Treason Trial Has To Come First
I just got back from a week in New York, my first trip back in at least 5 or 6 years. My friends Helen and Michael threw a party for our mutual friends in Westchester, a part of the county now represented by Republican freshman Mike Lawler. Helen, who made one of the best veggie lasagnas I ever tasted, is obsessed with politics. But neither she nor Michael knew that Lawler is their congressman. I doubt many people do. He narrowly defeated an extremely corrupt and incompetent Democrat, Sean Patrick Maloney, last year. This cycle, Lawler will be facing an extremely popular Democrat, Mondaire Jones, and his chances of surviving the election are… remote. (By the way, you can help get Helen and Michael back into a blue district by contributing to Mondaire’s campaign here.)
Yesterday, the NY Times published an early morning report by Nick Fandos about how the GOP Speaker mess has divided NY House Republicans. He started by writing about Lawler, who wants Helen and Michael— and everyone else in the Hudson Valley district that includes parts of Westchester, Rockland, Putnam and Dutchess counties— to know that “his political party is an absolute mess. ’Stuck on stupid,’ he branded a band of hard-right Republicans who pulled Congress to the brink of a government shutdown. He said their ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy ‘undermined the will of the American people.’ As for the fight over a replacement that has ground the House to a halt for two weeks and counting? ‘This is the single stupidest thing I’ve ever seen politically, in terms of self-sabotage,’ Lawler said in a telephone interview on Wednesday, just minutes after he joined 21 other Republicans and every Democrat to torpedo Representative Jim Jordan, a hard-right Ohioan, the latest candidate for speaker. His mounting frustration, voiced in interviews with reporters in the Capitol and on networks like CNN that are typically reviled on the right, is not merely an unusual display of bluntness. It is a risky gambit by one of the House’s most endangered Republicans to insulate himself from his own party as it careens, leaderless, toward another possible shutdown.”
Fandos pointed out that “Lawler’s outspokenness is perhaps the most glaring example of the balancing acts that anxious frontline Republicans are trying to pull off across the country— acrobatics that could determine the trajectory of the House this fall and beyond,” by holding together crucial swing district coalitions. Biden won these districts. In fact, he won Lawler’s district by 10.1 points. What he and the Long Island Republicans—minus George Santos who will be in prison by next November, not running for reelection— is the opposite of what the 7 swing district California Republicans are doing. “Anthony D’Esposito and Nick LaLota, who both represent Long Island districts won by Biden, joined Lawler in voting against Jordan and have condemned those who took out McCarthy. So did Andrew Garbarino, another Long Islander who represents a district that Biden lost narrowly [1.5 points]… They issued near-identical statements outlining bipartisan priorities that they believed would falter under Jordan, the leader of the party’s rebellious right wing who has long been labeled a ‘legislative terrorist.’”
“I want a speaker who understands Long Island’s unique needs,” said D’Esposito, who represents a district where voters favored Biden by 14 points in 2020. He listed support for victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack and lifting a cap on the amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted on taxpayers’ federal return.
But Representative Marc Molinaro, a moderate who narrowly flipped a Biden district in the Hudson Valley on promises of bipartisanship, appeared to have reached a very different conclusion: that the damage of elongating the House’s paralysis would be worse than electing a right-wing speaker whose policies and style could scarcely be more different than his.
“Most of the people I represent wouldn’t know the speaker of the House if they backed over them with a pickup truck,” he said before voting for Jordan.
Representative Brandon Williams, a Republican from the Syracuse area who voted for Jordan, has evidently chosen not to give voice to the issue at all. [Williams has gone all-in on MAGA in the last 6 months. He’s crazed and doomed.]
…Republican lawmakers caution that there is still time to put the House back in order, and moderates appeared to be coalescing late Wednesday around trying to empower a [psychotic, corrupt and murderous] House veteran, Patrick McHenry, to serve as a temporary speaker until Congress can reach a deal to fund the government and address the war breaking out in Israel and Gaza.
But many fear damage is already being done. Democrats have deployed aggressive tactics to try to lock in the dysfunction with potential voters, as they eye the handful of seats they need to retake the House next year.
The House Majority PAC, House Democrats’ primary super PAC, placed thousands of robocalls in Lawler’s district on Monday asking voters to pressure him not to support Jordan for speaker, given Jordan’s vote to overturn the 2020 election and “an extreme agenda to ban abortion nationwide.”
Lawler did not vote for Jordan; Democrats hit him anyway. “Mike Lawler is an unserious legislator whose wasted vote today is blocking critical work getting done on behalf of Lower Hudson Valley families,” Ellie Dougherty, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an email blast.
