Putin’s Lapdogs in Congress

The imbroglio among Republican House members during the recent battle over the foreign aid supplemental was significant on numerous fronts, not the least of which being the estrangement of Speaker Mike Johnson from nearly half of his colleagues. Unable to pass the security supplemental, or much of anything else with a chance of enactment, with Republican votes, Johnson (like Republican speakers before him) has come to depend on a broad swath of Democrats to keep the government functioning and, potentially, even to hang onto his job.

But there is another aspect of the recent legislative imbroglio that needs to be discussed, and that is the enthusiasm of some in Johnson’s party to parrot Vladimir Putin’s propaganda in the halls of Congress. It is one thing to have principled opposition to spending tens of billions of dollars without applying conditions, demanding performance requirements or other forms of accountability. But it is quite something else to use the congressional microphone, and the prominence that comes with being a member, to promote distortions that are specifically designed to mislead the American people.

The allegation of such deceitful misbehavior comes not from Democrats but from senior House Republicans like Michael McCaul (TX) who decried that his Republican colleagues are deliberately spreading misinformation McCaul isn’t some inconsequential blatherskite hoping to make it onto the evening news; he is chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, with access to the highest levels of U.S. intelligence. Putin, he declared, has “unfortunately … infected a good chunk of my party’s base.”

And McCaul is not alone among well-briefed chairmen in calling out his Republican colleagues. Mike Turner (OH), who leads the Intelligence Committee, told CNN “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages – some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.”  

One can only imagine the response of congressional leaders had such foreign propaganda been articulated on the floor of Congress to sow dissention and confusion among the American people  in the period leading up to World War II!

Oh, wait! Actually, there was a well-planned and expertly executed effort by Nazi sympathizers and Berlin propogandists to deceive the American people as to the nature of the war in Europe and thus the need for the United States to stand up to German fascism. The efforts of Charles A. Lindberg, Father John Coughlin, the German-American Bund and the Silver Legion are well known efforts to keep the United States from becoming embroiled in a second European conflagration. Their exhortations were effective and public sentiment reflected broad support for such hesitancy. In 1940, Lord Lothian, the British ambassador to Washington, said that 95% of Americans were opposed to entering the war; a year before Pearl Harbor, only 11% of Americans wanted the U.S. to defend Britain. Even in the aftermath of the Japanese sneak attack on the U.S. fleet in Hawaii, a substantial percentage of Americans remained resistant to joining the European war until Hitler took the matter out of their hands a few days later.

The pro-fascist speeches were not limited to giant rallies held in venues like Madison Square Garden and the Los Angeles Coliseum. As historian Bradley Hart documents in his important study, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States, Nazism had admirers within the Congress who voiced views drafted in Berlin and relayed by German spy George Viereck to willing dupes like Sens. Ernest Lundeen (DFL-MN) and Burton Wheeler (D-MT) and Reps. Hamilton Fish.(R-NY) and Jacob Thorkelson (R-MT). Not only did these fascist sympathizers submit into the Congressional Record statements written by Nazi propagandists, but they used the official frank to mail millions of these statements across the country at no cost.  By 1940, journalist David Lawrence declared, the country had been deluged with distorted, pro-Nazi bunkum “planted here and there … where almost any argument against opposing [Roosevelt’s] policy [of aiding Britain] would be seized upon as valid,” including by “certain members of Congress.”

Today, alleges Intelligence chairman Mike Turner, members of his party are repeating Russian propaganda on floor of the House of Representatives. “It is absolutely true,” he says. “We see, directly coming from Russia, attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages.”  

We have enough trouble with chronic hyperbole, dishonesty and inflammatory bombast by the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, who incomprehensibly declared in 2018 that he trusted Putin more than American intelligence agencies (a statement Sen. John McCain recalled demonstrated the unprecedented and “abject” debasing of an American president “before a tyrant.”) We do not need false fulminations that originate in the Kremlin tainting the already pitiable state of what passes for “debate” on the House floor. It’s time for Johnson to hold his members accountable for echoing such claptrap; if he can’t win support from his Republican colleagues, perhaps he can enlist Democrats again to restore some integrity to the debate in Congress.

A Profile in Courage Moment

No person in modern history has assumed the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives with a shorter tenure in Congress, less leadership experience or lower expectations for success than Mike Johnson. It took a humiliating 15 ballots for his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, to win the position just nine months earlier after making major concessions that significantly undercut the powers of his office and ultimately led to his ignominious downfall. 

There was little reason to believe that Johnson, no one’s first choice for the job, would prove much more successful than McCarthy or previous Republican speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan. Handicapped at efforts within the GOP conference to pass legislation, even “must pass” bills that keep government functioning, they all were forced to cut deals with Democratic presidents and, more importantly, with the Democratic minority in Congress to govern, which earned them the undeserved enmity of their GOP colleagues. 

Unsurprisingly, the nihilistic caucus led by zealots like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie have been enraged by Johnson’s collaboration with Democrats and the Biden administration on aid to Ukraine, Israel and Gaza. For Johnson, the threats went beyond the issue of keeping his job; also at stake was his obligation as party leader to attempt, however slim the odds, to preserve the tentative consensus in the Republican conference that had made him speaker, a consensus chronically fractured by the brazen renegades who measure success by face time on Fox and the campaign money it generates rather than by substantive legislation enacted. 

Failure to calm those conference divisions already sacrificed a likely bipartisan border control policy. Further capitulation risked the very possible collapse of Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression, Israeli vulnerability to Iranian-sponsored attacks and a worsening humanitarian calamity in Gaza. It was obvious that the legislation Johnson was delaying, in an effort to salve the conference hardliners, would easily pass with large bipartisan majorities if he allowed it to be debated on the floor in the first place. Just as Boehner had tanked the bipartisan Senate immigration deal in 2013, however, it seemed Johnson lacked both the skill and the will to defy his implacable minority and cut a deal with Democrats. 

