GOP Will Shut Down The Government Unless Trump Cases Are Shut Down
In a New York Magazine column yesterday, For Republicans, Abetting Coups Is a Good Career Move, Eric Levitz noted that “The 2022 elections were widely hailed as a triumph of democracy and a disaster for Donald Trump’s ‘stop the steal’ movement. And not without reason. In last year’s midterms, 13 election deniers ran for governor, secretary of state, or attorney general— offices with some influence over vote-counting procedures— in an Electoral College battleground. All 13 lost. But a new study of the 2022 results paints a less rosy picture of the relationship between Republican officials’ contempt for democracy and their electoral fortunes. The political scientists Larry Bartels and Nicholas Carnes note that many of the vanquished election deniers in statewide races were political novices who may have been at a disadvantage, irrespective of their claims about the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory. For example, the GOP’s gubernatorial nominee in Pennsylvania, Doug Mastriano, was an ardent supporter of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and attended the ex-president’s rally on January 6, 2021. But he was also a QAnon enthusiast who aired virtually no campaign ads in the race’s home stretch.”
Bartels and Carnes argue that a better gauge of the political viability of contempt for democracy in the U.S. is the electoral performance of Republican members of Congress who did and did not support Trump on key votes concerning the January 6 insurrection. Specifically, they examine how GOP congressional members voted on (1) the certification of electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania, (2) Trump’s impeachment for his role in fomenting the Capitol riot, and (3) a proposed commission to investigate January 6. They then look at the disparate political fortunes of Republicans who stood with Trump and those who did not, while attempting to control for other variables that might have influenced their respective fates. For example, Republicans who were already at high risk of losing reelection (because they represented competitive districts) might have been disproportionately likely to buck Trump on these votes. Thus, the study measures how well candidates did in 2022 compared to both their own margins in the 2020 election and Trump’s margin in their districts that year.
Bartels and Carnes find that Republicans who backed Trump on these key votes did no worse than other GOP lawmakers in their general elections. But those who consistently defied Trump’s will— voting to certify the 2020 election results, to impeach Trump for his attempt to overturn those results, and to investigate January 6— were drastically more likely to lose a primary. As a result, a GOP lawmaker who opposed Trump on all these votes had a 19 percent chance of winning reelection, while one who backed Trump on all of them had a 98 percent chance of returning to Congress in 2023.
…[T]he study indicates that triumphalist accounts of the 2022 midterms were overly sanguine. Republican donors and primary voters rewarded lawmakers who shielded Trump from accountability for his coup attempt. General-election voters, meanwhile, did not significantly punish House Republicans who supported that coup by voting to decertify election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. This finding is consistent with survey experiments showing that only a small fraction of U.S. voters are willing to prioritize democratic principles over partisanship or ideological preferences.
Of course, you don’t actually need to do much number crunching to find that GOP primary voters aren’t inclined to punish election deniers; Donald Trump currently leads the Republican presidential field by nearly 40 points. Opponents of authoritarian rule must therefore hope that general-election voters are more inclined to punish anti-democratic candidates in presidential races than they have been in congressional ones.
Maybe Trump is leading by 40 points because the alternatives are so dismal. DeSantis is trying hard to prove he’s even worse than Trump… and largely succeeding. Tim Scott may be relatively reasonable for a Republican— and very nice— and the big funders think he’s swell… but you think the MAGAt base is ready to back a Black man (who is also a closet case)? I would also like to throw into Levitz’s calculations that most of the non-incumbent MAGAt candidates for Congress who lost, in the general-- if not in only-Republicans-are-allowed-to-vote primaries-- Joe Kent (in a district with an R+11 partisan lean), J.R. Majewski (in a district with an R+6 partisan lean) and Karoline Leavitt (in a district with an R+1 partisan lean) being only three of the best known.
Meanwhile, though McCarthy and McConnell have agreed with Schumer and Jeffries on a continuing resolution (CR) to prevent a government shutdown— in just over a month— the “Freedom” Caucus has said they won’t go along with it without conditions, reminding everyone that they could deprive a weak and pitifully pusillanimous McCarthy of his job if he dares to oppose them. This was their latest statement of demands-- one that could certainly grow at any moment-- insisting they will kill any CR that doesn’t:
include their xenophobic right-wing immigration bill
address the weaponization of the Justice Department
agree to their war on woke (anti-Choice, anti-LGBTQ demands)
That second one (bolded) includes a demand that Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump (who they referred to as “a law abiding citizen”) be halted. In other words, stop prosecuting their Führer or they’ll shut down the government. Democrats and the mainstream media need to discuss that. I don't expeect it will be brought up in this evening's debate.
Yesterday Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascism, explained why Trump refused to debate— different from my own explanation that he’s too senile to debate anyone other than Joe Biden. Debates, she wrote, are “anathema to the authoritarian mindset. Personality cults posit the leader as a man above all others, and the egalitarian staging and format of debates make them dangerous to his brand. Moreover, authoritarians who depend on disinformation, threat, and corruption (including fixing elections), have much to lose by submitting to spontaneous questioning by a rival or a third party.
Comparing Trump to two of his contemporary fascist idols, Putin and Orban, she noted that “Autocrats… who rely on corruption, violence, and lies don’t exactly want to be questioned— least of all Trump, who has multiple indictments hanging over him… Trump's shadow will hang over the debate proceedings. His rivals for the nomination, none of whom have much chance of winning, will attack each other. But we shall see how far they go in attacking Trump, the cult leader who has much of the party firmly in hand. The advice given to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to ‘defend’ Trump during the debate is telling. For those who will gather on stage know that the threat Trump recently posted on Truth Social— ‘If you go after me, I’m coming after you’— is meant for them too.”
