indicted, not accept some dubious norm that ex-presidents shouldn’t be.

We do not know the scope of the investigation that led a judge to authorize the search of Mar-a-Lago, though it reportedly involves classified documents that T____ failed to turn over to the government even after being subpoenaed. More could be revealed soon: Attorney General Merrick Garland announced on Thursday that the Justice Department had filed to unseal the search warrant.

It should go without saying that T____ and his followers, who howled “Lock her up!” about Clinton, do not believe that it is wrong for the Justice Department to pursue a probe against a presidential contender over the improper handling of classified material. What they believe is that it is wrong to pursue a case against T____, who bonds with his acolytes through a shared sense of aggrieved victimization.

The question is how much deference the rest of us should give to this belief. No doubt, T____’s most inflamed fans might act out in horrifying ways; many are heavily armed and speak lustily about civil war. To let this dictate the workings of justice is to accept an insurrectionists’ veto. The far right is constantly threatening violence if it doesn’t get its way. Does anyone truly believe that giving in to its blackmail will make it less aggressive?

It was T____ himself who signed a law making the removal and retention of classified documents a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Those who think that it would be too socially disruptive to apply such a statute to him should specify which laws they believe the former president is and is not obliged to obey. And those in charge of enforcing our laws should remember that the caterwauling of the T____ camp is designed to intimidate them and such intimidation helped him become president in the first place.

T____ shouldn’t be prosecuted because of politics, but he also shouldn’t be spared because of them. The only relevant question is whether he committed a crime, not what crimes his devotees might commit if he’s held to account.

Unquote.

There’s a similar situation in Ukraine. Some people say we shouldn’t provoke Putin for fear he’ll do something worse. But allowing him to do whatever he wants in Ukraine won’t make him less dangerous.

The FBI Searches Mar-a-Lago: Point and Counterpoint

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It’s happened but not here.

In other democratic countries, political leaders can and do face criminal investigations and trials for their alleged misdeeds. South Korea impeached and tried then-President Park Geun-hye in 2017 and 2018 over corruption allegations, for which she served five years in prison out of a more-than-twenty-year sentence. A French jury convicted former President Nicolas Sarkozy last year on campaign-finance charges, effectively ending his political career. The legal troubles of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi are so extensive that they defy casual description; Wikipedia dedicates an entire article to them with more than two dozen subsections [The New Republic].

To avoid it happening here, the Department of Justice bent way over backwards to give the former president the opportunity to return classified documents that didn’t belong to him. After months of discussions with his lawyers, the former president returned a vanload of documents. Believing the former president hadn’t fully complied, a US Attorney and the FBI convinced a judge to approve a search warrant. The search revealed that there were indeed more documents that should have been returned. Except for the hysterical reaction of right-wing pundits and politicians, that would have been the end of the story unless the former president’s lawyers challenged the search warrant in court or prosecutors decided to pursue the matter. However, in all fairness, there is another view, as this piece from an Australian magazine clearly states: 

We are certainly no fans of D____ T____ – let’s make that clear from the outset. But yesterday’s raid by the FBI on the home of a former president sets a dangerous precedent.

A precedent which now means that anyone who evades taxes, attempts to undermine an election, sexually assaults women, manipulates the value of their assets, uses state resources to enrich themselves or aids and abets the overthrow of a democratically elected government will be subject to investigation.

Is that the world we want to live in? Where anyone accused of insurrection can be subject to questioning from law enforcement officers?

It’s a slippery slope. Before we know it, regular citizens accused of defrauding the government, concealing evidence, manipulating financial documents, tampering with witnesses or perverting the course of justice will also be held to account.

Or to put it another way, if we simply shrug our shoulders and fail to question the actions of the FBI, soon any old Joe Citizen who is suspected of ripping classified government documents into small pieces and flushing them down the toilet will be obliged to answer to law enforcement, as well as their plumber.

If we don’t ask the hard questions about the potential motives of the FBI now, soon any one of us who buries our ex-wife in a small grave at the side of their golf course in order to gain a tax concession will be treated with suspicion.

