Month: January 2021

Here’s the best way to unify: accountability, justice then reconciliation — in that order

If people can’t unify around the fact that a violent insurrection to overturn the election is wrong, I’m afraid there isn’t much hope. But the fact is that most of the people who think that was justified have been lied to. (A fair number know very well that the election was fair, they just believe they are entitled to win and that the ends justify the means.) Some of those people can move off their position with enough time and a change in the social incentives.

It will be possible to turn down the temperature eventually. But it cannot happen without accountability.

Joe Biden announced his run for president with these words:

Charlottesville, Virginia is home to the author of one of the great documents in human history.

We know it by heart:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.

We’ve heard it so often, it’s almost a cliché. But it’s who we are.

We also haven’t always lived up to these ideals.

Thomas Jefferson himself didn’t

But we have never before walked away from them.

Charlottesville is also home to a defining moment for this nation in the last few years. It was there, in August of 2017, that we saw Klansmen, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis come out into the open — their crazed faces illuminated by torches, veins bulging, bearing the fangs of racism. They chanted the same anti-Semitic and racist bile heard across Europe in the 1930s and 40s.

They were met by a courageous group of Americans, and a violent clash ensued. A brave young woman lost her life.

And that’s when we heard words from the President of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of our nation. He said there were some “very fine people on both sides.”

“Very fine people on both sides.”

With those words, the President of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it.

And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had seen in my lifetime.

I wrote at the time that we were in the battle for the soul of this nation. That is even more true today.

He said this throughout his campaign, it obviously was a major motivation for running and one of the reasons people voted for him. So why are the right wingers screeching like a bunch of crazed harpies over his inaugural address in which he hit some of the same themes?

Jonathan Chait:

The portion of the speech that rankled was Biden’s renunciation of racism and violent white-supremacist terrorism.

“If you read his speech and listen to it carefully, much of it is thinly veiled innuendo calling us white supremacists, calling us racists,” protested Rand Paul on Fox News. “It’s an odd way to seek national unity: Call a significant portion of the American public white supremacists, racists, and nativists,” complained Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald. Tucker Carlson devoted an entire segment to angrily denouncing Biden for opposing white supremacy, which he interpreted, not unreasonably, as a veiled criticism of himself and his most fervent supporters.

None of these right-wingers self-identify as racist or white supremacist. And at no point did Biden say, or even imply, that all — or even most — Trump supporters are racist. Why, then, do they object to a fairly rote denunciation of ideas they claim to abhor themselves?

To understand why it rankled them, you should start with Biden’s reasons for including an attack on white supremacy in the first place. From Biden’s standpoint, he needed to do this in order to contextualize his call for “unity.” Historically, unity has been used as a device to encourage white Americans to come together while ignoring racism. The basis for the post-Reconstruction healing of the regional and partisan split was that white northern Republicans withdrew their protection for freed slaves and allowed white Southerners to violently repress and disenfranchise black people. That sub rosa agreement became the foundation for the century-long period of depolarized politics that ran from the end of Reconstruction through the civil-rights era, which triggered its demise.

Black Americans have particular cause for suspicion of “unity” as a transcendent value. (Biden himself has inadvertently articulated their reasons for questioning the old, bipartisan era when he touted his history of making deals with segregationists.) Biden’s explicit renunciation of racism and white-supremacist terror was a way of clarifying that his idea of unity would exclude, rather than include, racism.

Then, of course, there was the recent insurrection by a mob that, if not white supremacist in toto, was led by a militant white-supremacist vanguard. Biden is attempting to define a (small-d) democratic order that excludes a violent authoritarian faction that refuses to accept political equality for fellow citizens.

And that is what makes Biden’s statement an implicit rebuke to Trump and his fans. One of the most significant realignments of the Trump era was an extension of the Republican coalition to the more distant edges of the far right. As early as 2015, observers like Evan Osnos recognized that Trump had activated Nazis and Nazi-like white supremacists. (Ron Paul, Rand’s father and formative influence, was a precursor in bringing these fringe groups into his coalition.) Trump’s presidency inspired extremists, and brought into existence new ones, like the Proud Boys and QAnon.

Biden is implicitly demanding Republicans renounce those fringe groups. That’s what makes his speech so offensive to Trump enthusiasts. Carlson, indeed, all but admits that his refusal to denounce right-wing extremists is the hangup. In his segment on Biden’s speech, he said:

Other channels fill their air with attacks on the Proud Boys, whoever they are, or QAnon enthusiasts or gun owners in central Pennsylvania who fix air conditioning for a living and tend to vote the wrong way. They go after those people, and you can see why…. Attacking those people isn’t hard. None of them have real power.

