Voting to Acquit This Noxious Criminal Is the Point of No Return for the Republican Party

By Amanda Marcotte, Salon

03 February 20

Today Republicans make it official: Out of sheer lust for power, they've rejected democracy and basic decency

here are many theories about when it was exactly that Republicans lost their minds. Some will point out, correctly, that the strain of reality-free conspiracy-mongering that defines the Donald Trump presidency dates back at least to the era of Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society. Others will note Richard Nixon's reliance on the "Southern strategy," which helped remake the GOP into a white ethno-nationalist party that was capable of nominating Trump. Still others will point to the Tea Party, which was reported at the time as somehow an anti-tax movement, but now looks clearly like a panicked, racist reaction to the election of Barack Obama, and resulted in a purging of any moderate or reality-based impulses in the Republican ranks. 

But whenever it started, I think it's safe to say that the upcoming votes in the Senate impeachment trial, in which the Republican Senate majority will hold tight to prevent any witnesses from testifying and will then vote to acquit Trump, will mark a point of no return for the Republican Party.

Even considering how lost to reason and reality Republicans have been for years now, there's something final and official about going on the record to register their collective belief that facts don't matter and that democracy, to them, is little more than an obstacle in the way of their efforts to maintain power.

That Republicans would pull together to turn the Senate trial into a sham aimed at covering up Trump's crimes has been regarded as a foregone conclusion from before the moment that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi announced the impeachment inquiry months ago. Despite this, I suspect it will be a gut punch all the same when the entire Republican Party comes together to "acquit" Trump despite the inarguable evidence that he is guilty. 

They are not voting to declare the president innocent of the charges against him, since that is clearly absurd. They are voting to announce that, in their eyes, there's no limit to what can or should be done to maintain the Republican hold on power. 

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., all but admitted as much Thursday, in a series of tweets acknowledging that the accusation against Trump — that he withheld military aid and political support for Ukraine in order to force that struggling nation's president to help him cheat in the election — "has already been proven." But Trump's behavior, Alexander claimed, was merely "inappropriate" but "does not meet the U.S. Constitution's high bar for an impeachable offense."

This is, of course, nonsense. As the constitutional expert Pamela Karlan, who testified before the House in December, argued, the founders literally created the impeachment powers to mitigate "the risk that unscrupulous officials might try to rig the election process."

Alexander openly giving his blessing to presidents using their powers of office to cheat in elections — or to Republican presidents, anyway — illustrates why the twin votes to shut down witness testimony and to acquit Trump should be understood as the consummation of the GOP's long courtship with authoritarianism.

This will be the final note of a long process in which the Republicans allowed arguments in the Congressional Record, most notably from fabled defense lawyer Alan Dershowitz, defending a president's "right" to cheat in elections, and then affirmed this belief with a formal vote.

Dershowitz is now running around, making incoherent claims that he wasn't arguing what he said he was arguing, but that hardly matters. His case for presidential tyranny was made on the Senate floor, and his attempts to claw it back in the media don't carry anywhere near the same weight. 

For those of us who have watched Republicans closely throughout this process, what has been striking is the shamelessness and bad faith on display, as they have competed to be the biggest lickspittle to the wannabe fascist smearing his fake tan all over the White House.

Was it Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, openly bragging about how he was coordinating with the Trump defense team to rig this sham of a trial? 

Was it Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas starting a podcast about impeachment dedicated to licking Trump's shoes, despite the fact that Trump spent the election calling Cruz's wife ugly and accusing Cruz's dad of murdering JFK? 

Was it Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky using the trial as an excuse to air the name of the whistleblower who first reported Trump's bribery scheme, a move clearly meant to suggest to intimidate other federal employees out of stepping forward with information about Trump's crimes and corruption? 

Was it Sen. Susan Collins of Maine working herself into an outrage over Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., accusing Republicans of being a bunch of quislings who let Trump control them, even though the upcoming miscarriage of justice proves Schiff correct? 

Perhaps trying to decide who is the worst of them is a little like trying to pick which cat turd in the litter box stinks most. It doesn't much matter at the end of the day. What matters is that the entire basket of Republicans is thoroughly corrupt and divorced from any concern for reality or decency, and this week they're making it official. 