To the astonishment of many, Johnson did not buckle. Rather than circumventing the Rules Committee, Johnson blew the bills through it’ with the support of the panels Democrats, neutering the veto power of several Republicans placed on the Committee by McCarthy to ensure the far Right would control the flow of legislation to the floor. Collaboration with the minority on Rules is a congressional rarity; the minority reflexively opposes rules, even if they intend to vote for the underlying bill. It was an act of defiance by Johnson but also a notable act of statesmanship by Jim McGovern’s minority committee Democrats.

“This is a critical time right now, a critical time on the world stage,” Johnson declared. “I can make a selfish decision … but I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing.” Doing “the right thing” not only meant the creative Rules strategy but also severing the foreign assistance bill from controversial immigration policies demanded by most Republicans, recognizing that linking the two would perpetuate a legislative stand-off with the Senate and President Biden. Johnson will certainly give the conference a vote on a tough immigration bill, which will pass into oblivion like H.R. 2, the earlier MAGA border restrictions.

Johnson’s maneuver does not erase his past association with many of the most extremist elements in his party. And it is noteworthy that both the Rule and the bill passed by massive margins, although a majority of Republicans voted against final passage (while all Democrats were supportive). Nevertheless, Johnson deserves credit for defying the threats and allowing the House to act on a consensus bill notwithstanding the inevitable challenge it will provoke to his continued role as speaker. True, some Democrats likely will stand with Johnson against any motion to vacate the chair (which was not the case with McCarthy, whom many Democrats believed had consistently lied to them). And he likely believes he will survive since many Republicans understandably do not believe yet another speaker coup is in their best interest at this stage in the election cycle. Even so, it is a fair bet that Johnson will remain a pariah among those in his party with the loudest, if not the most reasoned, voices.

But believing he would survive a challenge does not vitiate the importance of Johnson’s decision to move this legislation. We can debate whether Johnson’s determined leadership constitutes a “profile in courage” moment, but it surely is an important reminder that contrary to popular beliefs, elected officials do make decisions, when the stakes are serious, that run contrary to their own political self-interest. During the furious negotiations that preceded passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2009 and 2010, numerous frontline Democrats who had narrowly won their seats in Republican districts nevertheless cast their votes with full knowledge their support could be a political death sentence, as it was for many.

Urged by some not to sacrifice a seat he had fought so hard to win in central Virginia, Tom Perriello voted for the bill and was defeated in 2010. “If the worst thing that every happens to me in my life is that I lost my seat in Congress because I voted to give 30 million people health insurance,” he told me, “I can live with that.” As noted in Arc of Power, I did not hear a word of complaint from any of those who lost their seats that year because of a principled vote (while others in similar circumstances voted “no” and lost anyway). 

Nor was the ACA an isolated experience. In the 1990s, a pair of freshmen women – Karen Shepherd and Karan English – represented swing districts in Arizona and Utah respectively and served on the Natural Resources Committee, on which I was staff director. Both strong environmentalists, they consistently voted for legislation to create and strengthen national parks and other public land protections. During one mark-up, I assured them we did not need their votes to pass the bills their district  opponents would doubtless criticize them for supporting. “I came here to vote for this kind of legislation,” one told me, the other nodding in agreement. They both lost their seats and, I suspect, never regretted their principled stands. John McCain’s famous thumbs down on repealing the ACA, a bill he had opposed enacting a few years before, is another important example.

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi likes to remind members, “We came to do a job, not to keep a job,” and while many Americans may dismiss the saying as sophistry, Johnson’s actions on the supplemental serve as a reminder that there are politicians, even those with whom we vigorously disagree on policy grounds, who do have integrity. We need to recognize them when they act on principle and remind us that the partisan, polarized gridlocked Congress is not due simply to outdated features in its design (which certainly do exist!) but to legislative saboteurs who revel in their ability to disparage the very institution they took an oath to respect.

Too often in the current congressional environment, when a member reaches across the aisle to collaborate with a member of the other party, they become a target for opprobrium, excoriated by party activists, big givers and all those who use social media to turn would-be heroes into political pincushions. When a leader rises to the occasion and puts national interest first, as Speaker Johnson did this week against all expectations, it is in all our interests to say, “Well done!”

Disorder in the House

Watching the State of the Union last Thursday, it seemed like half the country was hyperventilating due to their uncontrollable rage at Joe Biden while the other half was holding its breath in hopes the president wouldn’t trip going up (or down) the stairs of the dais in the House chamber. Now that the annual event is over and the mostly favorable reviews are rolling in, it is a good opportunity to focus on an aspect of the occasion that the Congress must address unless they are resigned to continually reenforcing the public’s already dismal regard for the institution. 

Only 12 percent in a recent poll claimed to have a favorable view of Congress, the poorest showing memory. When former speaker Nancy Pelosi was asked about the low approval ratings some years ago, she expressed astonishment that anyone held a positive view. Yet the Congress of which she spoke, despite the energetic feuding and hyperpolarized parties, resembles a courteous knitting group compared to the undisciplined clown show on full display in the House chamber these days.)

Geezer alert: I realize that complaining about how congressional behavior was so much better in days past makes me sound like an aging veteran of Capitol Hill who longs for the long-gone days of disagreeing without being disagreeable. But given the general agreement that it would take some improvement in self-management for the current crop of legislators to rise even to the level of “disagreeable,” I might be on to something here.