Whether or not they have “real power,” they did overpower the security at the U.S. Capitol, occupy the Congress, get a lot of people injured or killed, and scare the entire country. If they were totally powerless, Trump and Carlson would be happy to renounce the far right. They won’t, because they value its small but energetic contribution to their audience and movement.

Carlson, MacDonald and Paul heard Biden denounce white supremacy, and decided he was talking about them. That’s a choice they made, and it says more about them than it does about Biden.

They clearly identify with the White Supremacists even if they don’t identify themselves as white supremacists. I don’t know why they don’t just go for it.

This guy…

Stephanopoulos immediately kicked off Sunday’s This Week interview with Paul by asking him a “threshold” question about the results of the election, wondering aloud if he accepted that President Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate and “not stolen,” something former President Donald Trump and his allies have baselessly insisted and which eventually resulted in an insurrectionist riot.

“Well, what I would say is that the debate over whether or not there was fraud should occur, we never had any presentation in court,” the Kentucky lawmaker deflected. “Most of the cases were thrown out for lack of standing, a procedural way of not hearing it.”

As Paul said there was “still a chance” that some cases challenging states’ voting laws or alleging irregularities could make their way to the Supreme Court, the ABC moderator pushed back to point out that Republicans’ election challenges have been laughed out of court.

“I have to stop you there,” Stephanoulous noted. “No election is perfect. But there were 86 challenges filed by President Trump and his allies in court, all were dismissed. Every state certified the results.”

The Republican senator contended that the majority of Republican voters believe that “we do need to look at election integrity,” prompting Stephanopoulos to claim that those voters agree with Paul “because they were fed a ‘big lie’ by President Trump and his supporters.”

Cornered on the issue, and still refusing to admit that the election was not “stolen,” Paul then framed the argument as a partisan and ideological issue, complaining that “people coming from the liberal side” immediately “say everything’s a lie instead of saying there’s two sides to everything.”

Stephanopoulos, meanwhile, again explained that Trump falsely claimed the “election was stolen” when, in fact, it wasn’t. Furthermore, as the ABC host stated, Trump’s own attorney general and Department of Justice found no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would impact the election’s results.

“I won’t be cowed by liberals in the media who say ‘there’s no evidence here and you’re a liar if you talk about election fraud.’ Let’s have an open debate this is a free country,” Paul grumbled in response.

The Trump-boosting senator went on to dismiss former Attorney General William Barr’s declaration about the lack of evidence of voter fraud, claiming it was just a “pronouncement.” From there, he complained that the media is unfair to Republicans and says they are “all liars.”

“There are two sides to every story,” he blared.

“Sir, there are not two sides to this story. This has been looked in every single state,” Stephanopoulos shot back.

“There are two sides to every story,” Paul wailed. “George, you’re forgetting who you are as a journalist if you think there’s only one side. You’re inserting yourself into the story to say I’m a liar!”

“There are not two sides to facts,” the ABC anchor retorted.

Stephanopoulos would then circle back to the original question about whether Paul felt the election was stolen or not, something Paul still refused to answer.

“I think there was great deal of evidence of fraud and changing of the election laws illegally,” he asserted. “A thorough investigation is warranted.”

He’s a liar. Even Chris Christie agrees:

This is happening in state parties all over the country apparently:

Arizona Republicans voted Saturday to censure Cindy McCain and two prominent GOP members who have found themselves crosswise with former President Donald Trump.

The censures of Sen. John McCain’s widow, former Sen. Jeff Flake and Gov. Doug Ducey are merely symbolic. But they show the party’s foot soldiers are focused on enforcing loyalty to Trump, even in the wake of an election that saw Arizona inch away from its staunchly Republican roots.

Party activists also reelected controversial Chairwoman Kelli Ward, who has been one of Trump’s most unflinching supporters and among the most prolific promoters of his baseless allegations of election fraud.

The Arizona GOP’s combative focus has delighted Trump’s staunchest supporters and worried Republican insiders who have watched the party lose ground in the suburbs as the influence of its traditional conservative establishment has faded in favor of Trump. A growing electorate of young Latinos and newcomers bringing their more liberal politics from back home have further hurt the GOP.

“This is a time for choosing for Republicans. Are we going to be the conservative party?” said Kirk Adams, a former state House speaker and chief of staff to Ducey. “Or is this a party … that’s loyal to a single person?”

