This, ladies and gentlemen, is today’s Republican Party. Divided in Congress to the point of dysfunction. With a patently dishonest and deplorably indecent man, warped by a dystopian disposition, at the party’s head. But few of his presidential rivals willing to call him out.
Paralysis might not be too strong a word.
If it were just the one party that was paralyzed, I wouldn’t shed crocodile tears. From their blind backing of Donald Trump since he stepped onto politics, and their spineless surrender to the hard-right flank in Congress since they won the majority in last year’s election, Republican politicians at the national level brought this upon themselves. That ring of right-wing House extremists, from issue to issue, numbers only about 20. But because of rules they extorted from Kevin McCarthy back in January when he sold his soul to become speaker, they have now turned him out and turned the House upside down. However, it’s not just the hard-right that’s to blame. As Dan Rather wrote today, “This is but a distinction of degree. By the standards of the past, almost the entire GOP caucus would be considered ‘hard right,’ which is why we’re in this mess to begin with.”
But it’s not just about the Republican Party suffering from its own dysfunction. It’s about all of us: Republicans, Democrats, every American. We’re all victims. Not only because of the political pandemonium of this present day, but because it has implications for our future, worldwide implications, and they’re not good.
Here at home, it has spawned the likes of Florida’s Matt Gaetz, who forced the vote to expel McCarthy from the Speaker’s chair. He and his most conservative colleagues from the House Freedom Caucus would rather burn the house down than fix it from the inside.
They have set fire to workable norms of propriety and compromise, leading to this afternoon’s pronouncement from the presiding officer of the House, “The office of Speaker of the House of the United States House of Representatives is hereby declared vacant.” They had won their biggest battle yet. They are, if anything, emboldened.
Overseas, it has spawned new suspicions about the stability of the United States of America. If we can’t keep our own house in order, how can we keep the world in order? When I worked overseas, foreigners would talk in affectionate terms about “those silly Americans.” Today, it’s more like “those absurd Americans” and for some, “those reckless Americans.” And more American funding for Ukraine? A case in point. These rabble-rousers now have new momentum to use their power to try to stop it.
It’s also worth mentioning, once the extremists had their way today in the House, the Dow, reflecting the strength of companies where many retirees have their nest eggs, dropped more than 400 points.
I watched some of the live feed of the verbose debate about Kevin McCarthy. His detractors spoke about their grievances: that McCarthy had caved on government funding, that he’d had caved on the national debt, that he had caved on his personal promises to the Republican caucus in January when he survived 15 votes to win the Speaker’s gavel. All true, he could not be trusted. His supporters spoke about McCarthy’s successes, at least as they defined them. But it was one of them, Arkansas congressman Bruce Westerman, who encapsulated the failings of own party’s hard-right: all they do, he said, is complain about problems, but never offer solutions. True too.
It was clear from hearing the two sides clash that no one knows whether, let alone how, the different factions of today’s Republican Party can ever productively work together again.
But I couldn’t stick with the McCarthy debate from beginning to end. There was too much news from the civil fraud trial of Donald Trump in New York.
Consistent with his ruthless rhetoric against anyone associated with any prosecution against him, the ex-president already had called the judge in this case, Arthur Engoron, a “Deranged, Trump Hating Judge,” and said he should “be disbarred.” But Trump hasn’t been sanctioned for his insults. Since his lawyers incautiously failed to request a jury trial, this is what’s called a bench trial, which means all matters are being decided solely by the judge. So despite the odious nature of his comments, consistent with his ongoing crusade to undermine his followers’ faith in American justice, Trump has been able to exploit his freedom of speech and push his rancor to the max, since there is no jury to taint.
But this morning, he took it too far. In an email sent to millions of supporters, he posted a photograph showing the judge’s law clerk, named Allison Greenfield, standing side by side at some function with Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer with the caption, “Schumer’s girlfriend, Allison R. Greenfield, is running this case against me.” He has no evidence of course to support his imputation, but that has never stopped him before and it didn’t stop him now.
After calling Judge Engoron “this rogue judge,” he wrote, “The only one that hates Trump more is his associate up there, the person that works with him. She’s screaming into his ear almost every time we ask a question.”
With the future of The Trump Organization at stake in this trial, it speaks to the man’s recklessness. It speaks to his stupidity too, because what it earned him was a gag order. Judge Engoron forbid “all parties from posting, emailing or speaking publicly about any of my staff. Failure to abide by this order will result in serious sanctions.”
The Republican front-runner is a madman. The Republican House is a muddle. The Republican Party is a mess. We’re all stuck with it until 2024.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Precisely. If the current events on The Hill and from trump world doesn't energize serious patriots to action at the voting booths, then we deserve our rancid state of affairs that we now suffer.
Freed of facts and truth anx 30-40m Americans in thrall to their cult leader we who oppose all he represents must achieve a resounding loss of trump in Nov ‘24---only then can this odious disruption be ended