Tag Archives: US Congress

The Grim Dawn of 2021

4 Jan 2021 By in Politics Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

New Year’s Day in my corner of the world was wet and grim.  The temperature was in the thirties, and rain fell on the unmelted snow.  The freezing mix formed big slushy puddles, glazed the steps seditiously, left icicles on the downspouts.  Gradually the trees and bushes sank under the weight of the ice forming on their boughs.  The patio grew too dangerous to cross.

Then, after night fell at around 4:40, the ugly grey day morphed into a snowy night.  The tree boughs, now brilliant with snow, arched lower.  By 10pm, the branches of a birch tree taller than the house had drooped to within just a few feet of the ground!  It was weird and beautiful.  Stressful for the trees.  I photographed them before going to bed, knowing I might never see the like again.  At night, I heard a few too-heavy branches fall from somewhere, landing on the roof of the house with a thud.

I want to say “happy new year,” but it would be insincere.  It’s impossible to greet this January with optimism, to pay lip service to the notion of “being better.”  Mortal and political dangers lie immediately ahead, threatening to push the US, already battered from the numerous crises of 2020, into a state of irremediable catastrophe.  What 2021 immediately demands is stamina, renewed vigilance against the coronavirus, and the guts to face down Trump-related threats to our government and national security.

Just as I went to bed the other night wondering whether the birch tree would snap in the night, so I wonder whether the government of the US will survive the week.  Extraordinarily, in the next few days the pressures that have been building on the nation will culminate.

  • This week, we will see whether Congress will allow Trump to destroy the United States or whether it will at last defy him, uphold the Electoral College, and be true to the will of the people and the Constitution.
  • We will see whether Trump will win his struggle to control the Republican party or whether his efforts will produce an all-out schism.
  • Will Mitch McConnell find a way to prevent the challenge to the Electoral College from going forward?  Only if anti-Trump forces in the Senate find a way to avert the EC challenge will the Republican Party, as we know it, survive this week.
  • Donald Trump’s conniving to hold on to an office he knows he lost is a self-interested quest that has nothing to do with his Constitutional duties.  He is a criminal and a grave threat to national security.  With the prospect of an ugly showdown in the House and Senate looming, calls for Trump’s impeachment or resignation are likely to grow.

Will the forces of good be strong enough to keep the nation from buckling under this week? The answer will come in the next 36 hours.

Devin Nunes Experiments With a Race to the Bottom

14 Nov 2019 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , 5 Comments


How congressman Devin Nunes behaved on the opening day of the House’s public impeachment hearings epitomizes how loyalty to Trump jeopardizes the personal honor of every House Republican while threatening the viability of the Republican Party.

The televised hearings invite a nationwide audience of millions to observe and evaluate the merits of every political actor involved in a momentous and rare Constitutional proceeding.  As the ranking Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes used his opening statement to deliver a partisan tirade, airing longstanding grievances irrelevant to the day’s proceedings, maligning his Democratic colleagues as liars, and insulting witnesses George Kent and William Taylor, whose accomplishments and integrity plainly far exceeded Nunes’s own.

Nunes and other Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee are intent on defending President Trump, but they have not really thought far enough ahead to understand how their prejudice in his favor will come across to citizens, who are counting on Congress to examine the president’s behavior fairly and impartially.  The public hearings are a special test of Republican leadership and integrity, because millions of well-informed Americans already know that President Trump has abused his power for personal political gain–not least because the president’s official spokesman, Mick Mulvaney, has already told them so.  Likewise, millions of Americans, including some of Mr. Nunes’s constituents, undoubtedly realize that the president’s behavior is an indefensible deviation from his Constitutionally sworn duties and a challenge to Congress.  They are looking to see whether Republican lawmakers have the courage and independence to admit that Trump’s personal behavior threatens everything republican government stands for.  Will House Republicans fail to admit that Trump must be stopped?

It was doubly ironical to witness Nunes’s crude attacks on the Democrats, given that the hearings were imbued with a concern for our national security and a patriotic determination to safeguard our republican form of government–issues historically central to the strength of the GOP.  Democrats came off as patriotic defenders of our national integrity, whereas Nunes’s petty assertions must have dismayed anyone who cares about curbing Russian aggression or has been part of American efforts to support the principle of self-determination abroad.  The injury that Nunes’s strategy inflicted fell mainly on his own personal reputation, for his fellow-Republicans and he tarnished themselves in defense of indefensible things.

House Republicans may be scared.  Yet what is the nature of the hold Trump has on them?  When will they see that their own best interest lies in being silent and attending solely to the facts presented, rather than whining about the unfairness of the proceedings?  Nunes’s election margins back home in his district are diminishing;  he might fear his chances of reelection are doomed unless he can count on votes from Trump’s base.  It’s depressing to think that Republican congressmen have nothing more valuable or principled to offer voters.  When political analysts say that the Republican Party has become “the party of Trump,” this is what they mean.