Not that members needed to wait for something broadcast nationally, in prime time, to unveil their puerile and discourteous behavior. Schoolyard epithets and potty-mouth expletives cascade from congressional yaps on such a regular basis that even the most offensive outburst barely registers anymore. In 2019, a survey of the use of swearing by public officials on Twitter reported a marked increase since 2015, the Year of the Golden Escalator. (Run-of-the-mill public swearing had risen from just 58 incidents in 2014 to an impressive 1,225 by the end of the third quarter of 2019. The increased use of the big two words was even more impressive: “sh*t” rose from a measly 21 instances to 558 and the grandaddy of all curses, the F-bomb, rose from zero to 579 in 2018.)

Historians of congressional smuttiness will doubtless trace back this implosion of congressional courtesy to the explosive outburst of Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) in 2009, chastising President Obama as a “liar” during a joint session on health care. The insult earned Wilson a disapproving look from Speaker Pelosi that could have frozen blood in the veins. (It also earned Wilson hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions over the following days.) Today’s observers of what passes for congressional discourse have become inured to the repetition of the slur by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-GA) or Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who unleash it whenever they feel it is appropriate (which is apparently frequently).

And while it is true that Donald Trump’s childish reliance on profanity appears to have given license to Republicans to curse blithely on the public record, the practice is not unknown among Democrats either. Who can (or would want to) forget the very helpful comment of Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) about Trump, “We’re gonna go in and impeach the motherf—er” in 2019, or presidential candidate Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) denouncing Trump’s statements as “a bullshit soup.” 

It is almost comical to recall that the speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, was punished by his colleagues forty years ago when he denounced a particularly egregious act of mendacity by Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA) as “the lowest thing” he had ever seen on the floor of the House. Not only was O’Neill’s remark unremarkably modest, even by the standards of the 1980’s, but it undoubtedly was accurate as well. The difference is that the presiding officer (O’Neill’s roommate!) demonstrated integrity and respect for propriety (and the House rules) and, notwithstanding the embarrassment to his friend, affirmed the objection. 

Prior to this week’s SOTU, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-GA), aware that past outbursts from Green and her zany MAGA soulmates made Republicans sound like a roiling lynch mob, urged his colleagues to behave with “decorum” during President Biden’s speech. He might as well have delivered his admonition to the tropical bird house at the National Zoo. He was, after all, lecturing people like Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), who recently insulted Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas at an official hearing as being “a reptile with no balls.” Despite Johnson’s admonition, Biden’s speech produced a cacophony of Republican insults and jeers aimed at the president, who literally laughed off the slights and challenged his critics to legislate rather than castigate.

Five years ago, I testified before the Committee on Modernization of the Congress that was seeking recommendations for improving the functioning of the House. “Organizational reform alone cannot heal the partisan discord that frustrates the members of this House and the citizens of the country,” I told the committee. Noting the “loss of the collegiality crucial to bipartisan collaboration,” I suggested the members consider implementing “tougher rules governing floor speech [that] could help refocus floor debate on substantive issues and lower the political temperature.” Pretty obviously, this wise counsel was not adopted.

Members who regularly rely on profane language bring disrespect on the institution in which they serve. One can reasonably assume that some of the worst offenders welcome the opportunity to heap opprobrium on Congress. This is a role for the leadership who presumably understand their responsibility in preserving public confidence in our institutions of government. When Speaker Pelosi rarely employed harsh language – she once referred to a Senate intelligence bill as “a piece of crap” — she quickly admonished herself by adding, “pardon my French.” The use of profanity even by a president earned a steely look of reproach from the speaker.

Amending the House rules to chastise intemperate speech wouldn’t single-handedly restore collegiality to the Congress, but it sure wouldn’t hurt. It is too much to expect from Speaker Johnson, who lives under a threat of being ousted by his own party. But if Democrats have a chance to revise the rules next January, it would be a good idea to upgrade the level of speech that is considered acceptable on the House floor and in its committee rooms to something above a locker room vocabulary of non-deleted expletives. 

Trump and Nixon Share More Than Impeachment

Donald Trump has several things in common with Richard Nixon: both were elected president; both were defeated for president. If things go as seems likely, Trump will join Nixon as one of the very few men ever nominated by their party three times for the presidency.

Trump is also following in Nixon’s footsteps in attempting to undermine national policy to enhance the chances for his election, notwithstanding the human misery he causes.

As bipartisan Senate negotiations on immigration policy seem poised to produce a breakthrough, Trump has urged Senate and House Republicans to abandon the discussion. Alternatively, if Sen. Jim Lankford (R-OK), among others, insist on doing their job and completing the compromise legislation, Trump advises (without having seen the compromise) his myrmidons to vote it down and let the crisis continue to worsen.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Trump’s legislative inaction exacerbated problems on the border. Trump and his Republican sycophants did next to nothing when they were in complete control of government except rebuild some pre-existing fencing along the border, a solution some have called a “6^th century solution to a 21^st century problem.” Trump and his acolytes have used their public megaphones to broadcast falsely that under President Biden, the U.S.-Mexico border is wide open. To hundreds of thousands of poor, abused and repressed people, that has sounded like an invitation to flock to the border, which is exactly what they have done.

If the Senate negotiations succeed, Speaker Mike Johnson and his band of zealots are warning the bill will be dead on arrival, as occurred when the Senate approved a bipartisan immigration package in 2013. House Republicans, every one of them up for re-election this year (unlike Lankford) in districts that are mostly slavishly devoted to Donald Trump, will likely heed the call of their party’s leaders and trash the deal.

The maneuver recalls Nixon’s well-documented secret maneuver on the eve of the nailbiter election of 1968. As Nixon biographer John Farrell, and Peter Baker of the New York Times, have both reported, Nixon was deeply worried that President Lyndon B. Johnson would secure a negotiated peace agreement just before the election, helping to pacify angry Democrats who would then reluctantly vote Johnson’s surrogate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Nixon was having none of that, as Baker reported. He ordered his top staff to throw a “monkey wrench” into the peace talks to prevent any agreement from being finalized before election day. Nixon instructed future chief of staff H.R. Haldeman to promise the teetering South Vietnamese government a better deal if and when Nixon became president.

