Conservatives vs Fascists
If Clarence Thomas (appointed by George HW Bush) and Aileen Cannon (appointed by Señor T) are today’s quintessential conservative judges, J. Michael Luttig (also appointed by George HW Bush) is yesteryear’s quintessential conservative judge. After college he worked for Chief Justice Warren Burger (an Eisenhower and then a Nixon appointee) and then in the Reagan administration (vetting potential judicial appointees for ideological purity). Afterwards he clerked for first Scalia and then his old friend Burger. He was an assistant attorney general under Bush who later appointed him to the Court of Appeals, where he was most often compared to Scalia, a kind of role model. He resigned as a judge in 2006 to become general counsel for Boeing, jumping from a $175,100 annual salary to a $2,798,962 base salary, an amount that, over time, rose to more than $4 million a year. what could be more conservative than that?
A former Luttig law clerk, John Eastman, came up with the spurious legal theory that Pence could overturn the election. Pence consulted Luttig who told him the theory was off-the-rails. Pence cited Luttig’s letter when he decided to reject Trump’s demands and Luttig was famously quoted as having said it was "the highest honor of my life" to be involved in preserving the Constitution. He testified, on TV, at the house Select Committee on the J-6 attack and noted that Trump "instigated" a war on democracy "so that he could cling to power… It is breathtaking that these arguments even were conceived, let alone entertained by the President of the United States at that perilous moment in history" [and that January 6] "was the final fateful day for the execution of a well-developed plan by the former president to overturn the 2020 presidential election at any cost." At the close of the hearing, Luttig said: “Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. They would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020. I don't speak those words lightly. I would have never spoken those words ever in my life, except that that's what the former president and his allies are telling us.” That’s what an old fashioned conservative judge could sound like.
Yesterday, the NY Times published some wishful thinking by that old fashioned conservative judge, It’s Not Too Late for the Republican Party. To be honest, he probably should have named his OpEd, “It is Too Late for the Republican Party.” He began by railing about how “the Republicans’ spineless support for the past two years convinced 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 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.”
He was talking about post-modern Republicans like McCarthy, Traitor-Greene, Boebert, Jordan, Gaetz, Gosar, Tuberville, Hawley, Cruz… and noted that “Republicans are as responsible as Trump for this month’s indictment— and will be as responsible for any indictment and prosecution of him for Jan. 6. One would think that, for a party that has prided itself for caring about the Constitution and the rule of law, this would stir some measure of self-reflection among party officials and even voters about their abiding support for the former president. Surely before barreling headlong into the 2024 presidential election season, more Republicans would realize it is time to come to the reckoning with Trump that they have vainly hoped and naïvely believed would never be necessary.”
Nope; that’s where he went wrong. “Self-reflection among party officials and even voters?” Uh… no, he’s mistaking MAGAts for conservatives. There are no conservatives any longer— unless you want to call the emerging dominant wing of the Democrap Party— just fascists, nihilists and MAGAts where conservatives once stood. He is right that “by all appearances, “it certainly hasn’t occurred to them yet that any reckoning is needed. 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 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.” Yep… that’s how you can define what the media still refers to as “conservatives.”
The stewards of the Republican Party have become so inured to their putative leader, they have managed to convince themselves that an indicted and perhaps even convicted Donald Trump is their party’s best hope for the future. But rushing to model their campaign on Trump’s breathtakingly inane template is as absurd as it is ill fated. They will be defending the indefensible.
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, 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 FBI, 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 Trump and the Republicans. Mike Pence dutifully pronounced the indictment political. And both Governor DeSantis and Pence pledged— in a new Republican litmus test— that on their first day in office they would fire the director of the FBI, the Trump appointee Christopher Wray, obviously for his turpitude in investigating 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.
If the indictment of Trump on Espionage Act charges— not to mention his now almost certain indictment for conspiring to obstruct Congress from certifying 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.
There is no path to the White House for Republicans with Trump. He would need every single Republican and independent vote, and there are untold numbers of Republicans and independents who will never vote for him, if for no other perfectly legitimate reason than that he has corrupted America’s democracy and is now attempting to corrupt the country’s rule of law. No sane Democrat will vote for Trump— even over the aging Biden— when there are so many sane Republicans who will refuse to vote for Trump. This is all plain to see, which makes it all the more mystifying why more Republicans don’t see it.
When Republicans faced an 11th-hour reckoning with another of their presidents over far less serious offenses almost 50 years ago, the elder statesmen of the party marched into the Oval Office and told Richard Nixon the truth. He had lost his Republican support and he would be impeached if he did not resign. The beleaguered Nixon resigned the next day and left the White House the day following.
Such is what it means to put country over party. History tends to look favorably upon a party that writes its own history, as Winston Churchill might have said.
Republicans have waited in vain for political absolution. It’s finally time for them to put the country before their party and pull back from the brink— for the good of the party, as well as the nation.
If not now, then they must forever hold their peace.
Yesterday. E.J. Dionne wrote that “When you have a simple problem with your car, you fix it. When lots of things go wrong at once, you usually realize it’s time to trade it in. For American conservatives, last week was an occasion to ponder whether their whole approach is starting to look like a junker. If they are wise enough to visit a showroom of new ideas, they might consider the simplest option of all: being conservatives again.”
He added that an Economist/YouGov Poll released this month “found that by a healthy 59 percent to 41 percent margin, Americans preferred a member of Congress who ‘compromises to get things done’ rather than one who ‘sticks to their principles, no matter what.’ But whereas 81 percent of Democrats said they preferred compromisers, 58 percent of Republicans were in the ‘no matter what’ crowd. If you are looking for the core driver of gridlock, this is it. Conservatives don’t take kindly to progressives telling them what conservatism should be. It’s an old habit: When Joe McCarthy was riding high, moderate and liberal social scientists began distinguishing between ‘conservatism’ and ‘the radical right.’ I get the conservative impatience with liberal advice. But honestly, it’s really not a big ask to urge conservatives to be conservative rather than radical.”