Republicans have only to abandon Trump to slip free of all these difficulties.  Perhaps as the evidence mounts, Nunes and his ilk will see the wisdom of cutting Trump loose, a dramatic act that would give new life to embattled republican (and Republican) ideals.

RELATED
Impeach Trump, An Enemy of the Constitution
If the GOP Is Wise, It Will Dump Trump Now

If the GOP Is Wise, It Will Dump Trump Now

23 Oct 2019 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , , 3 Comments


From my vantage here in Chicago, I can sense the forces in favor of Donald Trump’s impeachment and removal from office building among Republicans on Capitol Hill.  Even as David Brooks has insisted that impeachment is a political mistake, even as Tamara Keith and other analysts see political “tribalism” as ineluctably binding Republican legislators to President Trump, one can read events as building toward a directly opposite result, and one very liberating and propitious for all the perplexed Republicans now “hiding in the tall grass,” uncharacteristically quiet and desiring at all costs to avoid the press.

One sign of a change in Republican sentiment is that vocal defense of the President has stopped.  Until lately, leading Republicans have eschewed impeachment as a spurious partisan maneuver, insisting in the face of the Democrat-led initiative that the president is innocent of any action meeting the Constitution’s definition of an impeachable offense (“treason, bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors”).  Since September 19, however, when word of the President’s efforts to strong-arm Ukraine into giving him political dirt against Joe Biden began circulating, the White House has itself supplied prima facie confirmation of Trump’s determination to use his official powers for personal ends.

With remarkable speed, the president has moved from doing wrong in private to openly testing the proposition that he can do no wrong. He has breezily defended his actions as a matter of “style.”  He has gone so far as to make public statements at odds with his Constitutional duties and responsibilities, denying the legitimacy of, and declining to cooperate with, the House impeachment inquiry, and railing against the “phony” emoluments clause.

The President has moved onto dangerous new ground, all but thumbing his nose at anyone who would insist that he adhere to the Constitution.  This was the significance of Mick Mulvaney’s open admission of a quid pro quo: Trump expects his fellow Republicans to tolerate his dirty dealings and “get over it.”  As though the Constitution is something to go beyond.

Everyone who passed civics grasps that Trump is violating federal election laws.  Once fair elections go by the boards, nothing will be left of the republic, either.

As public servants who have their own oaths to uphold, their own powers to wield, Republican lawmakers can hardly fail to notice how Trump is blossoming into a fearful liability: a president without fealty to their own political needs or principles, an interloper who, having cannibalized their once “grand” party, is intent on desecrating its remains, as in his disastrous unilateral decision to withdraw US troops from Syria and abandon the Kurds.  Trump wants Republicans to do more to defend him.  Yet why should congressional Republicans remain loyal to a president deviating so wildly from his Constitutional job description, which is to execute the will of Congress and respect its laws?

Republicans are supposedly afraid of cutting Donald Trump loose.  What, really, would the downside be?  After Trump’s removal from office, the very conservative Mike Pence would be the incumbent president.  Trump’s much-talked-of base supposedly wouldn’t like this, but let’s face it, this is something no one can know.  What will Trump be, when the amplifiers are turned off?  The Republican Party is still lousy with political talent (much of it in abeyance).  Boosted back into a commanding position through a gutsy act of patriotism, the GOP could find redemption, enjoying a new and more broad-based popularity.  It could even remake itself in time to beat the Democrats in 2020.  Nikki Haley, anyone?  She’s on a long list of Republican alternates published the other day in the Rolling Stone.

Image: Black and white screen-shot of Donald Trump just before his inauguration,
© 2019 Susan Barsy

RELATED:
“If Republicans Ever Turn On Trump, It Will Happen All At Once” (FiveThirtyEight)

Impeach Trump, an Enemy of the Constitution

9 Oct 2019 By in Politics Tags: , , 20 Comments

Dear Friends,

Impeaching President Trump is a patriotic necessity, one that every American regardless of party should support.  As Trump’s behavior becomes ever more brazen and erratic, every American needs to voice support for the impeachment process per se and do everything possible to encourage Republican lawmakers to join in removing Trump from office quickly.  I say this without having any axe to grind against the President or the GOP.  Unless the political class unites around the goal of removing him from office, our nation will have no future and the GOP itself will wither and die.

It’s clear from the papers that President Trump sought to coerce the Ukrainian government to come up with dirt that would harm a political opponent while helping the president’s own election chances.  Some people, like Senator Rob Portman, have temporized, saying that the president’s action was unwise but not impeachable.  Portman is wrong because if the President’s behavior is allowed, our entire election system will become a farce.  It will become a farce simply by allowing the President to continue on this way throughout the 2020 presidential campaign.  Where does his conduct leave every other candidate, Democrat or Republican, who runs for office but plays by the rules?  His lawless behavior is an affront to everyone else who has legitimately won an elective post.  Publicly inviting foreign governments to meddle in our affairs, as Trump has done, demonstrates a resolve to defy–rather than defend–our written and living Constitution.