As T____ supporters put it so clearly yesterday, if this can happen to a President, it could happen to anyone who has committed insurrection, assault or fraud. That’s a chilling thought.

We are on new ground here. As D____ T____ himself made clear, this is the first time a former president’s home has been raided. Proof, if ever we needed it, that the FBI shamefully only targets people who it considers to have committed a crime. Who gave FBI director Chris Wray that authority?

As we made clear earlier, we’re certainly not T____ supporters. But in today’s partisan world, it would be easy to fall into the trap of cheering on the FBI’s actions, without taking a step back to look at the bigger picture. If T____ goes to jail, it opens the door for every lying, corrupt, perverted piece of shit to go to jail too. Is that what we want?

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This Land Is Ours. We Stole It Fair and Square.

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Texas was part of Mexico until American newcomers decided to make it their own country. Whether the new Republic of Texas would join the Union and whether it would be a slave state were much-debated issues until 1845 when Congress agreed to admit Texas as the 18th state. We’d soon be at war with Mexico. (American politics hasn’t totally changed since 1845, although the Democrats eventually switched sides and became less warlike.)

From “Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster” by H. W. Brands:

Four months [after Texas joined the Union], James Polk made prophets of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster by commencing a war with Mexico. Polk’s war was a land grab wrapped in self-defense. Texas entered the Union with its southern boundary in dispute. The United States claimed the Rio Grande as the border; Mexico claimed the Rio Nueces, more than a hundred miles to the north. Mexico nominally claimed the rest of Texas as well, never having acknowledged the loss of its rebellious province. But though it responded to the American annexation of Texas by severing relations with the United States, it took no military action to challenge the new regime on its northern frontier. This frustrated Polk.

The president’s expansionist appetite grew with the eating; not content with depriving Mexico of Texas, Polk coveted California as well. He attempted to purchase California, but the Mexican government rebuffed him. Polk then sought a pretext for declaring war on Mexico. He sent troops to the disputed strip between the rivers, hoping to goad the Mexicans to attack.

Weeks went by and the Mexicans refused to take the bait. Polk, more vexed than ever, prepared a war message for Congress, in which he blamed the Mexicans for insults and injuries against American honor and interests. It was a flimsy document, as Polk himself recognized, but he was determined to have California and its Pacific harbors, by whatever means necessary.

Then, just as he was about to transmit his message to Congress, he received news that Mexican troops had finally engaged the Americans. “After reiterated menaces, Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil,” Polk told Congress. “War exists, and notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico itself.” For emphasis the president added, “The two nations are now at war.”

John Calhoun begged to differ. Polk wanted Congress simply to endorse his assertion that war existed and give him authority to prosecute it. Calhoun wasn’t going to be stampeded into anything. “The question now submitted to us is one of the gravest character, and the importance of the consequences which may result from it we cannot now determine,” he told the Senate. “The president has announced that there is war; but according to my interpretation, there is no war according to the sense of our Constitution.”

Calhoun didn’t challenge Polk’s account of the attack on American forces. Nor did he question Polk’s authority to resist and repel such attacks. But he distinguished hostilities from war. “It is our sacred duty to make war,” he told his fellow senators, “and it is for us to determine whether war shall be declared. If we have declared war, a state of war exists, and not till then.”

Calhoun succeeded in slowing the rush to war, but not by much. Congress debated the president’s request, with most of the negative comments coming from the Whigs [Polk, like Andrew Jackson, was a Democrat].

Some asked whether Polk had done all he could to avoid armed conflict; their strong implication was that he had not. A few went so far as to charge Polk with provoking the war. “This war was begun by the president,” Garrett Davis, a Kentucky Whig, told the House. Some inquired whether the Mexican attack, if it indeed had occurred as the president said, had been authorized by the Mexican government. Still others rejected Polk’s assertion that the soil on which the blood had been shed was American. Some said flatly that it was Mexican; others remarked that ownership was still in dispute.