It’s a question of Republican identity that party officials and activists are facing across the country following Trump’s 2020 loss, and particularly after a mob of his supporters laid siege on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

The cult members didn’t know quite what to do about Mitch. Yet:

The Republican Party of Kentucky’s State Central Committee rejected a resolution Saturday that would have urged Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to fully support former President Donald Trump and condemn his second impeachment.

The committee met Saturday to consider the proposal after the Republican Party of Nelson County announced more than 30 GOP county chairs and vice chairs had called for a meeting to consider the resolution aimed at the commonwealth’s longtime senator. 

Republican Party of Kentucky Chairman Mac Brown called the resolution out of order, and the majority of the committee agreed, a member told The Courier Journal after the meeting. The final vote agreeing the resolution should be deemed out of order was 134-49, the member said.

The party released a statement following the meeting, which it said had been called for by 28 members of the body.

“As a political party, we’re in a unique position to bring all sides of our organization together to have conversations about the direction we are going in and what we expect from our elected officials,” the statement said. The central committee “met in a special meeting called by a small group of individuals. In the end it is our intention to return our focus to bringing civility to the party and continue having larger conversations about how we can attract more voters and grow our party.”

Republican Party of Nelson County Chair Don Thrasher, who led the resolution effort, said the chairs who supported it will now bring a motion asking for McConnell’s resignation, which he said is in the purview of the rules. 

Meanwhile, Trump is seriously talking about a third party.

Lol.

“Why can’t we have nice things?” asks Heather McGhee. At “The.Ink” last week, McGhee discussed her new book  “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” with Anand Giridharadas. She explains, “Part of what American racial consciousness has done is to ratchet down white people’s expectations for themselves.”

MvGhee illustrates the problem with the decline of public swimming pools:

HEATHER: The parable is a story that I grew up learning from family members. It was a very visceral memory for many of them. There was a grand, resort-style public swimming pool in the heart of their community. In fact, in the United States there were more than 2,000 of them that were built with tax dollars over the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s. In many ways, it was one of the most real, everyday examples of the New Deal consensus of government being a force for the improvement of the everyday quality of life of its citizens.

Yet in so many of these communities, the pools were for whites only or were segregated. In the 1950s and ’60s, as the courts began to knock down these segregation codes in recreational facilities, many towns in virtually every region of the country decided to drain their public swimming pools, rather than integrate them. This happened in St. Louis. It happened in West Virginia, in Ohio, in Florida, and Louisiana. 

When racism drained the public pool, everyone in the town — including white families — lost out. 

The derelict pool illustrating the her parable at “The.Ink” resembles one here in town once used by Black residents and long abandoned.*

The decline in belief in public goods has a racial component, McGhee argues. It is not a matter of whites voting against their best interests (an expression I loathe):

HEATHER: They vote in their perceived racial interest, and against their class interest. I don’t understand how you can be a student of American history or be alive in today’s politics and not understand how powerful that racial interest is. Even if it only affords you the ability to be able to march into the Capitol and walk back out and have daiquiris, it’s clear that there are material and social benefits to whiteness in a vastly unjust society.

But in the nation with the largest economy on Earth, and potentially the largest representative multiracial democracy on the planet, we could have, for all of us, a much higher standard of living and much more economic security.

There is much more worth reading at the link.

I’d add that there is also an interplay between technological change (thought morally neutral) and concomitant social change for which we blame people (minorities and immigrants are always handy). Racial animus gives us villains to blame for loss of “Scrantons” and political cover for people who profit from technology and from a divide-and-conquer approach to maintaining their places atop the economy.

We’re animals in the end. Our enemies/predators have faces; systems have none. It’s very convenient.

*Update: To be clear, the pool atop this post, after being idle for years, has been renovated and put back in service.

Pour a fresh cup of coffee and take in this 2000-word celebration of progressive organizing from the New York Times.

The deadly coronavirus pandemic had a silver lining for progressive organizers from coast to coast. Zoom meetings and conference calls meant activist leaders stuck inside could still brainstorm and strategize:

The video call was announced on short notice, but more than 900 people quickly joined: a coalition of union officials and racial justice organizers, civil rights lawyers and campaign strategists, pulled together in a matter of hours after the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill.

They convened to craft a plan for answering the onslaught on American democracy, and they soon reached a few key decisions. They would stay off the streets for the moment and hold back from mass demonstrations that could be exposed to an armed mob goaded on by President Donald J. Trump.