She issued similar quotes about D’Esposito and LaLota, while writing in another that Molinaro’s vote proved that he “embraces the far-right wing of his party.”
At the same time, though, Republicans pushing too hard against their own party run the risk of sharp backlash from a right flank enamored of Jordan and eager to jump-start the House’s presidential impeachment inquiry and to fund new weapons for Israel’s battle against Hamas. In Lawler’s case, they played a key role in helping him topple Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the Democratic campaign committee at the time, in one of the nation’s biggest upsets.
Jack Chatham, a conservative talk radio host based in Albany, said on air on Tuesday that Lawler was “tempting fate,” particularly given the large number of retired law enforcement officers in his district, by opposing Jordan.
On Wednesday— when Jordan was still running for speaker— Jonathan Martin wrote that there is “a reason why House Republicans can’t settle on a speaker. It’s the same reason there are effectively parallel GOP presidential primaries. One is between a series of candidates embarked on all the usual rituals vying for support from about half the party’s voters, while the other half has long ago made up its mind about who its preferred nominee is. His name may ring a bell. There is no longer a cohesive Republican Party. There’s a pre-Trump GOP and a post-Trump GOP, living together uneasily. They may be roommates but they’re not married… Trump’s takeover of the GOP has accelerated the remake of Congress, where Republicans in his image have been arriving since 2018 while those anchored in the Ryan-era party have either followed the former speaker’s path to the exits or accommodated the party’s transition.”
Yesterday, Jeffrey Toobin suggested that all this right-wing craziness— Trumpism— is going to get someone killed. “Trump’s life,” he wrote, “has been a master class in the evasion of consequences. Six of his businesses have declared bankruptcy but he is still acclaimed as a business visionary; he’s been married three times but is still beloved by evangelicals; he’s been impeached twice but still remains a leading candidate for president. For years, Trump’s critics have believed that a moment of accountability was just over the horizon, thanks to, say, a Bob Woodward takedown or a Robert Mueller investigation; disappointment followed. Now, Trump confronts another moment of apparent peril as he begins to face his accusers in criminal and civil court proceedings. The verdicts in these cases remain months away, but he is reacting in apparent confidence that the consequences of his actions will, as ever, turn out well for him. But it’s equally important to ask how Trump’s response to his latest predicament will affect others, especially those who are now targets of his wrath… Trump has always employed invective as a political tool, but as his days of courtroom reckoning have arrived, his rhetoric has grown more menacing. He’s suggested that Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could have been executed; that shoplifters should be shot; that the judge’s clerk in the civil case against him is Sen. Chuck Schumer’s girlfriend; and that ‘you ought to go after’ the state attorney general who is prosecuting him. In language evoking Nazi eugenics, he has accused immigrants of ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’… [T]here’s no remedy there for his tirades.”
“Angry people,” wrote Toobin, “especially those predisposed toward violence, can be set off by encouragement that falls well short of the legal standard for criminal incitement… [F]rom Limbaugh to Trump, the act of calling out their provocations produces the same cries of wounded innocence… Trump, like Limbaugh before him, uses the Constitution’s broad protections for inflammatory speech as a shield against any sort of accountability. The implicit argument is that unless a criminal prosecution establishes a direct cause and effect between his words and the violence that follows, then there is no connection at all. But that isn’t true, nor can it be. Clinton was just reflecting common sense when he said, “words can have consequences,” and McVeigh’s story illustrates the effect that constitutionally protected words can have. But Trump never acknowledges that his words have any outcome other than those he chooses to recognize.”
The temptation with Trump, for President Biden and others, has always been to ignore the former president’s more outrageous statements in favor of the high (or at least higher) road. But that restraint is a disservice to the public and, in all likelihood, bad politics, too. If Trump isn’t called out for his encouragement of violence before it actually takes place, that will bolster his proclamations of innocence when the worst happens; he shouldn’t have that opportunity. Trump’s statements represent an immediate danger to the targets of his rage and the public at large; it’s Biden’s responsibility, as well as a political opportunity, to issue that warning.
Trump has never respected the norms of political behavior and there’s little reason to think gag orders will provide meaningful discipline either. As on Jan. 6, his supporters shed traditional rules as well. The day is fast approaching when someone picks up a gun or builds a bomb and then seeks to follow through on Trump’s words. If and when that happens, he will say that he did not specifically direct or cause the violence, and he will probably escape without criminal charges— but the blood will be on his hands.