But Polk knew the American political mind better than the dissenters did. He understood that the shedding of American blood—under whatever circumstances—created an irresistible impulse toward war. A negative vote could be characterized as an unpatriotic vote, and no lawmaker lightly risked that. The few surviving former Federalists remembered how their party had wrecked on its opposition to the War of 1812. In the end scarcely a dozen Whigs refused the president’s request. John Calhoun haughtily abstained.

Unquote.

Ulysses S. Grant fought in the Mexican War as a young lieutenant. Years later, he called it “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation”.

Laboratories of Autocracy

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Normal people were shocked when they heard about the 10-year old girl in Ohio who was raped, became pregnant, and was forced to travel to Indiana to get an abortion because Ohio’s new forced-birth law doesn’t have an exception for rape. From a long article by Jane Mayer for The New Yorker:

[Ohio’s] residents tend to be politically moderate, and polls consistently show that a majority of Ohio voters support legal access to abortion…. Yet, as the recent ordeal of a pregnant ten-year-old rape victim has illustrated, Ohio’s state legislature has become radically out of synch with its constituents….

Longtime Ohio politicians have been shocked by the state’s transformation into a center of extremist legislation, not just on abortion but on such divisive issues as guns and transgender rights. Ted Strickland, a Democrat who served as governor between 2007 and 2011, told me, “The legislature is as barbaric, primitive, and Neanderthal as any in the country. It’s really troubling”…. The story is similar in several other states with reputations for being moderate, such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania: their legislatures have also begun proposing laws so far to the right that they could never be passed in the U.S. Congress…..

A 2020 survey indicated that less than fourteen per cent of Ohioans support banning all abortions without exceptions for rape and incest…. But the Democrats in the Ohio legislature had no way to mount resistance: since 2012, the Republicans have had a veto-proof super-majority in both chambers….

… The General Assembly’s increasingly radical Republican majority is poised to pass even more repressive restrictions … when it returns from a summer recess. State Representative Gary Click … has proposed a “Personhood Act,” which would prohibit any interference with embryonic development from the moment of conception, unless the mother’s life is endangered. If the bill passes, it could outlaw many kinds of contraception, not to mention various practices commonly used during in-vitro fertilization.

[David Niven, a University of Cincinnati professor,] told me that, according to one study, the laws being passed by Ohio’s statehouse place it to the right of the deeply conservative legislature in South Carolina. How did this happen, given that most Ohio voters are not ultra-conservatives? “It’s all about gerrymandering,” Niven told me.

The legislative-district maps in Ohio have been deliberately drawn so that many Republicans effectively cannot lose, all but insuring that the Party has a veto-proof super-majority. As a result, the only contests most Republican incumbents need worry about are the primaries—and, because hard-core partisans dominate the vote in those contests, the sole threat most Republican incumbents face is the possibility of being outflanked by a rival even farther to the right.

The national press has devoted considerable attention to the gerrymandering of congressional districts, but state legislative districts have received much less scrutiny, even though they are every bit as skewed, and in some states far more so. “Ohio is about the second most gerrymandered statehouse in the country,” Niven told me. “It doesn’t have a voter base to support a total abortion ban, yet that’s a likely outcome.” He concluded, “Ohio has become the Hindenburg of democracy.”

Hindenburg_disaster

David Pepper, an election-law professor, has a book, “Laboratories of Autocracy,” whose title offers a grim spin on a famous statement, attributed to the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, calling America’s state legislatures “laboratories of democracy”…. He is determined to get the Democratic political establishment to stop lavishing almost all its money and attention on U.S. House, Senate, and gubernatorial races … and to focus more energy on what he sees as a greater emergency: the collapse of representative democracy in one statehouse after another.

Unquote. The article discusses how inattention to local politics has allowed right-wing extremists to take control of state legislatures, assisted by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, and how lower court decisions have been ignored: 

Swept out of power in Washington, the Republican Party’s smartest operatives decided to exploit the only opening they could find: the possibility of capturing state legislatures in the 2010 midterm elections. They knew that, in 2011, many congressional and local legislative districts would be redrawn based on data from the 2010 census—a process that occurs only once a decade. If Republicans reshaped enough districts, they could hugely advantage conservative candidates, even if many of the Party’s policies were unpopular.

