Are we all Jim Jordans now? Witnesses to crimes about which we do nothing? Either to punish what’s happened or to prevent what will? Are we collectively caught in one of those nightmares in which we are desperate to flee imminent danger, yet our legs won’t work?
Virtually every Democrat inside the Capitol dome is committed to seeing Joe Biden’s social spending package pass into law. They remain hopeful, if not convinced that, as in normal times, voters will reward good governance at the polls. But these are not normal times.
Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the White House wasted months this year trying to coax, cajole, and threaten their Senate outliers into voting for the Build Back Better act, the centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s first-term agenda. Solid legislative accomplishments, in normal times, provide a platform for winning a second term. But these are not normal times.
Republican legislators outside the Beltway are throwing acid and sand into the machinery of elections in state after state to ensure they can control the outcome of future elections whatever Democrats accomplish between now and November 2024. Or even 2022.
Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence H. Tribe and colleagues fret openly in the New York Times that despite what we collectively witnessed in real time on Jan. 6 this year, too little is being done to dissuade the ringleaders from attempting a second coup in 2024. Information already in the public record is sufficient, they argue, for the Department of Justice to launch a criminal investigation of “Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and even Donald Trump — all of whom were involved, in one way or another,” in events that led to the violent attack by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol:
Almost a year after the insurrection, we have yet to see any clear indicators that such an investigation is underway, raising the alarming possibility that this administration may never bring charges against those ultimately responsible for the attack.
The legal paths are there, and clear.
And yet there are no signs, at least in media reports, that the attorney general is building a case against these individuals — no interviews with top administration officials, no reports of attempts to persuade the foot soldiers to turn on the people who incited them to violence. By this point in the Russia investigation, the special counsel Robert Mueller had indicted Paul Manafort and Rick Gates and secured the cooperation of George Papadopoulos after charging him with lying to the F.B.I. The media was reporting that the special counsel’s team had conducted or scheduled interviews with Mr. Trump’s aides Stephen Miller and Mr. Bannon, as well as Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
If there is work going on behind the scenes, the press should have reported something. Perhaps Attorney General Merrick Garland awaits a final report from the House select committee. Perhaps there is not enough evidence extant to convict. But, they write, uncertainty about conviction is “no reason to refrain from an investigation. If anything, a federal criminal investigation could unearth even more evidence and provide a firmer basis for deciding whether to indict.” Meanwhile, enemies of democracy hack away at its pillars.
In Congress, Democrats supposedly able to walk and chew gum have yet to pass voting rights legislation that could stop the manifold, post-2020 attacks against voters, voting rights, and democracy itself. Like the nuclear doomsday clock, the hands move closer to midnight as 2022 approaches. Crimes against this once-democratic republic, passed under color of law in state after state and in the light of day, go unanswered. Like Jim Jordan, we are witnesses and do-nothings.
The Big Lie festers:
“I’ve never been more scared about American democracy than I am right now, because of the metastasizing of the ‘big lie,’ ” says election law expert Rick Hasen, co-director of the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center at the University of California, Irvine.
“This is not the kind of thing I expected to ever worry about in the United States,” Hasen says. “I kind of feel like a climate scientist from five years ago or [an] expert on viruses a couple of years ago, sounding the alarm and just hoping that we’re not too late already.”
Timothy Snyder (“The Road to Unfreedom” and “On Tyranny“) warns, “the ‘big lie’ is not just in people’s minds. It’s also now in the law books.” In dozens of laws passed in 19 states so far:
“All of those things set us up for a scenario where the candidate who loses by every measure, not just by the popular vote, but by the Electoral College, the candidate who loses by every measure will nevertheless be installed as president of the United States,” Snyder says. “I think that is probably the most likely scenario in 2024 as things stand now.”
That scenario needs to be confronted immediately, Snyder says: “It’s right in front of our eyes. The most interesting and the most distressing thing about American news coverage right now is that we don’t treat the end of democracy in America as the story. That is the story.”
Carol Anderson, professor of African-American Studies at Emory University, tells NPR voting rights legislation needed to “short circuit” what “the ‘big lie’ is doing and will do.” But the Democratic Party seems not to grasp “the fierce urgency of now.”
We have been, in her words, “baptized in American exceptionalism” — the naive belief that the demise of democracy can’t happen here.
“Even after you have had the insurrection,” Anderson says, “even after you have had these legislatures write these laws figuring out not only how to stop Black people, brown people, indigenous people from voting, but also how to lower the guardrails of democracy that prevented Trump from being able to overturn the results in these states; so even after seeing this, to not move and do what needs to be done to protect this nation?” Anderson sighs. “It’s unconscionable.”
Having failed, Jan. 6 was a rehearsal, says Snyder. “This is what historians and political scientists who study coups d’etat say. They say a failed coup is practice for a successful one.” The end of democracy in America lies ahead and we choose not to see.
We have to stop looking the other way and act. Or else stop pointing fingers at Jim Jordan.
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