They would use careful language. In a presentation, Anat Shenker-Osorio, a liberal messaging guru, urged against calling the attack a “coup,” warning that the word could make Mr. Trump sound far stronger than he was — or even imply that a pro-Trump militia had seized power.

Subtlety is not the typical response from the progressive left, and rarely valued or practiced. Reaction appears more the norm to those on the outside. In this case, however, advance planning meant executing an effective response to Trump’s attempts to control the outcome of the Nov. 3 election.

The Democracy Defense Coalition led by Deirdre Schifeling, a former top strategist for Planned Parenthood, grew from “a long season of planning and coordination by progressives.” When the doomsday scenarios war-gamed in the spring and summer emerged after the fall election, progressives were ready. Not with “fiery rhetoric and divisive demands” but with a “more studied vocabulary, developed through nightly opinion research and message testing.” And perhaps more importantly, with relationships born of months of cooperation aimed at protecting the vote:

For the most part, the organized left anticipated Mr. Trump’s postelection schemes, including his premature attempt to claim a victory he had not achieved, his pressure campaigns targeting Republican election administrators and county officials and his incitement of far-right violence, strategy documents show.

Ai-jen Poo, a prominent organizer involved in the effort, said the realization had dawned on a wide range of groups: “We all had to come together and bring everything we could to protecting our right to vote.”

Those groups ordinarily pursue their own goals from women’s issues to labor organizing. But in this effort, everyone’s interests were on the line.

Michael Podhorzer, an A.F.L.-C.I.O. strategist, was one of the new coalition’s architects. As the pandemic took hold in April. he drafted “Threats to the 2020 Election” outlining how cyberattacks, mass disinformation and more might disrupt voting and vote-counting.

“We are eight months away from crisis,” Mr. Podhorzer wrote in a missive to his allies. “Our efforts over the last three years to create a political infrastructure to mobilize and persuade voters has been extraordinary, but our preparation for the coming crisis has been woefully inadequate.”

Other progressive strategists, at organizations founded after 2016 like the Fight Back Table and the Social and Economic Justice Leaders group, had been mulling the same perils ahead.

As detailed here in August:

The Transition Integrity Project ran a series of war games in June to simulate what might happen after Election Day. About 100 bipartisan players from former Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta to former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, plus pundits and academics participated.

Over the summer and into the fall, weekly coordination calls over Zoom brought together hundreds of progressive organizations focused on winning the fall elections. With a coalition of over 200 strategists and activist groups, the Democracy Defense Coalition became “the largest of several interlocking progressive federations that prepared for a contested election.”

So when election night tipped in Joe Biden’s direction, organizers were prepared and coordinated. Planned pos-election rallies were replaced by targeted actions in places at vote-counting facilities. If the right attempted to revive the Brooks Brothers riot of Florida 2000 in Philadelphia and Detroit, progressives were prepared to head them off, the Times explains:

Anna Galland, a prominent progressive organizer involved in the deliberations, said it had been a “tough decision” not to mobilize nationwide demonstrations. Part of the concern, she said, had been that they might “inadvertently turn the tide of media momentum” by depicting a defeated president as a fearsome adversary.

“Organizing any kind of massive ‘It’s a coup’ mobilization, in the midst of those contested days, would have just been bait for the right,” she said.

Where they did gather, organizers were urged to take a tone of celebration and triumph. The goal, leaders agreed, would be to make Mr. Trump’s actions look impotent. Ms. Stamp described a midweek demonstration in Philadelphia, organized when she and others learned of a Proud Boys presence in the area, that became a “two-day dance party” that averted a tense standoff.

As Protect Democracy pushed back against Trump activists’ efforts to intimidate elections officials, Democracy Docket and other well-prepared Democratic attorneys quashed case after case — over 60 — brought by Trump lawyers to overturn election results.

The New Republic’s “Soapbox” in September dismissed planning for these efforts as “ridiculous war-gaming.” Then came months of Trump denying he had lost, alleging his reelection was stolen, pressuring state elections officials, and finally inciting violent insurrection. Yet through it all, advance planning and progressives’ cooperation helped our republic survive the greatest threat to our democracy since The War of 1812.

Cynical observers often condemn Democrats and progressive allies for doing nothing (or nothing effective) because those efforts are not visible to the casual observer. But not seeing is not the same as nothing happening. Take heart. There is more than meets the eye.

Washington Post:

Federal law enforcement officials are privately debating whether they should decline to charge some of the individuals who stormed the U.S. Capitol this month — a politically loaded proposition but one alert to the practical concern that hundreds of such cases could swamp the local courthouse.