In 2010, the Supreme Court issued its controversial Citizens United decision, which allowed dark money to flood American politics. Donors, many undisclosed, soon funneled thirty million dollars into the Republicans’ redistricting project, called REDMAP, and the result was an astonishing success: the Party picked up nearly seven hundred legislative seats, and won the power to redraw the maps for four times as many districts as the Democrats….

The Ohio statehouse has grown only more lopsided in the past decade. Currently, the Republican members have a 64–35 advantage in the House and a 25–8 advantage in the Senate. This veto-proof majority makes the Republican leaders of both chambers arguably the most powerful officeholders in the state….

The vast majority of Ohio residents clearly want legislative districts that are drawn more fairly. By 2015, the state’s gerrymandering problem had become so notorious that seventy-one per cent of Ohioans voted to pass an amendment to the state constitution demanding reforms. As a result, the Ohio constitution now requires that districts be shaped so that the makeup of the General Assembly is proportional to the political makeup of the state. In 2018, an even larger bipartisan majority—seventy-five per cent of Ohio voters—passed a similar resolution for the state’s congressional districts.

Though these reforms were democratically enacted, the voters’ will has thus far been ignored…. [Republicans] proposed districts [that] were nowhere near proportional to the state’s political makeup. The Democrats argued that the Republicans had flagrantly violated the reforms that had been written into the state constitution.

This past spring, an extraordinary series of legal fights were playing out. The Ohio Supreme Court struck down the map—and then struck down four more, after the Republican majority on the redistricting commission continued submitting maps that defied the spirit of the court’s orders…. The Republicans’ antics lasted so long that they basically ran out the clock. Election deadlines were looming, and the makeup of Ohio’s districts still hadn’t been settled. … A federal court [was asked] to intervene, on the ground that the delay was imperiling the fair administration of upcoming elections. The decision was made by a panel of three federal judges—two of whom had been appointed by T____. Over the strenuous objection of the third judge, the two T___ judges ruled in the group’s favor, allowing the 2022 elections to proceed with a map so rigged that Ohio’s top judicial body had rejected it as unconstitutional.

On Twitter, Bill Seitz, the majority leader of the Ohio House, jeered at his Democratic opponents: “Too bad so sad. We win again. The game is over and you lost.”

Ohio Democrats, including David Pepper, are outraged. “The most corrupt state in the country was told more than five times that it was violating the law, and then the federal court said it was O.K.,” he told me. “If you add up all the abnormalities, it’s a case study—we’re seeing the disintegration of the rule of law in Ohio. They intentionally created an illegal map, and are laughing about it.”

[A Democratic legislator] likens the Republicans’ stunning contempt for the Ohio Supreme Court to the January 6th insurrection: “People are saying, ‘Where is the accountability when you disregard the rule of law and attack democracy?’ Because that’s what’s happening in the statehouses, and Ohio is a perfect example.”

Unquote. Ohio isn’t the only state where this has happened. From The New York Times:

Since January, judges in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Ohio have found that Republican legislators illegally drew those states’ congressional maps along racial or partisan lines, or that a trial very likely would conclude that they did. In years past, judges who have reached similar findings have ordered new maps, or had an expert draw them, to ensure that coming elections were fair.

But a shift in election law philosophy at the Supreme Court, combined with a new aggressiveness among Republicans who drew the maps, has upended that model for the elections in November. This time, all four states are using the rejected maps, and questions about their legality for future elections will be hashed out in court later.

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Let’s Review the History of the Party Since Around 1994 (in 1,600 Words)

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Dana Milbank of The Washington Post shares some of his new book, The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party (although he says the crack-up  started closer to 30 years ago). This is an excerpt from his excerpt:

“We have become in danger of losing our own civilization,” Newt Gingrich warned.