“There’s really no doubt this was a step beyond the normal political jockeying … given the stakes with all the lives,” said John A. Farrell, who discovered the notes in the Nixon Library that the former president neglected to destroy. Nixon denied any personal involvement, but the papers Farrell uncovered dispositively prove he was in it up to his jowls. Nixon worked the deal through Anna Chennault, widow of a prominent World War II pilot and a major GOP fundraiser in her own right. Relaying a message to the Vietnamese from “her boss,” Baker reported, Chennault advised, “Hold on, we are gonna win.”

LBJ learned of the conspiracy through wiretaps and surveillance and was unamused. For good reason – the Logan Act bars private citizen interference in foreign relations for just such a reason – Johnson considered charging Nixon with treason but backed off such a volatile action on the eve on an election. The peace negotiations stalled, Nixon eked out a narrow victory, and the war and deaths on both sides dragged on through much of his first term in the White House.

“Nixon committed a crime to win the presidential election,” concluded Ken Hughes of the Miller Center of the University of Virginia. It proved to be a dry run for the felonies committed in 1972 to hang onto the office.

Trump’s current efforts to manipulate the Congress to torpedo an immigration deal – one that likely will cost Biden support on the Left – may not rise to the level of treason, but it matches Nixon in treachery. Sabotaging the incumbent president – not to mention your own party in Congress – so that you can run against that person’s failure is going low, by Michelle Obama’s 2016 standard. This time, Trump’s disloyalty, and that of his cultish devotees in Congress, needs to be exposed to voters ahead of the election.

Avoid the 14th Amendment Rabbit Hole

Democrats are making a big mistake in attempting to use the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution to force Donald Trump off state primary and general election ballots. My objections are both constitutional and strategic, and a discussion seems in order as the controversial strategy is  picking up speed and heading for the Supreme Court (where, I have no doubt, a certain death awaits).

Yes, there are numerous scholars of the Right and Left with considerable legal training who advocate employing section 3 of the amendment that prohibits those who, having taken an oath of loyalty to the United States, “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” from holding public office. Initially intended as a mechanism for barring former Confederates from gaining state or federal office – the reference to “insurrection or rebellion” having a crystal clear meaning when it was ratified in 1868 – Trump opponents now see the language as a way to keep the former president out of the presidential racer due to his encouragement of the insurrection on January 6, 2021.

When the issue is Congress choosing to exclude members, one might have a reasonable argument about exclusion since the Constitution, in section 5 of Article 1 declares that “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.” State constitutions grant the same power to their legislatures. As was just demonstrated with former Rep. George Santos (R-NY), Congress can boot one of its members without a formal adjudication by a neutral court (although I disagreed with this action as well). But barring someone from running for or serving as president without such a neutral judgment should be a very troubling precedent regardless of one’s opinion of Donald Trump.

The problem, of course, is who makes the judgment that a person has engaged in insurrection or rebellion (let alone what those terms might mean). In 35 states, that power would presumably rest with the secretary of state, who is an elected official and, in today’s political environment, undoubtedly a partisan one. (In other states, including Florida, Oklahoma and Texas, the governor appoints the secretary of state, which provides little prospect for avoiding partisan politics). In Maine and Colorado, Democratic secretaries of state have ruled Trump off the ballot already; in other states, including Democratic California, a decision was made to allow him access. The issue will soon be resolved, soon and decisively, by the U.S. Supreme Court, and I wouldn’t advise betting against Trump.

In a hyper-partisan environment, I am not comfortable leaving such decisions to those with a political interest in the ruling. The 14^th amendment is silent on the question of whether participation in the insurrection needs to be affirmed by a court, but it is fair to say that on such a momentous decision, leaving it in the hands of a low-level, political state official is irredeemably irresponsible.

At the moment, the person in question is Trump, who will be judged by a jury for his activity on January 6^th; if he is found guilty, then sure, XIV/3 makes sense. But suppose it wasn’t Donald Trump. Suppose a charge of “giv[ing] aid or comfort” to those challenging the authority of the government were raised against Sen. George McGovern for supporting draft resistance during the Vietnam war or Rep. Maxine Waters for embracing demonstrations against police brutality. Yes, from a liberal’s perspective, those examples appear to be very different from encouraging interference in the counting of electoral ballots or storming the Capitol. Well, how about those members of Congress who objected to counting electoral ballots in the disputed Bush v. Gore election of 2000 or in the Clinton/Trump election of 2016? What about public officials, or those seeking election to public office, who sanctioned  demonstrations against the Pentagon in the 1960s and 1970s, actions that often grew to include violent activity?

History is rife with the dangers that befall those who abandon institutional and procedural guardrails for momentary or partisan gain. Can anyone doubt that diluting the standard for challenging a candidate’s eligibility will not be turned back on Democrats? One need only look at the growing frequency in the use of impeachment actions since the Nixon vote in 1974 and the Clinton vote in 1999, or the increased use of censure resolutions in the House, or tit-for-tat changes in Senate Rule XXII concerning cloture to appreciate that loosed from historical constraints, such trends exponentially rear out of control like a legislative Kraken.

Sure, the examples of Democratic exhortations to “insurrection” or “giving aid and comfort” to uprisings seem minor compared to the enormity of Trump’s criminality in 2021, and such challenges are unlikely to be upheld in court (as is the tactic against Trump). But losing in court is only part of the price of pursuing such a strategy. Allegations, meritorious or not, will surely proliferate and candidates and parties will be compelled to spend millions in legal fees to fight the cases year after year, wasting vast sums that need to be spent on the elections where voters will make judgments about who should hold public office.