The internal discussions are in their early stages, and no decisions have been reached about whether to forgo charging some of those who illegally entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions.

Justice Department officials have promised a relentless effort to identify and arrest those who stormed the Capitol that day, but internally there is robust back-and-forth about whether charging them all is the best course of action. That debate comes at a time when officials are keenly sensitive that the credibility of the Justice Department and the FBI are at stake in such decisions, given the apparent security and intelligence failures that preceded the riot, these people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss legal deliberations.

Absolutely not. These people knew they were breaking and entering the US Capitol during a Joint Session of Congress convened to count the electoral votes! It wasn’t breaking into the high school for spring fling! They were trying to overturn the presidential election for god’s sakes! Five people died, one of them a policeman at the hands of this mob.

All of them had agency. They could have walked away. Plenty of people in that crowd did that, even though they were Donald Trump supporters too. Anyone who wandered the halls with miscreants carrying Confederate flags and wearing Camp Auschwitz shirts and chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”, who heard the threats of violence against Speaker Pelosi and watched as the police were threatened and assaulted were accomplices. I’m sorry, they deserve to have the book thrown at them. And frankly the book really isn’t that harsh considering what they were trying to do.

They should keep the courts running 24/7 and let every single non-violent suspect go if they have to. This was an assault on our democracy and acting as though they were just letting off steam or on some sort of unauthorized tour is unacceptable.

These are not “very fine people:”

The Justice Department revealed new charges against a Texas man who allegedly participated in the Capitol attack and posted online death threats against Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a US Capitol Police officer.

Garret Miller of Texas faces five criminal charges stemming from the Capitol insurrection, including trespassing offenses and making death threats. Miller allegedly tweeted, “assassinate AOC,” according to court documents.

He also said the police officer who fatally shot a Trump supporter during the attack “deserves to die” and won’t “survive long” because it’s “huntin[g] season.”

Investigation into US Capitol riot moves into more complicated phaseProsecutors said in newly released court documents that Miller posted extensively on social media before and during the attack, saying a “civil war could start” and “next time we bring the guns.”

He was arrested on Wednesday, according to the Justice Department. Federal prosecutors are asking a judge to keep him in jail pending trial, and a detention hearing is scheduled for Monday.Clint Broden, a lawyer for Miller, told CNN Saturday that his client “certainly regrets what he did.”

“He did it in support of former President (Donald) Trump, but regrets his actions. He has the support of his family, and a lot of the comments, as viewed in context, are really sort of misguided political hyperbole. Given the political divide these days, there is a lot of hyperbole,” Broden said.

Death threats = “misguided political hyperbole

Right.

We have a new problem with the virus. And it’s scary:

In Denmark, where they DNA-sequence *every* positive COVID case, the B117 variant is growing 70% per week, yes, per week, despite strict lockdown.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/uk-variant-covid-denmark/2021/01/22/ddfaf420-5453-11eb-acc5-92d2819a1ccb_story.html?tid=ss_tw

This is happening while cases actually drop overall, giving a false sense of security.

In other words, a tsunami is coming.

Exponential growth means you can’t wait until the problem is evident.

This shows the additional deaths a strain like B117 can cause – without even accounting for overloaded hospitals being unable to deliver same level of care.

Worse, research is starting to suggest B117 is both more contagious *and* more deadly.

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-693bb5e5fab573efc4011fa6ad5dbb47

Higher mortality finding is still in dispute, though. Some experts aren’t convinced.

All this is bad economically, too. It will likely mean more businesses closing and people staying home whether governments order it or not. Terrible for already-struggling travel sector, restaurants, etc. More fiscal aid will be needed, raising government debt burdens.

And to cap it all, experience in Manaus, Brazil, which last year was thought to have reached herd immunity because 76% of population had been infected, says immunity either fades fast or offers less protection from new variants.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/01/21/958953434/reinfections-more-likely-with-new-coronavirus-variants-evidence-suggests

Portugal looking similar to Denmark.

Important read. Ben Hunt was one of the first to see all this coming last year. He’s been on target throughout.

Also see this by my colleague @JohnFMauldin, who said a week ago these new Covid variants could be a game-changer for the global economy.

https://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlinethoughts/the-grip-tightens

One problem with Great Barrington/Sweden-like “shield the vulnerable and let it rip” strategies is that allowing more reproduction gives the virus more chances to mutate in possibly problematic ways.

Originally tweeted by Patrick W. Watson (@PatrickW) on January 23, 2021.