Americans had seldom heard a politician talk this way, and certainly not a speaker of the House. But that’s what Gingrich became after the GOP’s landslide victory in the 1994 election. The Contract With America made little headway — only three minor provisions (paperwork reduction!) became law — but the rise of Gingrich and his shock troops set the nation on a course toward the ruinous politics of today.

Much has been made of the ensuing polarization in our politics, and it’s true that moderates are a vanishing breed. But the problem isn’t primarily polarization. The problem is that one of our two major political parties has ceased good-faith participation in the democratic process. Of course, there are instances of violence, disinformation, racism and corruption among Democrats and the political left, but the scale isn’t at all comparable. Only one party fomented a bloody insurrection and even after that voted in large numbers (139 House Republicans, a two-thirds majority) to overturn the will of the voters in the 2020 election. Only one party promotes a web of conspiracy theories in place of facts. Only one party is trying to restrict voting and discredit elections. Only one party is stoking fear of minorities and immigrants….

Republicans and their allied donors, media outlets, interest groups and fellow travelers have been yanking on the threads of democracy and civil society for the past quarter-century; that’s a long time, and the unraveling is considerable. You can measure it in the triumph of lies and disinformation, in the mainstreaming of racism and white supremacy, in the erosion of institutions and norms of government, and in the dehumanizing of opponents and stoking of violence. In the process, Republicans became Destructionists: They destroyed truth, they destroyed decency, they destroyed patriotism, they destroyed national unity, they destroyed racial progress, they destroyed their own party, and they are well on their way to destroying the world’s oldest democracy.

Consider just a few of the milestones along this path of destruction — all of which, we can now see, made T____ possible, if not inevitable:

Long before T____ promulgated more than 30,000 falsehoods during his presidency, including disinformation about the covid-19 pandemic that contributed to countless deaths:

  • House Republicans encouraged the conspiracy theory that Vincent Foster, a lawyer in the Clinton White House, had been murdered — possibly, in the belief’s craziest formulation, by Hillary Clinton. After four separate, independent investigations concluded it was suicide, Gingrich said, “I just don’t accept it,” and one of his committee chairmen, Dan Burton, shot a melon in his backyard to reenact the “murder.”
  • The George W. Bush administration, to make the case for war, distorted the available intelligence to suggest that Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, that it was on the cusp of obtaining nuclear weapons and that U.S. troops would be “greeted as liberators.” When a former diplomat publicly disputed Bush’s false claims, aides retaliated by disclosing the identity of his wife, a CIA operative.
  • Sarah Palin, the party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2008, falsely proclaimed in 2009 the existence of “death panels” in Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Republican lawmakers lined up to make the false claim a centerpiece of their attempt to defeat Obamacare. About a third of Americans came to believe the falsehood.

Long before T____ spoke of immigrants as rapists and murderers coming from “shithole countries” and told Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to other countries:

  • Patrick J. Buchanan, who ran insurgent bids for the GOP presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996, offered generous words for Hitler, lamented the treatment of “European-Americans” and “non-Jewish whites,” warned of a migrant “invasion,” and ran on a promise to “put America first.”
  • Conservative radio giant Rush Limbaugh aired the song “Barack the Magic Negro,” Fox News’s Glenn Beck claimed President Obama had a “deep-seated hatred for White people,” and tea party activists chanted the n-word at Black members of Congress outside the Capitol.
  • Fox News in 2011 served as the forum for T____ and others to perpetrate the “birther” libel asserting that Obama, the first Black president, was not American-born. Palin told Obama to stop his “shuck and jive shtick.”
  • Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said in 2013 of the “dreamers” (those brought illegally to the United States as children): “For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.”
Long before T____ told the violent Proud Boys to “stand by” instead of condemning them:
  • Conservative radio host G. Gordon Liddy in 1994 told listeners that if federal agents try to disarm them, “go for a head shot” and “kill the sons of bitches.” Other hosts, and GOP members of Congress, warned of federal agents in “black helicopters” planning “a paramilitary style attack against Americans” and the need for an “armed revolution” to resist a “New World Order,” and Gingrich and other Republicans spoke supportively of antigovernment militias.
  • Thousands of Tea Party activists, on the eve of final passage of Obamacare in the House in 2010, got to within 50 feet of the Capitol. Democrats worried about violence, and police officers struggled to maintain security, but GOP lawmakers inflamed the crowd, waving signs and leading chants of “Kill the bill.”
  • Palin, urging supporters “don’t retreat, instead — RELOAD!,” in 2010 promoted a map of 20 Democratic-held congressional districts in target crosshairs. A GOP Senate nominee spoke of using “Second Amendment remedies.” Threats and vandalism against Democratic lawmakers spread, and, in 2011, Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-Ariz.), one of those listed in Palin’s map, was shot in the head by a gunman who killed six others….