In my view, investing such time and resources in a doomed 14^th amendment battle is further evidence of a desire to short-circuit the political process and relieve people of the hard work of battling it out in campaigns. Winning a symbolic victory in Maine or Colorado is ephemeral and pursuing such a course in more states consumes valuable time and money that needs to be devoted to ensuring that Donald Trump never comes anywhere near the Oval Office again. Frankly, we don’t have time for symbolic battles that conservatives will cite as evidence that Democrats are just as willing as Trump to tamper with the electoral process. 

The place to win elections is in campaigns; that’s where people need to devote their time, energy and money. Everything else is theater, and theater doesn’t win elections.

Personalize the Message

Republican intransigence over aid to Ukraine and Israel, as strategically indefensible as it may be, is about to hand Democrats a golden messaging opportunity for 2024. Unfortunately, unless Democrats demonstrate a greater willingness to use hardball messaging frames than they have to date, there is a good chance the opportunity will be missed, with catastrophic ramifications.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Democrats cannot misjudge how much danger the election season portends about the future of the country. They did so in 2016 when many candidates from Hillary Clinton down embraced the high-minded strategic advice of Michelle Obama: “When they go low, we go high.” Democrats cheered and handed the low-goers the keys to the White House. The House fell to the Republicans in 2023 despite great achievements in the first two years of the Biden administration; the Senate is on the precipice in 2024.

As noted in earlier editions of this blog, there are disturbing signs of Democrats again failing to get the messaging right. If Republicans are dumb enough to leave town without providing crucial aid to Israel and Ukraine, Democrats need to hold them accountable: not by engaging in longwinded diatribes about geopolitics, but by showing American voters the victims of Republican game-playing. 

Every child killed, every soldier wounded, every town over-run – every military or humanitarian casualty -needs to be laid at the doorstep of extremist Republicans who are playing parliamentary games to advance an extremist agenda that most Americans in and out of Congress reject on a bipartisan basis. These people not only support Dictator Don’s pledge to suspend democracy here at home, but they also want to abandon our allies on democracy’s front line. 

The same tactic – personalization of the message – needs to be utilized on other issues where the public and the bipartisan majority in Congress is solidly with Democrats. Every victim of a mass shooting is attributable to the obstinate refusal of Speaker Johnson and his Republican colleagues to allow the House to vote its will on gun legislation. Show the American people: here is what that victim looked like. Here is her grieving family. Run ads showing the faces of the victims and justifiably blame Republican intransigence and extremism.

Donald Trump vows to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Show a family that lost a parent or child to a medical crisis because they couldn’t afford hospitalization or couldn’t find affordable drugs. Spotlight a senior who didn’t get vaccinated because of Trump’s idiotic raves, and then died. Dare the voter: look at the faces of these needless victims and then consider empowering the crackpot party that is responsible for their misery.

Republicans want to ban mask-wearing during pandemics: show the videos of the scores of corpses being loaded into freezer trucks and the faces of the grieving family. (Also show the mask-wearing hypocrites on the floor of Congress.)

Three decades ago, Newt Gingrich headed up Gopac, the Republican messaging powerhouse that advised members who pleaded, “I wish I could speak like Newt.” The strategy essentially boiled down to: don’t say anything mild when something inflammatory is available. In describing Democrats, Gingrich urged his candidates to eschew the traditional verbiage of Congress and public policy schools; don’t admit your opponents share the same values or embrace the same principles. Use words like “betray,” “bizarre,” “hypocrisy,” and “sick” to inflame voters and frame opponents not as colleagues with whom you have a disagreement but rather as “self-serving … hypocritical … traitors” who want to destroy the country by destroying your rights and your freedoms. And say those words over and over again, irrespective of their resemblance to the truth. Repetition works. Say what you like about Newt: he understood the power of words.

Many Democrats were understandably repelled by (and dismissed use of) these tactic, believing voters would see through the hyperbole and reject the extremism. Thirty years later, after 7 years of Trump and three decades of an increasingly hysterical and unproductive House Republican Conference, one would hope we aren’t still taking the extreme Right lightly.

The point is not to resort to banal name-calling and slander to frame Republicans. But it is long past time to hold them accountable for the effects of their obstructionism and indifference. Show the faces and tell the stories of the Americans hurting because of Republican extremism and ineptitude; show them the villages and soldiers overseas who are suffering because Speaker Johnson and his minions would shut down the U.S. government that provides urgent assistance to those who are sacrificing to battle fascism and barbarism.

“Go high?” Not a chance. I’d rather follow Harry Truman’s advice when criticized for his hard-nosed condemnation of his Republican opponents. “I never did give anybody hell,” Truman said. “I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.” Let’s try that for a change.

If you haven’t finished your holiday gift purchases (and even if you think you have), please consider purchasing a copy of two of one of my books — “The Class of ’74: Congress After Watergate and the Roots of Partisanship,” “Arc of Power: Inside Nancy Pelosi’s Speakership 2005-2010,” “Sherlock Holmes and The Affair at Mayerling Lodge” or “The Further Undiscovered Archives of Sherlock Holmes” — all available on http://Amazon books. Thanks for your support for DOMEocracy and best wishes for happy holidays.

