We've all been played
Deranged Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, but our democracy has been under attack from the inside for many years.
When the U.S. Senate reconvened Wednesday night, Mitch McConnell stood up at his mahogany desk and valiantly defended the sanctity of our institutions. “We’ve never been deterred before, and will be not deterred today,” the majority leader said just a couple of hours after Trump’s unwashed mob stormed the Capitol building. “They tried to disrupt our democracy. They failed. They failed.”
McConnell is right: the riots inside of the Capitol may have killed four people and injured dozens of others, but they did not stop the tallying of the electoral count. Joe Biden’s victory was ratified; he will take office on Jan. 20.
And besides, McConnell knows a thing or two about “disrupting democracy.” He’s been successfully doing it for decades.
There were many surreal scenes Wednesday: Members of Congress applauding Capitol Police for failing to protect their wellbeing; Black workers literally cleaning up after white terrorists were allowed to run rampant throughout “The People’s House;” journalists being arrested while the actual criminals relaxed at Trump’s hotel. But the most surreal moments of a dismal day occurred on the Senate floor, when countless blowhards who have actually destroyed our democracy pretended to heroically protect it.
Hell, Lindsey Graham was even able to work out the kinks in his stand-up routine. Our founding fathers would’ve been proud.
Make no mistake: Mitch McConnell and his geriatric cohorts have done more damage to American democracy than Donald Trump or any lunatic who stormed through the Capitol Wednesday afternoon. We can begin with their constant enabling of Trump, who never left any doubt about how this was going to end.
I mean, the guy formed a voter fraud commission to investigate an election he won. Donald Trump refusing to give up power is the most predictable thing ever. But Republican senators were fine with that for four years. They got to slash taxes on millionaires and corporations and shepherd the entire Federalist Society into our judiciary. Trump was the most useful of idiots.
Here’s the thing Trump may finally be figuring out: He’s been used. Sure, the Republican Party has acquiesced to his idiocy, but that’s because he’s the only person who can actually turn out voters. Without Trump, it is the party of Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. They’ve lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. A rigged system is the only way they can actually keep power.
It’s a fact that isn’t lost on Rand Paul. “We shouldn’t be trashing the very institution that has been the way we win the presidency, and the only way we’ve been winning the presidency recently is through the Electoral College,” he accurately said on Fox News.
Republicans have controlled the Senate for the last six years, despite representing around 40 percent of the population. At this rate, two-thirds of Americans will be represented by just 30 percent of the Senate by 2040. Now that Democrats control things, they could level the playing field and push for Puerto Rico and D.C. statehood. But that would require playing aggressively. They don’t typically do that.
Over the last two decades alone, Democrats have watched helplessly while Republicans have obliterated democratic norms. George W. Bush won the presidency on a 5-4 Supreme Court decision and Barack Obama wasn’t allowed to name a Supreme Court justice during his last year in office. Most consequently, the Supreme Court ruled corporations could spend unlimited amounts of money in elections, and invalidated the heart of the Voting Rights Act.
The former ruling has been good to every Washington powerbroker. For example, donors and outside groups plowed nearly $1 billion into Georgia’s runoff races. The money flows to both sides.
The latter decision, which granted nine (mostly) Southern states permission to change their election rules without federal approval, has obviously not been kind to Democrats. It’s resulted in the closing of at least 1,688 polling places and a torrent of voter ID laws. Most glaringly, these racist restrictions helped propel Brian Kemp to victory in Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial election. In the lead-up to the race, 1.4 million voters were purged from the rolls and nearly half of the state’s precincts and polling sites were either closed or relocated.
Kemp defeated Stacey Abrams by less than 55,000 votes.
And yet, over the last two months, Kemp has been lauded as a champion of democracy — along with Georgia’s Secretary of State. You see, they’ve refused Trump’s demands to overturn Biden’s victory. It’s very brave.
But Trump’s insane conspiracy theories will almost certainly result in more draconian voting restrictions being enacted across the country. McConnell even said it himself. While he was waxing poetic about how asserting Biden’s win will be the “most important vote he’s ever cast,” he slipped in this little beauty: "I support strong state-led voting reforms. Last year's bizarre pandemic procedures must not become the new norm."