Jane Mayer has a long piece about McConnell’s role in the Trump era up at the New Yorker. She says that McConnell really loathed Trump but had made a pact with the devil to get his tax cuts and judges, which we already knew. She also claims that he wanted to extricate the party from him but wanted to see if they could maintain their majority in the Senate before making a move:

As it turned out, the Republican leadership’s complicity with Trump was not only cynical; it also may have been an egregious miscalculation, given that voter data suggests his unchecked behavior likely cost the Republican Party the two Georgia seats. The chaos and the intra-party warfare in the state appear to have led large numbers of moderate Republican voters in the suburbs to either vote Democratic or not vote at all. And in some deeply conservative pockets of Georgia where the President held rallies, such as the Dalton area, Republican turnout was unexpectedly low, likely because Trump had undermined his supporters’ faith in the integrity of American elections.

By dawn on January 6th, it had become clear that Loeffler and Perdue were both going to lose. The personal and political consequences for McConnell were cataclysmic. Stuart Stevens, a Republican strategist who helped lead Romney’s 2012 Presidential campaign and was a founder of the anti-Trump group the Lincoln Project, told me, “McConnell had a forty-eight hours like no one else. He became Minority Leader and his Capitol was invaded. Domestic terrorists got inside it this time—unlike on 9/11.” (On that day, Al Qaeda had planned to crash a United Airlines flight into the Capitol, but the plane went down after passengers overwhelmed the hijackers.) Stevens went on, “And what happened in Georgia was incredible. He’s scared to death, too, at how corporate America is responding. Supporting the overthrow of the U.S. government isn’t good for business.”

After the January 6th insurrection, dozens of the largest corporate campaign donors, including A.T. & T., Comcast, and Honeywell, used their cash to send a message: their political action committees would no longer contribute to the hundred and forty-seven Republican representatives and senators who had opposed certification of the Presidential election even after the Capitol riot, on the spurious ground that the process had been less than fair. Even Koch Industries, the huge oil-refining conglomerate that has served as the conservative movement’s piggy bank for decades, said that it was reëvaluating its political contributions. McConnell, who once infamously declared that the three most important ingredients for political success in America are “money,” “money,” and “money,” was reportedly alarmed. A spokesperson for McConnell denies this, but, according to the Associated Press, he spent much of the weekend after the Capitol assault talking with colleagues and the Republican Party’s wealthy corporate donors, promising that he, too, was finally done with Trump.

Still, with another impeachment trial looming in the Senate, it’s unclear whether McConnell will truly end his compact with Trumpism. His recent denunciation of Trump sounded unequivocal. But he and his Republican caucus could make the same miscalculation that they made in Georgia, choosing to placate the Trumpian base of the Party rather than confront its retrograde values and commitment to falsehoods. So far, McConnell has been characteristically cagey. Although he let it be known that he regards Trump’s behavior as potentially impeachable, he also signalled that he hasn’t personally decided whether he will vote to convict him. He explained that he wants first to hear the evidence. He also rejected Democrats’ requests that he bring the Senate back from a winter recess to start the impeachment trial immediately, saying he prefers that the Senate trial begin in mid-February. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, has said that she might start the trial process by sending the article of impeachment to the Senate as early as January 25th. Either way, it will be left to Chuck Schumer, the leader of the new Democratic majority in the Senate, to take on the politically perilous business of presiding over the trial of a former President—an unprecedented event in American history.

“I think McConnell is trying to have it both ways,” Stevens told me. “He absolutely doesn’t want to impeach and convict Trump. It would split his base and cause members of his caucus to face primary challengers.” Stevens contended that McConnell, by signalling his openness to impeachment without committing to convicting Trump, was trying to avoid a meltdown of the Republican Party. Stevens likened McConnell to the top engineer at Chernobyl, who, after the power plant malfunctioned, thought that he could micromanage a nuclear disaster: “He tried to take the rods out.” Stevens added, “If he really wanted an impeachment conviction, he’d have done the trial right away.”

At first, political observers from both parties considered it possible that McConnell was merely using the threat of an impeachment trial as a brushback—a way to hold Trump in line as he left office. Then McConnell directly accused Trump of having “provoked” the mob. Jim Manley, who served as the senior communications adviser to Harry Reid, the former Democratic Majority Leader, told me, “There is no going back now. He has decided to cut his losses, and do what he can to make sure Trump is no longer a threat to the Republican Party.” McConnell and other Republican leaders, Manley suggested, “have gotten as much out of Trump as they can, and it’s now time to make sure Trump is damaged goods.”