Personally, I am outraged at the development of a corrupt set of transnational relations that a sitting president is hoping will lessen his dependence on American voters.  The president bets that he can hold on to power by conjuring up a climate of public opinion that degrades every other public figure and undermines confidence in our once-efficacious and illustrious political system.  The damage that he is inflicting on his own party, on the nation, and on blameless public servants is mounting daily.  If the American public cries out loudly for impeachment, Republicans will listen.

No one but former Senator Jeff Flake has the guts to admit how many enemies Trump has within his own party.  (The Arizona Republican, speaking to USA Today last month, estimated that 35 GOP senators would vote to remove Trump if the vote were private.)  Think of all the honorable people Trump has dismissed and humiliated, the Tillersons and McMasters of the world.  Where are they now?  If I were Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell, or Marco Rubio, I’d be working furiously behind the scenes to dump Donald Trump and expel him from the Republican Party.  If the Senate GOP hangs with Trump, the senators will go down in history as the group that destroyed our nation through inactivity.  If, though, they turn against Trump, the GOP will save the nation from a very bad man, and the party’s prospects will brighten again.

I am not a firebrand.  Frankly, I wish this whole terrifying mess Trump is causing would go away.  But he really is turning into a political Lucifer, destroying the “natural order” of the government and aspiring to a kind of power at odds with what the Constitution envisioned.  This morning the Times reports his decision to spurn cooperation with the House impeachment inquiry, branding it “illegitimate” and “partisan,” whereas if he has done nothing wrong one would think he would be eager to clear his name.  Congress definitely has the right to gather information prior to charging Trump with articles of impeachment, and no amount of bluster will take that right away.

Again, I entreat every patriot to get behind impeachment as loudly as possible and to urge the House and Senate to see it through. Perhaps massive pro-impeachment rallies are the way to go.

RELATED ARTICLES:
George Will, “The Spiraling President Adds Self-Impeachment To His Repertory” (10 Oct 2019)

Senator Flake

18 Feb 2019 By in Politics, The Trump Years Tags: , , , , , 2 Comments

The former Senator from Arizona speaking at the Union League Club of Chicago's George Washington's Birthday Celebration.
Over the weekend, I went to hear Senator Jeff Flake at the Union League Club. Every February, the club hosts a big dinner to celebrate George Washington’s birthday and invites a guest speaker. This year, Jeff Flake of Arizona spoke. This was the 131st first year the dinner was held.

I believe that whenever one has a chance to see a major public figure, one should take the opportunity.   Flake has just left the Senate after one term but he is definitely presidential material, and I will be surprised if he fails to run for president one day. He faces one major impediment to his ambition, however: at the moment he is very nearly a man without a party.

Flake comes across as a very poised, articulate, and thoughtful conservative. He describes himself as having fallen in love with politics at an early age. He served twelve years in the House of Representatives prior to his elevation to the Senate. Then along came Trump, the game changer who has cast Flake into a sea of difficulty.  Flake is one of the few Republicans in Congress to have broken openly with the president instead of going along with him in a sheepish and cowardly way.

Most Republican senators have tried to “find common ground” with the president as though doing so does not compromise their dignity. They have chosen to collaborate with him, even though it cheapens them by association. Trump treats the Senate in a high-handed and condescending manner. The Republican-led Senate has permitted itself to be humiliated. Republican senators endure Trump for the sake of party domination.

In the rare cases when the Republican majority finds that it cannot comply with Trump, its opposition to the president is tacit, as was true last week when Trump was shut out of the budget negotiations and told afterward that he must accept the negotiated deal. By and large, Republican senators have watched silently, however, as Trump has destroyed the soul of the “Grand Old Party.” It’s a peculiar situation, because it’s not clear whether most leading Republicans genuinely endorse Trump’s ideas. What they see is that Trump is charismatic and that his charisma is pumping up Republican power. Perhaps they believe they can outlast Trump, then return to what they were before.

Jeff Flake has no such illusions. He cannot stand with a president whose followers chant, “Lock her up.” During Flake’s tenure in Congress, he witnessed the gradual erosion of comity on Capitol Hill. When he began, it was still the custom of senators and representatives to move their families to Washington. Political differences tended to evaporate when members on either side of the aisle knew one another’s children by name. On weekends, representatives worshipped together and watched their kids play sports, developing friendships that softened the edges of partisan conflict.

That changed, Flake recalled, with Newt Gingrich’s speakership.  Gingrich told House Republicans to leave their families at home, because, on the weekends, he expected them to be back in their districts campaigning. As a result, the US now has “a commuter Congress,” with members flying in to work a few days a week.

Reluctant to treat Democrats as “the enemy” and unwilling to stand with the president, Flake has learned that Republicans in his state increasingly demand this very thing. Whereas “the economy” or “jobs” used to top the list of Republican voters’ concerns, “Where do you stand on Trump?” has displaced them, according to recent polls. Out of sync with both his base and GOP leadership, Flake saw re-election was futile.  He left the Senate last month.  In retirement, he seems to have embraced the philosophy of the first president we had gathered to honor. For, as that great man once observed,

If, to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The rest is in the hands of God.