Somehow, Chuck Todd and others tongue-bathing McConnell must have missed those words. Or maybe they did and just ignored them. The pundit class is complicit in this takeover, too. One of the most laughable moments of Trump’s term came in the immediate aftermath of his first State of the Union address, when Van Jones declared he “became president of the United States,” because he did something fleetingly normal and honored the widow of a dead soldier.
The Trump Years have been very good to the media. Legacy institutions like the NYT and WaPo saw their subscriber numbers explode; cable news enjoyed huge ratings; lucrative book deals were easily obtained. Indignant outrage sells. Trump treats his supposed enemies better than he treats his friends.
Cheap bottle of wine in hand, I was glued to MSNBC for hours Wednesday night, watching the likes of Joy Reid and Claire McCaskill pretend the couple thousand MAGA heads who police allowed to enter the Capitol presented the greatest threat to American democracy since cannons were fired at Fort Sumter. And Lawrence O’Donnell was busy defending the authorities who let them do it, saying the Capitol Police aren’t equipped to handle an onslaught of that magnitude.
Their budget is $515.5 million! I am the sucker. They rightfully think we all are.
In four years, Trump never indicated he would leave office willingly. Tens of millions of people genuinely think the election was stolen from him, and thus, them. We’re lucky they did silly things like take selfies with police officers and steal Nancy Pelosi’s mail. They could’ve blown up the whole place.
I don’t need to go into a whole dissertation about how Fox News and the vast right-wing conspiracy machine (a good line from Hillary Rodham Clinton) has created a frightening alternative reality. We know that. But here’s the thing: railing against that alternative reality has made a lot of people very rich.
And in turn, they’re allowed to create their own world, where Vladimir Putin runs our government and Republicans are responsible for every ill — even in states and cities they do not control.
I’ve watched it play out every night for four years on MSNBC. Do you think Rachel Maddow would’ve been silent if a Republican governor threatened to fine hospitals $1 million for vaccinating someone out of the state-mandated order, like Andrew Cuomo?
No way.
This tit-for-tat — “Fake News” vs. “Democracy Dies in Darkness” — is purely theatre. Now we will spend the next two weeks debating whether Trump should be impeached again or TRIED FOR TREASON!!!! Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have called for Trump’s cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney, who voted to send Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court so she can vote us back into the Gilded Age, will take his victory lap.
It would be interesting to see if the likes of Mitt Romney and Pat Toomey would be making such heartfelt defenses of good ol’ American democracy if we had President-Elect Bernie Sanders. I doubt it. Joe Biden is not a threat to anybody. His administration will make life marginally better for those on the margins, and that is better than than making it worse. But there will not be structural change. I was listening to WBUR Wednesday, and some operative excitedly referred to Biden as a “creature of the Senate.”
She said he won’t get anything “drastic” accomplished like Medicare For All or the Green New Deal. But we don’t need that. Right now, she said, the country just needs small change that isn’t so divisive. Most importantly, we need to heal.
Yes, the spiritual healing of seeing bipartisan handouts to lobbyists and corporations. It’s the only healing at least 30 million uninsured Americans can afford.
But it’s exactly what McConnell needs to get back to his own coup, which is actually working. The system is so tilted towards the right, and the Democrats don’t mind being hamstrung. Expect to hear a lot of this over the next couple of years: “Why, yes, it would be great to do [insert good thing here], but how could Joe Manchin possibly vote for that?! We need a consensus! Susan Collins must get on board. And the Supreme Court is 6-3, anyway. You have to be realistic!”
Our democracy has been under attack from the inside for a very long time. It’s been the Republicans completing most of the assault, and the Democrats have acted like the Capitol Police. They’ve just let it happen.
Custodial staff cleaned up the mess from Wednesday’s riots. Then the damage began again, when Mitch McConnell resumed speaking.
Photo via Twitter.
The Dems will have two short years before mid-term elections threaten to derail their trifecta majority. Then the pendulum will swing right again — how far right remains to be seen. I fear those two years will be spent correcting the wrongs of the Trump regime, with no new progressive gains of any kind. So yeah, the right, with their stacked court and gerrymandering, are poised to continue the undermining of our democracy for many years to come. It's up to your generation, Alex, to slay the white male colonial patriarchy once and for all! Rise up, Millenials and Gen Z'ers!
Yeah and a guy who takes a peepee in his butt hole is a now a political scientist based on what a dyke on msnbc said.