But the risks for McConnell and other Senate Republicans are high. It’s never good for a party leader to get out too far ahead of his caucus members—he risks losing their fundamental support. Senator Lindsey Graham has criticized McConnell’s decision to blame Trump for the Capitol riot and has warned that, “without Trump’s help” in 2022, “we cannot take back the House and the Senate,” adding, “If you’re wanting to erase Donald Trump from the Party, you’re going to get erased.” McConnell’s maneuvers have also stirred the wrath of such powerful right-wing media figures as Sean Hannity, the Fox News host known for his unyielding sycophancy toward Trump. Hannity has called for McConnell to step down from the Party’s leadership in the Senate.

But if McConnell can muster the additional sixteen Republican votes necessary for a conviction—doing so requires the assent of two-thirds of the Senate, and the fifty Democratic senators are expected to vote as a bloc—he will have effectively purged Trump from the Party. Moreover, after a conviction, the Senate could hold a second vote, to bar Trump permanently from running for any federal office. Such a move might strengthen McConnell’s clout within the Party and help his wing of traditional Republicans reëstablish itself as the face of the G.O.P. Al Cross, a veteran political reporter and the director of the Institute for Rural Journalism, at the University of Kentucky, said, of McConnell, “I think he sees a chance to make Trump this generation’s version of Nixon, leaving no doubt who is at the top of the Republican heap.” Banning Trump would also guarantee that a different Republican will secure the Party’s nomination for President in 2024. Otherwise, Trump threatens to cast a shadow over the Party’s future. He has discussed running again, and, shortly before flying to Florida on January 20th, he stood on a tarmac and vowed, “We will be back in some form.

Jentleson, the former Senate aide, thinks that McConnell and his party are in a very tricky spot: “The glue that kept the Tea Party and establishment Republicans together during the past few years was tax cuts and judges. And McConnell can’t deliver those anymore. So you could basically see the Republican Party coming apart at the seams. You need to marry the forty per cent that is the Trump base with the ten per cent that’s the establishment. McConnell is like a cartoon character striding aside a crack that’s getting wider as the two plates drift farther apart. They may not come back together. If they can’t reattach, they can’t win.”

There is another option: McConnell could just lie low and wait to see if the Democrats self-destruct. A divisive Senate impeachment trial may undercut Biden’s message of bipartisan unity, hampering his agenda in the crucial early months of his Presidency, when he needs momentum. McConnell has already seized on the fifty-fifty balance between the parties in the Senate in order to obstruct the Democrats. He’s refusing to devise rules for moving forward on Senate business unless Schumer yields to his demand not to alter the filibuster rule. Reviled by progressives, the rule requires a supermajority of sixty votes to pass legislation, rather than the simple majority that the Democrats now have if Vice-President Kamala Harris casts a tie-breaking vote. McConnell, who wrote a memoir titled “The Long Game,” is a master at outwaiting his foes. And, as Jentleson observed, one can never overestimate the appeal for politicians of “kicking the can down the road,” especially when confronted with tough decisions.

McConnell could conceivably make a play that would avoid a direct showdown over convicting Trump. A conservative legal argument has recently been advanced by J. Michael Luttig, a prominent former federal appeals-court judge: the Senate, he says, has no constitutional authority to hold an impeachment trial after a President has left office. Luttig’s argument has been challenged by numerous constitutional scholars, some of whom have cited an instance in which a lesser official was impeached after leaving office. But this politically convenient exit ramp is alluring, and Luttig is held in high regard by conservatives. The Republican senator Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, a Harvard Law School graduate, has eagerly embraced the theory, arguing, “The Founders designed the impeachment process as a way to remove officeholders from public office—not an inquest against private citizens.” So has Joni Ernst, of Iowa, who is a member of McConnell’s leadership team.

Christopher Browning, a historian of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany, told me that McConnell has been almost “Houdini-like at escaping his own devil’s pact” with Trump. In a widely admired essay in The New York Review of Books, from 2018, Browning called McConnell “the gravedigger of American democracy,” and likened him to elected officials in Weimar Germany who struck early deals with Hitler, mistakenly believing that they could contain him and his followers. When I asked Browning if he still regarded McConnell in this way, he said that the new Minority Leader had “cut a better deal than most.” McConnell was “lucky that Trump was so lazy, feckless, and undisciplined.” Hitler didn’t go golfing, Browning pointed out. But Browning found little to celebrate in McConnell’s performance. “If Trump had won the election, Mitch would not be jumping ship,” he noted. “But the fact is Trump lost, and his coup failed. And that opened an escape hatch for Mitch.” Browning warned, however, that “the McConnell wing was ready to embrace Trump’s usurping of democracy—if Trump could pull it off.”