Long before T____ discredited democratic institutions with his “big lie” about election fraud:

  • Republican operatives intimidated the Miami-Dade County Elections Department into stopping the recount of the 2000 election results. A partisan crowd flooded into the elections office, chanting “Stop the fraud!” “Stop the count!” and “Cheaters!” Democratic officials were kicked, pushed and punched.
  • John Ashcroft, who became attorney general after the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore handed the presidency to George W. Bush, falsely claimed in 2001 that dead people had voted and that “votes have been bought, voters intimidated and ballot boxes stuffed.”
  • House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in 2003, trying to create a “permanent majority,” forced through a Texas redistricting that shifted six House seats to Republicans — and when Democratic legislators left the state to block the scheme, DeLay attempted to use the FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration to track them down.
  • The Supreme Court’s conservative majority stacked the deck for Republicans with its 2010 Citizens United decision, which made it possible for wealthy interests to flood elections with unlimited, unregulated “dark money,” and its 2013 gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which invited GOP-led states to restrict voting in ways that disproportionately affect voters of color. Republican senators cemented the high court’s reputation as an arm of the GOP when from 2016 into 2017 they blocked Obama for 11 months from filling the vacancy left by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death.

Long before the dysfunction of the T____ era:

  • Gingrich in 1995 announced that he forced a shutdown of the federal government in part because he was asked to exit Air Force One via the rear stairway after a trip to Israel with President Bill Clinton. Republicans debuted a new era of manufactured crises over debt-limit deadlines, and repeated government shutdowns, whenever Democrats held the White House.
  • The Republican National Committee drafted an “autopsy” in 2013 after Mitt Romney lost to Obama, calling for more outreach to Black, Hispanic, Asian and gay Americans. GOP lawmakers in the House swiftly abandoned the idea, killing a comprehensive immigration reform bill that had sailed through the Senate by a bipartisan 68-32.
  • House Speaker John A. Boehner announced his retirement in 2015, later saying he was disgusted with the growing “circle of crazy” inside his party. Republicans “couldn’t govern at all,” Boehner wrote. “Incrementalism? Compromise? That wasn’t their thing,” Boehner wrote of the insurgents. “A lot of them wanted to blow up Washington. … They wanted wedge issues and conspiracies and crusades.” Boehner concluded that he was “living in Crazytown. … Every second of every day since Barack Obama became president, I was fighting one bats–t idea after another.”

Against that quarter-century of ruin, what we are living through today is just a continuation of the GOP’s direction for the past 30 years: the appeals to white nationalism, the sabotage of the functions of government, the routine embrace of disinformation, stoking the fiction of election fraud and the “big lie,” and the steady degradation of democracy.

Now, it seems, that degradation is accelerating….

As they avert their gaze from the cascading horrors of the failed coup, Republicans are instead looking to a familiar guide: Gingrich. The former speaker, now a board member of the pro-T____ America First Policy Institute, announced this year that he is serving as a consultant to House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy and his team.

No sooner had this been disclosed than Gingrich, on Fox News, threatened the imprisonment of lawmakers serving on the Jan. 6 committee, saying they’re “going to face a real risk of jail” after Republicans take over Congress. Throwing political opponents in jail for investigating an attack on the U.S. Capitol and a coup against the U.S. government?

Replied Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the committee: “This is what it looks like when the rule of law unravels.” But Gingrich knows that. He’s the one who first started tugging at the threads.