Congress Needs to Get a Grip

Nearly a quarter of Americans agree that “patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country” — the most in the nearly three years the question has been asked since Donald Trump’s presidency, a new survey by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the Brookings Institution says. https://www.prri.org/research/threats-to-american-democracy-ahead-of-an-unprecedented-presidential-election/In one of the notable understatements of our tumultuous era, Rep. Russell Fry (R-SC) recently observed that democracy “can be messy at times.” I beg to disagree. Messy is when you don’t clean up the Mixmaster after making cookies. Messy is going a month without making the bed. What is poisoning American politics these days is lightyears beyond messy; it is depressing, dispiriting and deeply hurtful to our own citizens and to observers around the world. And it is very dangerous because it fosters disdain for the basic institutions of government, especially among the young who have few memories of government functioning effectively.

No one should be under the misimpression that the Founding Fathers prized efficiency in statecraft. Nor is there anything particularly novel or surprising about passionate disagreements among the members of Congress (and the people who elect them).  “Every man who is a man, and not a jellyfish, is a partisan,” Rep. Jacob Fassett (R-NY) observed a century ago. “We were all elected by partisans because we were partisans. A man ought to have opinions and convictions.”  

But something very fundamental has changed for the worse. For decades, the standard for debate was set by Speaker Sam Rayburn who advised members to “disagree without being disagreeable.” Members referred to another member as “the gentleman” or “the gentlewoman” from this or that state; senatorial courtesy virtually prohibited campaigning against a colleague, regardless of policy differences. And any visitor to the chamber was to be accorded complete respect and deference, especially the president. But in recent years, with an increasing frequency and coarseness, prominent political leaders have embraced rhetoric better suited to ruffians than representatives. 

The deterioration of congressional comity was on full display in September, 2009, when Rep. Joe Wilson yelled “you lie” when President Barack Obama insisted that his new health law would not cover undocumented people. Nearly a decade and a half later, the disruptive Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly heckled Joe Biden during his State of the Union, calling the president “a liar” for reminding listeners that many in the Republican party have endorsed cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Earlier this year, Greene called fellow MAGA conservative Lauren Boebert a “little bitch” on the House floor. This month, Rep. Tim Burchett trolled after Kevin McCarthy, denouncing him as a “jerk,” a “chicken” and “pathetic” for allegedly elbowing Burchett, a McCarthy critic. At a hearing in the Senate, Markwayne Mullins rose from his chair to threaten fisticuffs with the president of the Teamsters Union. (Mullins, who had an eyeblink career as a mixed martial arts fighter, should know better than to risk going mano-a-mano with the Teamsters.)

Ill-tempered remarks in Congress are not particularly new, but they have gotten a whole lot more commonplace and coarse. Speaker Tip O’Neill was reprimanded by the House in 1984 for denouncing the bank bencher Newt Gingrich for a grotesque distortion of Democratic lawmakers. The criticism leveled by O’Neill — “the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress” — seems painfully mild in today’s climate on Capitol Hill.

Confrontations have sometimes moved beyond words; the caning of Sen. Charles Sumner  by Rep. Preston Brooks in 1856 is widely known, and Yale historian Joanne Freeman has documented the frequent fisticuffs in the ante-bellum Congress in her award-winning Field of Blood. More recently, Robert Dornan throttled Tom Downey on the House floor and Don Young held a knife to the throat of his Republican colleague, John Boehner.

The use of supercharged language and threats of physical violence has escalated in recent years, further exacerbating the deep tensions that course through the modern Congress and the electorate as well. The internet-generated obsession with seeking  attention certainly bears some of the responsibility. So, too, does the apocryphal and incendiary language of Donald Trump who, among his many inciteful remarks, once called on supporters in Iowa to “knock the crap” out of potential hecklers; later, he famously (and perhaps criminally) encouraged the January 6, 2023 siege of the Capitol. Last week, he referred to political opponents as “vermin.”

Trump is impossible to corral, but congressional leaders need to work a lot harder to prevent their institution from deteriorating further into a legislative version of the Jerry Springer show. The hysterical and bullying persiflage is costing the Congress respect at home while sending a dreadful image of failed democracy around the world. Four years ago, while testifying before the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, I urged an updating of House rules to reprimand members who employ excessively provocative and confrontational language on the floor or in committees. In the intervening four years, it seems obvious that the problem of incendiary language (let alone physical confrontation) has grown exponentially worse. So long as the use of harsh language and physical intimidation rewards members with press coverage and fundraising opportunities but no official castigation, they will continue the behavior that brings discredit on themselves and the institution. It is time for Congress to stand up for its own integrity and sanction those who embrace vitriol and provocation instead of fulfilling their legislative responsibilities to their constituents and the nation.

Assessing the 2023 Elections

We are a year out from the 2024 election and a great deal can and will happen between now and then that renders any current head-to-head poll between Joe Biden and Donald Trump pretty inconsequential. At this stage in 2011, Barack Obama was also underwater, but the circumstances a year later led him to win a second term decisively. Although broad party support for Biden’s policies has been shaken by the immediate fallout from the Israel-Hamas war, he continues to enjoy strong party loyalty that is likely to drive the 2024 turnout that will be essential to his being competitive in those wobbly frontline states. 

The off-year results are a lot clearer when addressing questions of what motivates voters and nowhere more so than on the question of abortion rights. In recent elections, voters from both parties as well as unaffiliated voters bypassed their hostile state legislators to enshrine the right to abortion services in state constitutions. Those successes are leading Republicans in Congress to threaten using federal power to block the action of voters at the state level. So much for conservatives’ embrace of federalism!

This time it was Ohio, where state lawmakers teamed up with would-be abortion restrictors to attempt to make it harder for a majority of voters to amend the state’s constitution. The state’s voters turned out in large numbers, joining California, Michigan, Vermont, Kansas, Kentucky and Montana in taking the issue into their own hands. A slew of additional states will have similar measures on their 2024 ballots to protect a woman’s right to choose her health services including Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Pennsylvania and South Dakota.

