It is a tragedy indeed that the Republican party has lost its way so severely that a judge, articulating the most basic principles of ethics and common sense, is a minority figure, a sole voice of reason in the din of perversity spewed by GOP leaders, but that is the case. J. Michael Luttig, the retired circuit court judge who spoke so eloquently at the January 6 Committee hearings, has penned a blistering take down of his own party in the New York Times. If you can only read one piece today, in its entirety, this is the one, hands down.
On cue, the Republicans kicked their self-defeating political apparatus into high gear this month. Almost as soon as the indictment in the documents case was unsealed, Mr. Trump jump-started his up-to-then languishing campaign, predictably declaring himself an “innocent man” victimized in “the greatest witch hunt of all time” by his “totally corrupt” political nemesis, the Biden administration. On Thursday, he added that it was all part of a plot, hatched at the Justice Department and the F.B.I., to “rig” the 2024 election against him.
From his distant second place, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida denounced the Biden administration’s “weaponization of federal law enforcement” against Mr. Trump and the Republicans. Mike Pence dutifully pronounced the indictment political. And both Governor DeSantis and Mr. Pence pledged — in a new Republican litmus test — that on their first day in office they would fire the director of the F.B.I., the Trump appointee Christopher Wray, obviously for his turpitude in investigating Mr. Trump. It fell to Kevin McCarthy, the House speaker, to articulate the treacherous overarching Republican strategy: “I, and every American who believes in the rule of law, stand with President Trump against this grave injustice. House Republicans will hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.”
There’s no stopping Republicans now, until they have succeeded in completely politicizing the rule of law in service to their partisan political ends.
This is the plain unvarnished truth. The judge then goes on to mention that famous day in history half a century ago when Barry Goldwater left the Senate, crossed the White House lawn and told Richard Nixon that it was over; that he would be impeached the next day. Nixon, distraught though he was, was not about to destroy his own legacy and put himself and his party through the disgrace that was certain to follow. He was smart enough to know when the jig was up. But then Nixon was a self-made man and a realist, not a trust fund baby TV personality.
Goldwater, then the elder statesman of the GOP, told Nixon he had lost Republican support. Nixon accepted that reality and acted accordingly. Democracy worked — exceedingly well, in fact — in that era. Now, democracy is barely on the rails, trying to hang on for dear life, as an out of control GOP self-immolates — another phrase that Judge Luttig uses.
As only the Republicans can do, they are already turning this ignominious moment into an even more ignominious moment — and a self-immolating one at that — by rushing to crown Mr. Trump their nominee before the primary season even begins. Building the Republican campaign around the newly indicted front-runner is a colossal political miscalculation, as comedic as it is tragic for the country. No assemblage of politicians except the Republicans would ever conceive of running for the American presidency by running against the Constitution and the rule of law. But that’s exactly what they’re planning.
That is plain to Judge Luttig and many others as well. The GOP, in 2024, intends to run against the Constitution and the rule of law — which is running against democracy. It does not get any more basic than that. We are in a fight, in 2024, to preserve our form of government and our way of life.
Judge Luttig delivers the knock out punch.
The former president’s behavior may have invited charges, but the Republicans’ spineless support for the past two years convinced Mr. Trump of his political immortality, giving him the assurance that he could purloin some of the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets upon leaving the White House — and preposterously insist that they were his to do with as he wished — all without facing political consequences. Indeed, their fawning support since the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol has given Mr. Trump every reason to believe that he can ride these charges and any others not just to the Republican nomination, but also to the White House in 2024.
The judge calls for a reckoning in the party, but he doesn’t seem convinced that one will happen.
If the indictment of Mr. Trump on Espionage Act charges — not to mention his now almost certain indictment for conspiring to obstruct Congress from certifying Mr. Biden as the president on Jan. 6 — fails to shake the Republican Party from its moribund political senses, then it is beyond saving itself. Nor ought it be saved.
So where do we go next? This is certainly a call to arms. If the better angels of the GOP can’t hear this analysis of Judge Luttig’s and act upon it rationally, what will it do? We are going to find that out. That’s the only certainty that can be predicted for 2024 at this point, is that we will find out what, if anything, the GOP intends to do to right its course and get moving on the correct path again. Or, if it continues to keep self-destructing.
There is no conservative party in America right now. There is the Democratic party, with its progressive and centrist elements, there is the MAGA cult, there is the GOP intelligentsia, who jumped ship and became Never Trumpers quite some time ago, and there are a lot of stragglers with R’s behind their names, wandering lost, struggling for direction and purpose, while they endeavor to survive from day to day. Yes, Kevin McCarthy, we’re talking about you.
McCarthy has no vision for his caucus or his party. He has no game plan. He lives day to day, like a fruit fly, dealing with each vote as it comes. Mitch McConnell’s best days are in the rear view mirror. He’s a place holder until somebody else comes along.
The GOP is rudderless and lost, a ghost ship at sea. Whether it will ever regain its bearings and find its compass, we do not know. But it would behoove anybody in leadership in that party to read what J. Michael Luttig has written and act accordingly. This is a wake up call.
You know, with regard to Goldwater: He was already seething at the direction that HIS party had become in the 1990s by aligning itself with the reprehensible “Christian Conservative” movement of the (horribly misnamed) “Moral Majority” and abandoning TRUE conservative principles. I can only imagine how Goldwater would feel after seeing the horrors that the teabaggers and now Trump’s MAGAts have done to the Party that he spent a lifetime working to build. Even more disconcerting would have to be that *his* GOP turned itself over–one could say, slavishly–to a man who only became a Republican a decade before running as its Presidential candidate.
Nixon was a better man than the mango moron ever will be. Never thought I would ever think Tricky Dick was better than anyone.
It appears to me that this sheds light on eople’s understanding of Americanpolitics. We tend to think it’s left and right … bu it’s also up and down. Left and right refer to economic positions, and there’s more to politics than economics. Up and dow refer to authoritarian and anti-autoritarian respectively.
Whe the Dixiecrats left the Democratic Party after the passage of the Civil Rights act, they didn’t leave because of any economic teory. They left because they were authoritarian and it had become clear that the Democratic Party was not and would not be authoritarian. (And they infected the Republican Party with authoritarianism in the process.) We all remember the famous Lee Atwater quote.
The REpublican Party was on the right before it inherited the Dixiecrats. That was why the Great Depression, and why Democrats can say we havebeen cleanign up Republican messes since 1933. But they weren’t, as a whole, despicable. But – when you court authoritarians – that happens.