Why are they all so rotten to the core? The answer lies in looking at the gulf between the power Republicans have and the votes they actually get. Trump won the 2016 election because of the quirks of the Electoral College, even though Hillary Clinton got nearly 3 million more votes. In 2018, Democrats in Senate races got 12 million more votes than Republicans, yet Republicans gained seats.

Republicans have structural and geographic advantages that allow them to stave off the threat of actual democracy, but they fear that this won't last forever. As never-Trumper Evan McMullin noted on Twitter:

Republicans in the Senate are affirming and supporting Trump's schemes to cheat in 2020 for the simple reason that they believe they can't win without cheating. They've already been using legal and quasi-legal methods to cheat — tearing apart campaign finance laws, defanging the Federal Election Commission, passing voter suppression laws, wild gerrymandering schemes — but Trump has now opened that final door to outright criminal conspiracies to cheat in elections. 

In 1974, Richard Nixon resigned for doing pretty much the same thing Trump did: His goons were running an illegal scheme to help him cheat in the 1972 election, and he was engaged in the cover-up. Nixon resigned not because he wanted to but because congressional Republicans, or enough of them anyway, believed that the rule of law mattered more than maintaining their party's political power. Republicans worked with Democrats to expose evidence that led to Nixon's downfall.

Nowadays, the opposite is true: Republicans are working to conceal evidence, and when they can't conceal it are arguing that it doesn't matter what Trump does anyway. In voting to block witnesses and then to acquit a clearly corrupt and criminal president, they are making it official: Cheating in elections is no crime, so long as you're on their side.  

There is no turning back now. Republicans will, of course, continue to pretend they're anything but the party of corruption and cheating, but the veneer of plausible deniability has been stripped away. Their party's last vestiges legitimacy are gone, and they know it. In fact, they're voting on it in the Senate sometime on Friday.

What this means for the rest of us is still not clear. There will be an election in November, and a newly emboldened Trump will probably concoct more criminal conspiracies to cheat in it. He may very well win. If he doesn't win, it's entirely likely that he'll reject the election results and refuse to leave, launching a new and much more dangerous episode in our slow-unfolding constitutional crisis. Senate Republicans, having already signed off on his cheating, may conclude there's no reason to stop now, and find some excuse to back his illegal rejection of the election results. 

There is no longer any reason to believe Republicans will balk at anything that allows them to hold onto power. I do mean anything.

How far this goes, and whether our democracy can still be dragged out of this dark pit, is still unknown. But the history books will almost surely mark the end of this sham trial as the day that Republicans, who long ago made a mockery of their historical legacy as the party of Abraham Lincoln, reached the point of no return. 

Pete Buttigieg's Elite-Friendly Politics Won't Help the Marginalized

By Paul M. Renfro, Jacobin

03 February 20

Pete Buttigieg is this election’s poster child for “progressive neoliberalism” — offering up platitudes about diversity while leaving untouched the very structures that oppress people. It’s time we left this kind of politics in the past.

he past decade was a momentous one for the LGBT movement in the United States. Among many other milestones, marriage equality became the law of the land in 2015, and trans students received vital protections under Barack Obama’s administration.

Yet the decade also revealed the shortcomings of mainstream LGBT politics. Not only were many Obama-era actions weak and relatively easy to repeal — Trump has already reversed many of these gains — they also tended to focus on well-off segments of the LGBT community. Radical activists calling for a broader, more ambitious queer politics focused on poor and working-class people — including the LGBT youth who disproportionately experience homelessness and incarceration — were rebuffed in favor of a blinkered politics of inclusion, representation, and accommodation.

Former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg’s emergence as a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination serves as a fitting bookend to this decade of elite-centered LGBT politics. By framing himself as a progressive champion while vowing not to alienate voters on either side of the aisle (and hobnobbing with big-money donors), Buttigieg has sought to emulate Barack Obama in both style and substance.