Voters who are protecting access to health care are not simply Democrats, it is important to note. Nor does support for keeping Washington politicians out of such state (and personal) matters necessarily signify a swing towards Democratic candidates. Many philosophical conservatives favor congressional pre-emption of state policies on issues like environmental standards but are less sympathetic to the principle when it affects their personal choices, as with abortion rights.

Trump is ahead of most of his fellow Republicans on this issue despite having appointed the three justices whose votes reversed Roe. Recognizing that intransigence on abortion rights could cost him heavily in suburban areas and with some libertarian-leaning voters, Trump is chastising Republicans who “speak very inarticulately” on the issue. He insists he will overcome five decades of furious political battles bring all sides together to find a workable middle ground. It’s an absurd boast, much like promising Mexico would pay for his border wall or that he would end the Ukraine-Russia war in 24 hours. But he recognizes the vulnerability looming out there for the party and, more importantly, for him, if Republicans remain intransigent on access to abortion.

Voter activism in the face of legislative and judicial extremism is not limited to the abortion issue. Taking a page from turn-of-the-20^th-century activists, voters are cranking out initiatives and referendums on a variety topics when they confront hostile legislators. In recent years, for example, we have seen voters in conservative states either repudiate or end-run their legislatures to expand Medicaid eligibility, as allowed under the Affordable Care Act. Where state legislatures failed to pass these expansions of health coverage, voters in South Dakota, Maine, Oklahoma, Missouri, Utah, Nebraska and Idaho went ahead and did it themselves. Elsewhere, voters are voting to invalidate national laws against recreational marijuana and to raise minimum wages above the federal level. The reformers of the Progressive Party, in whose 1912 platform support for direct democracy in the form of the initiative, referendum and recall was enshrined, would be heartened.

There is a downside to this trend. Already cautious state and local officeholders might decide to let voters address complex or controversial issues instead of taking the tough votes themselves.  While such direct democracy may initially seem appealing, the experience of states like California should send a warning signal to those who favor governing by initiative. Without adequate safeguards, which many favoring initiatives might oppose, the practice runs the risk of enabling well-heeled special interests to seize control of the policymaking process, drafting complex state statutes and even constitutional amendments free from the deliberation and compromise inherent in the legislative process. 

Still, federal and state  lawmakers have no one but themselves to blame if they continue to renege on their constitutional oaths and turn the complex aspects of governance over to voters themselves. As Congress deadlocks on key issues such as immigration reform and climate change while wasting valuable time on irrelevant flim-flam like censure resolutions and unwarranted impeachment circuses, a revival of Progressivism’s direct democracy may well find growing support in the states. 

Speaker Mike Johnson’s Challenge: The Battle Between Ideology and Governing Realities

(Originally published in The Messenger 10/26/23) 

The election (at long last) of backbencher Mike Johnson (R-La.) as the new Speaker of the House will do little to reverse a trend of divisions within the Republican House conference that have translated into a drastically weakened speakership. 

Many casual observers of House politics assume that a powerful speaker, corralling his or her own party, containing the minority, while standing up to the Senate and White House is the historical norm. In actuality, that kind of speaker has been a rarity in the last century. Even legendary speakers like Sam Rayburn (D-Texas) and Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.) ran a House in which the bulk of power resided in the committees and especially in chairmen, which is why historians regard the period 1910-1994 as the “committee system.”

For two decades prior to that time, speakers played an outsized role, naming chairmen, assigning committee slots, and determining the floor schedule. Reforms imposed by Speaker Thomas Reed (R-Maine) in 1889 concentrated power in the speaker’s hands until a bipartisan revolt in 1910 against the authoritarianism of Speaker Joseph Cannon (R-Ill.). Much of the power was devolved to chairmen who were selected by seniority rather than fealty to the speaker. The decades of domination of chairmanships by hyper-conservative Dixiecrats finally provoked the long-simmering reformers’ revolt in 1974 that replaced some chairmen, subjected all of them to caucus approval, and returned significant power to the elected leadership.

During the late 1980s, as partisanship in the House was ramping up significantly, Speaker Jim Wright (D-Texas) imposed some of the managerial discipline that had earned predecessors like Reid and Cannon the nickname “Czar.” And when Wright’s Republican tormentor, Newt Gingrich of Georgia, became the first GOP speaker in 40 years, he further centralized power in his office, recognizing that narrowing party margins in the House required greater intra-party discipline to steer legislation through the convoluted congressional process.

The return of the strong speaker was firmly established with the ascent of Nancy Pelosi in 2007. Although she enjoyed larger margins than her Republican predecessors, there were significant factional disagreements within the party — from the left (anti-Iraq War, pro-single payer health care), from activists, and from more moderate Blue Dogs and pro-business New Democrats. Passage of major legislation, from TARP to health care, necessitated the exact set of skills that Pelosi possessed to meld her party’s factions to overcome nearly unanimous Republican opposition, making her the most dominant speaker in a century.

The strong model began to wither after Republicans regained the majority in 2010. Dozens of newly-elected Tea Party activists were skeptical of their own leaders, whom they suspected were prepared to cut deal with Democrats to avoid government shutdowns or massive tax increases. Recognizing the deep fissures within his own party, incoming Republican Speaker John Boehner, of Ohio, confided to me that “in six months, I’ll be more popular in your caucus than in my own.” Boehner de-emphasized his role in directing his fractious and fragmented conference. “I try to stay out of … all the issues” he explained, insisting that running the House “doesn’t need the heavy hand of the Speaker all over everything.”   

Boehner was wrong. The sharp ideological divide, small margin between the parties and minimal crossing of the aisle meant Pelosi-style discipline was needed, not hands-off management. Factionalism took deep root in the GOP conference and exponentially exploded with the ascent of the Freedom Caucus and the election of the blatant anti-establishment Donald Trump in 2016. Boehner was overwhelmed by extremists unwilling to countenance his collaboration with  Democrats — and his successor, Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), faced the same crisis of ungovernability.