If McConnell does vote to convict Trump of high crimes and misdemeanors, it won’t be the first time that, out of political convenience, he has turned on his party’s leader. In 1973, when McConnell was an ambitious young lawyer, he wrote an op-ed in the Louisville Courier-Journal which referred to Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal and denounced the corrupting influence of political money. Given McConnell’s later embrace of unregulated political funds, it may seem hard to square the author of that high-minded piece with the McConnell of today. But what remains consistent is that then, as now, he was acting in his self-interest. He later confessed to a biographer that the newspaper column was merely “playing for headlines.” McConnell was planning to run for office, as a Republican, and one thing was certain: he needed to protect himself from the stain of a disgraced President. 

It certainly appears to me that they are going to come together to vote against impeachment on procedural grounds. It’s the cowardly way out but will probably appease their rabid base because they don’t know any better.

As far as McConnell, he can make soaring speeches denouncing Trump every day until he drops dead and it won’t change a thing. He is one of Trump’s most important collaborators who protected him throughout his ignominious reign. He can’t erase that stain. And the truth is that McConnell’s stain on the Senate and the nation is even bigger than that.

Quick answer:

No.

Here’s a bit more on that from Adam Jentleson discussing his new book about the filibuster called “Kill Switch” on Fresh Air. He discusses the fact that it was never anticipated by the founders and was primarily used by Southern racists to block civil rights legislation. He picks up the story in more recent years here:

GROSS: Who is the innovator of making that supermajority routine, enabling the minority to block any legislation it wants to?

JENTLESON: More than any other single senator, Mitch McConnell is responsible for the overuse of the filibuster. This is simply a fact. It was – it came into frequent use. And I don’t want to downplay the role the Democrats played here. From the 1970s through the 1980s and into the 2000s, leaders of both parties began to use it more frequently. Senator Harry Reid, my former boss, used it under President George W. Bush a good deal.

But when Mitch McConnell became leader – the first minority leader in 2007, he began using the filibuster at a rate that had never been seen before in the Senate. And his key innovation was to use it not just with the intent of making it harder to pass individual bills but of deploying it as a weapon of mass obstruction against every single thing that moved in the Senate, which had the net effect of grinding the gears of the Senate to a halt and creating what appeared to any casual observer to be a completely gridlocked Washington.

GROSS: The Senate is now going to be split 50-50, with Kamala Harris as vice president having the ability to break the tie if there is a tie. So it’s not enough to pass the threshold of filibuster and cloture. So what does this narrow margin get the Democrats in the Senate?

JENTLESON: Well, a majority, even the slimmest majority possible, gives you a ton of power in the Senate. It puts you in control of all the committees. It doesn’t matter if your majority is one seat or even hinging on the vice presidency or if it’s 10 seats. You have control of all of the committees.

It also makes Chuck Schumer the majority leader and Mitch McConnell the minority leader, and that means that Schumer, not McConnell, can determine what bills come to the floor. That is a huge difference. We saw how important this is just last month with the fight over direct payment checks, where the bill that passed the House was denied a vote because Mitch McConnell simply refused to bring it up for a vote in the Senate. So even having the ability to determine what bills come to the floor can be very important in the Senate. It means that whether they pass or fail, all or most of President Biden’s major legislative agenda items will get a vote in the Senate.

GROSS: Are we about to see a strategic war between Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer?

JENTLESON: I think we are. And I think that what happens is going to have massive and very important ramifications not just for the Senate as an institution but for the everyday lives of American people. My personal view is the inevitable outcome of this war is going to be some kind of Senate reform that lowers the threshold from 60 votes to somewhere closer to a majority. I would prefer that it go all the way to a majority, but we’ll see what happens.

I think that the simple fact of the matter is that even if President Biden tries to secure bipartisan cooperation with Republicans, it’s simply not going to be forthcoming to the extent that he needs it to be. And that is going to force the question of whether Democrats simply want to give up on their agenda or reform the Senate so that they can pass bills on a majority basis.

The filibuster is a fundamentally undemocratic tactic that was used for decades to deny Black citizens their civil rights. Then McConnell came along and saw the opportunity to use the same tactic to ensure minority rule on everything. It is and outrage and it must be done away with. The Republicans are no longer operating with even the modest gentrue toward good faith.