As theorist Nancy Fraser has argued, the Obama/Clinton wing of the Democratic Party has embodied and espoused “progressive neoliberalism” — fusing “mainstream currents of new social movements (feminism, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and LGBTQ rights), on the one side, and high-end ‘symbolic’ and service-based business sectors (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood), on the other.” Through watchwords like diversity and inclusion, progressive neoliberalism has looked to incorporate historically subjugated groups into the mainstream while retaining the underlying economic and political system, built on exploitation and inequality.

Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat seemed to signal the demise of progressive neoliberalism. Yet Buttigieg has breathed new life into it, positioning himself as Obama’s heir. For a time, Buttigieg’s move seemed like a smart bet. Obama and Obamaism remain popular among the Democratic electorate, and Buttigieg — buoyed by high-dollar fundraisers — polled well in Iowa and New Hampshire for many months. But we would do well to recognize the severe limits of progressive neoliberalism, which has harmed the very groups it purports to defend.

To many Democratic primary voters (especially those on the older end), Buttigieg comes off as a polished and poised progressive, a fresh face whose youth and sexual identity set him apart from the rest of the primary field.

It’s an image that owes much to Barack Obama and his advisers. “Obama’s unique gift,” Corey Robin writes, “was being able to turn soaring statements of principle into simple truths of politics, marrying a national inheritance of social movements from below to a plainspoken pragmatism from above.” In 2008 especially, Obama’s rhetorical flourishes, racial identity, and youthful visage encouraged voters to project upon him their own political aspirations.

Though Obama’s racial identity, elite academic credentials, and connection to far-flung locales like Indonesia and Kenya alarmed white supremacists, anti-intellectuals, and xenophobes, these characteristics served as a salve to progressives. As Jeremy Scahill observes, “people wanted to place onto him an identity that Obama himself never even claimed. But he did craft his identity .?.?. in such a way that a lot of things were open to interpretation.?.?.?. Obama would allow people to think he was this thing but in reality, he was a pretty right-wing Democrat.”

Mayor Pete has followed suit, foregrounding his identity and his ostensibly bold policy proposals — which, in his words, “are not as extreme” as those of his competitors, but which “would still make [him] the most progressive president of [his] lifetime.” This kind of argument surely resonates with voters who imagine themselves to be progressive yet sensible, a formulation that boosted Obama to electoral success but ultimately proved insufficient.

In the face of Republican obstructionism, a festering economic crisis, and a series of cataclysmic wars, Obama suffered from a failure of imagination. His market-friendly politics hemmed in health care reform, the stimulus, and, most disastrously, foreclosure relief. (Right-wing detractors called him a socialist, anyway.) His and other Democrats’ deep-seated fear of appearing soft on national security prompted a string of counter-terrorism misadventures — most notably, the intervention in Libya. Obama portrayed himself as a transformative figure, all while fortifying an unconscionable deportation regime, eviscerating black wealth, and bombing the Middle East, South Asia, and Somalia.

Obama’s tepid response to the slayings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown helped fuel the Black Lives Matter movement and, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has noted, also fostered disappointment and disenchantment among many young African Americans. “When the president your generation selected does not condemn these attacks, you suddenly begin to believe that this system is a fraudulent hoax,” St. Louis hip-hop artist Tef Poe wrote to Obama in a 2014 letter. “Racism is very much alive in America, but as a president with so much melanin in his skin, you seem to address it very bashfully.” Such disillusionment contributed to the Democrats’ shocking defeat in 2016, as many working-class black voters stayed home. (The GOP’s draconian voter suppression laws didn’t help either.) By 2017, some 21 percent of black women indicated “that neither party supports them.”

For critics like Taylor and Tef Poe, Obama seemed only to marshal his racial identity when it was politically expedient. There’s ample evidence that Mayor Pete is operating in a similar vein, on occasion deploying his identity as a gay man in order to sugarcoat policy proposals that would benefit the ruling class.

When asked during November’s Democratic primary debate about his failure to connect with African-American voters, for example, Buttigieg responded with progressive neoliberal pablum, championing the nationwide adoption of same-sex marriage while downplaying the vast power imbalances between an affluent, Ivy League–educated person like himself and the overwhelming majority of people of color:

[W]hile I do not have the experience of ever having been discriminated against because of the color of my skin, I do have the experience of sometimes feeling like a stranger in my own country. Turning on the news and seeing my own rights come up for debate and seeing my rights expanded by a coalition of people like me and people not at all like me working side by side, shoulder to shoulder, making it possible for me to be standing here wearing this wedding ring in a way that couldn’t have happened two elections ago, lets me know just how deep my obligation is to help those whose rights are on the line every day even if they are nothing like me in their experience.