In his maiden speech on Wednesday, the previously invisible new House speaker declared decentralization of his power as a central goal of his administration. A junior member of the House first elected in 2016, Johnson might be excused for not knowing the operational weaknesses of recent GOP speakers. Needless to say, if Johnson follows through on his decision, every subgroup within the Republican conference will believe itself empowered to interfere, obstruct and prevaricate whenever its interests are compromised, as they invariably will be.

The debacle visited upon Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Republicans over the past month is the logical outcome of this progression of the GOP conference over the past two decades. Indeed, the challenges to House leaders has only become worse because so many members can appeal to the activist base for primary votes and online solicitations, allowing them to ignore the kind of leverage the leadership historically could impose on recalcitrant legislators.

The underlying challenges that have bedeviled recent Republican speakers will soon be visited upon Johnson: the conflict between the ideological rigidity it took to win the speakership and the realities of governing that compel compromise with a Democratic Senate and president. Such bows to reality cost Boehner, Ryan and McCarthy crucial support and, ultimately, their jobs.

Unless the new speaker is prepared to oppose a continuing resolution and trigger a massive and costly government shutdown of indeterminate duration, he will find himself with the same dilemma.

In the meantime, it is probably a good idea for Johnson not to hang too many pictures on the walls in his new office.

A Path Forward?

When celebrating a victory during his career as a wrestling coach, a vocation he shared with former disgraced speaker Dennis Hastert, Rep. Jim Jordan was said to break into “an odd victory strut, marching in a Zombielike circle, straight-legged, arms aloft.” That is doubtless how he envisioned the members of the Republican conference marching him up to the top of the House of Representatives dais to present him with the speaker’s gavel. 

This time, however, there was no strutting as Jordan was thrice rejected by his faction-ridden colleagues. “I’m concerned about where we go from here,” said deposed speaker Kevin McCarthy, who demonstrated yet again his mediocre political skills by backing the volatile Jordan. “It’s astonishing to me.”

Neither McCarthy nor anyone else should be “astonished” by the Republicans’ capacity for undercutting their own leadership. Conservative Republican speakers since Newt Gingrich have been confronted by a growing cohort of obdurate, extremist colleagues who disdain the very institution in which they serve and who have no particular interest in performing even the most basic tasks of serving in the majority, including the timely selection of a speaker. 

For the better part of a decade, the Republican extremists steadily expanded their influence in the conference, helping the GOP win the House majority in 1994 for the first time since 1952. A decade and a half later, the emerging Tea Party yielded enough victories to oust the Democratic majority with an anti-establishment message that targeted the Republican leadership, too. As the Tea Party evolved into the Freedom Caucus, the radical tilt accelerated, receiving an enormous influx of energy (and legitimization) from the Trump victory of 2016. 

This sizable group has been more interested in obeisance to anti-government dogma than in actually governing. For years, its leaders were content to fulminate against liberal Democratic leaders like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi than formulate their own legislative agenda. In 2020, the party didn’t even bother to fashion a national platform, a first in modern history. With the departure of their favorite targets from Democratic leadership roles, the MAGA Republicans have been exposed as the disorganized nihilists they are. Moreover, many of their favorite legislative targets have become too popular to attack – when was the last concerted effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act —  leaving them to create issue out of whole cloth: Democrats favor “open borders” or Joe Biden takes money from China. 

Their lone achievement in the majority, other than swelling the deficit by $2 trillion, has been to accomplish what the January 6^th insurrectionists failed to do: a prolonged shutdown of the operations of the Congress at the exact moment when American leadership is desperately needed internationally. All that is missing is the Viking helmet.

The novice legislators now announcing their candidacies for speaker would have generated guffaws a couple of weeks ago for suggesting they should be entrusted with leading The Peoples’ House. Even if one can, briefly, win the support of 217 of their colleagues to be elected speaker, none has the experience to unify what has become a woefully fractured conference let alone successfully represent the House’s position in negotiations with the Senate and White House. That failure diminishes not only the hapless Republicans but the House as an institution as well.

If the Republicans hit the stone wall yet again this week, an effort might be made to entice a few Democrats to support a supposed “moderate” or “institutional” candidate on a temporary or  permanent basis. Democrats should be very cautious about being lured into that unholy alliance. Right now, Republicans own responsibility for every failure of Congress to act. Should Democrats provide the crucial votes to elect a Republican speaker, they will share that responsibility for every decision the GOP majority makes for the next 14 months, and you can bet very few of those decisions will involve good-faith concessions to the Democratic majority. 

If Democrats want to extend a helping hand to their bumbling GOP brethren, they might consider insisting on concessions to ensure their assistance in ending the speaker nightmare is not rewarded with a hyperpartisan Republican agenda including: (1) any spending cuts beyond those already enacted must be limited to individual appropriations bills, not forced in partisan Continuing Resolutions that risk government shutdowns; (2) a guarantee that amendments chosen by Democrats will be made in order on all floor legislation; (3) a suspension of Jim Jordan’s impeachment charade until the whole House votes to initiate such an investigation (as McCarthy had promised); (4) additional seats on House committees to reflect the actual ratio of the parties in the full House.

This package of concessions to Democrats may represent a Godfather-like offer Republicans can’t accept.  Agreeing would almost certainly generate a MAGA primary challenge. Yet offering such a solution would position Democrats as being the reasonable party to the 67% of Americans who want a speaker elected quickly and demonstrate a willingness to work on a bipartisan basis if Republicans would only agree to manage the House in a fair and balanced manner. If Republicans can’t get their act together quickly and the paralysis continues, it might be an offer worth extending.