In the daily thicket of eye-grabbing headlines, you might have missed the most extraordinary one of all: Capitol Hill Becomes National Nudist Camp. The transition has actually been gradual, but it seems as if we all awoke one morning and realized with a shock that every member of Congress was naked! Our federal servants, like the vain emperor in the old story, had no clothes! Everything we needed to know about them was right in plain sight.
The Republicans
Our president, who’s indirectly on the midterm ballot, strikes a stunning range of poses on the domestic and world stage. He varies from rude to vulgar to arrogant to absurd to bombastic to uninformed to treasonous to shameless. At times, he wears these poses in combinations, a freak show to behold. I say that “performing freakishly in office” is an impeachable offense … but I reluctantly acknowledge there are less drastic ways to express revulsion at presidential conduct. The Republicans, who control the Congress, can join with Democrats and pass legislation to block presidential action (with a subsequent veto override, of course). They can work with Democrats to draft and pass a Sense of the House (or Senate or Congress) to lodge a formal complaint, a sort of shot across the presidential bow. They can authorize committees to investigate and report on alleged malfeasance in office. Have the Republicans used any of these milder forms of redress? Only the last, and then ineptly and with extreme bias.
Take, for, example, the antics of the House Intelligence Committee and its preposterous chairman, Devin Nunes. In early 2017, he falsely claimed that the intelligence community knew nothing about contact between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives. He declared that Michael Flynn, the National Security Advisor, should be thanked for his conversations with Russian officials, even though Flynn had lied to the FBI about their content. He later called a bogus press conference to announce receipt of information about secret recordings made of the Trump transition team. He hadn’t bothered to notify members of his committee in advance, and the recordings, it turned out, were entirely legal.
But Nunes was only building toward a grand finale. In February of 2018, he and committee Republicans released a memo alleging an FBI conspiracy to mislead judges about a surveillance warrant they were seeking. Nunes and Company further claimed the FBI had relied on “political dirt” (an incriminating dossier written by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer) to open a counter intelligence operation against the president! A month later, Nunes and his Republican colleagues topped this stunt by announcing, without notice to committee Democrats, the end to the committee’s investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. They followed up with a report, written solely by the Republicans, asserting there was neither collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government nor evidence the Russian government tried to help elect Trump. These conclusions were entirely in contradiction to well-grounded findings by the intelligence community!
At any time during the evolution of this farce, House Speaker Ryan could have taken away Nunes’s chairmanship or told him to knock it off. He did neither. He watched as Nunes began a parallel investigation into claims (his own) that the FBI and the Justice Department were abusing their powers. He sighed as Nunes incited House Republicans to call for the Assistant Attorney General’s impeachment. He was mum when Nunes and colleagues told a crowd at a fund raiser that his committee was a bastion against the president’s impeachment.
On the Senate side, the Senate Judiciary Committee also tried to defame Christopher Steele and, by extension, the FBI, who took Steele’s work seriously. (Steele retired with distinction in 2009 and and subsequently worked as a private investigator for Fusion GPS, a political research firm with an interest in Trump’s connections to the Russian government.)
In January of 2018, Chuck Grassley and Lindsay Graham, the committee’s chairman and senior Republican, respectively, formally asked the Justice Department to investigate Steele’s interactions with media outlets. The Democratic members of the committee had not been notified. Grassley and Graham said innocently that they weren’t asserting criminal behavior but merely wanted an official finding.
Glenn Simpson, a co-founder of Fusion GPS, had earlier vouched for Steele’s integrity before a closed-door session of the committee. Grassley ordered that Simpson’s testimony be kept secret. Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s ranking Democrat, defied his order and released a transcript of the testimony, much to Grassley’s chagrin.
Of course, Grassley’s committee brought much more shame upon itself in its closed-minded, ramrod sponsorship of Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Notwithstanding his record of dishonest testimony and history as an apparatchik for ultra-right causes, Kavanaugh was championed by the committee’s Republicans and continually talked up by Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader. To my mind, the confirmation process was the most outrageous example of “qualifications be damned” in more than a generation. The Senate Republicans saw it quite differently. Only one of them voted against his confirmation.
But let’s put Republican-controlled committees to one side and look at the entire Republican Congress. Collectively, they now make no effort to deny their naked subservience to wealth and power. Only a couple of years ago, there was a terrific hullabaloo about the dwindling middle class and the unconscionable enrichment of the 1%. You might have expected some kind of backlash — a more equitable tax structure, for example. But no, the Republican Congress embraced inequity as never before! The 1% got even more of the pie, as did our largest corporations. As a consequence, our budgetary shortfall and the cost of living have accelerated. Our economy is more out of balance than ever, and legislation is before the House to tip the scales further.
It’s the same story with health care. The Republican Congress wounded Obamacare and came within a hair’s breadth of killing it. Why? Because big medical and pharmaceutical interests oppose any government role in health care. The Republicans are selling one of the biggest lies in our society, that private health care can be affordable health care.
Likewise, the Republican Congress has made it clear that there is no amount of gun violence that can move them to regulate the availability of guns. Double the gun violence, triple it. No matter. Republicans want the status quo forever, or at least as long as the gun lobby exists.
The Democrats
“We the people” is at the core of the Democrats’ political sensibilities, diametrically opposite to the Republicans’ “We the greedy.” But their nudity isn’t as stark as the Republicans’. Many Democrats sport a fig leaf. This is all about the socialism bugaboo. They don’t want their constituents to know they embrace socialism. In fact, they’re not entirely sure they do. This is especially true of over-the-hill Democrats: Clinton, Biden, Kerry, and their tribe. At bottom, they are a tentative group. They would do little to nurture the young beating heart of the party.
Emphatic Note. In any one-on-one matchup with a Republican, an over-the-hill Democrat is still the far superior choice.
A looking glass into the future
Our political values and institutions have taken a beating from Republican Congresses for years, and now we stand at the unraveling edge. If pushed much further, the promise of our history, to become a nation of, by, and for the people, will be lost. There will be no “taking our country back.” The task then will be recreating it, in an unknown year and perhaps by an unknown generation.
In that context, the midterm elections, now less than two weeks away, will be prophetic. If they leave us with anything near the status quo, our future will be grim at best. But if the Democrats take just one house, the fight will be properly joined, and our country will have earned another two-year lease on life. No reason to pop a champagne cork but neither a reason to write a national obituary.
The Scratching Post 