This Pollyannaish, triumphalist spiel also obscured the folly of rights without enforcement or redistribution (as Taylor and Samuel Moyn have pointed out). Over a half-century since the civil rights bills of the 1960s, racial segregation and discrimination remain firmly entrenched. When Buttigieg claimed to have “worked for years” as South Bend mayor “under the illusion that our schools in my city were integrated .?.?. [b]ecause they had to be, because of a court order” — and then contradicted himself by insisting that the city’s schools were, in fact, meaningfully desegregated — he was, consciously or not, doubling down on the legalistic liberalism that has failed poor and working-class black people in South Bend and beyond for generations.

Pete’s policy platform reflects not only this rights-based liberalism, but also the “woke” market-centric technocracy at the heart of progressive neoliberalism. His policies demonstrate a keen awareness of racial, gender, and sexual inequality but not the ways that capitalism produces and widens those disparities. In fact, Buttigieg locates solutions to these injustices in the very systems that sustain them.

Buttigieg’s “Douglass Plan” (presumptuously named for abolitionist Frederick Douglass) seeks to reverse the damage done by centuries of capitalism and racism through “entrepreneurship and job creation in underserved communities.” “Entrepreneurship is an engine of economic growth and employment,” Buttigieg’s campaign website reads. “However, people of color face unique challenges to starting their own businesses.” This fundamentally misunderstands the dynamics of racial oppression in the United States — prescribing black capitalism when exploitation and corporate power are at the center of the problem.

Buttigieg takes a similar approach to women’s issues. In his insistence that “ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment,” “appointing at least 50 percent women to the Cabinet and judiciary,” and “investing over $50 billion to grow women-owned business” will help improve the lives of US women, Buttigieg simply hopes to diversify, rather than dismantle, oppressive hierarchies.

Given Buttigieg’s dismal record on race as South Bend mayor and as a presidential candidate, his eagerness to project US power around the world, his clear popularity among billionaire donors (forty of whom have contributed to his campaign), his volleys against universal social programs like Medicare for All and tuition-free public college, and his consulting history at McKinsey & Company, there’s plenty of reason to suspect a Buttigieg presidency would be bad for the non-rich and the marginalized. And his sexual identity doesn’t change any of that.

Against Progressive Neoliberalism

Writing in the New York Times last year, Barbara Smith — cofounder of the black feminist Combahee River Collective and an early analyst of “identity politics” — noted that she left the mainstream LGBT movement because it has generally privileged rich, gay white men. “Gaining rights for some while ignoring the violation and suffering of others does not lead to justice,” she cautioned. “Unless we eradicate the systemic oppressions that undermine the lives of the majority of LGBTQ people, we will never achieve queer liberation.”

Smith — who endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2016 and is backing him again — may as well have been declaiming against Buttigieg. As a moderately unconventional meritocrat seeking to diversify “the winner-takes-all corporate hierarchy,” Buttigieg is following the progressive neoliberal playbook refined by the Democratic Leadership Council, the Clintons, and Obama. His predecessors’ failures to envision or fight for antiracist, antipoverty, feminist, pro-LGBT policy measures beyond the boundaries of the corporate plutocracy helped sow the economic misery and anti-elitism from which Trumpism grew. The progressive neoliberalism that Pete hopes to revive ought to be left in 2016.

None of this is to say that representation does not matter. Notions of citizenship, belonging, and “deservingness” — always freighted with racial, gender, sexual, religious, and class meaning — are partially forged through policy and political discourse. But we should pursue a more ambitious policy program that addresses the oppressive structures that have withstood progressive neoliberal reform. Decommodification, universal policies, and redistribution will not only mobilize the Rainbow Coalition disillusioned by the Third Way politics of Obama and Buttigieg — they will go a long way toward improving the lives of poor and working-class people of all stripes.