27.10.2022

War intensifies at home

Having defied midterm gravity for months, the Democrats are back to self-destruction. Daniel Lazare reports on the latest legal move against Donald Trump

With a Democratic-controlled US congressional committee ordering Donald Trump to turn over thousands of documents relating to January 2021’s attempted coup d’état, the party’s plight can be summed up all too neatly: the tougher it tries to act, the weaker it becomes.

The October 21 dragnet subpoena is a case in point. It is part of a long downhill slide that began a week after the January 6 uprising, when the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump on charges of “incitement of insurrection”. With every member of the party voting for the resolution, along with 10 Republicans, the show of unity was impressive. But then the bill of impeachment - in effect little more than an indictment - went to trial in the Senate, where Democrats maintain a tenuous 50‑50 grip on power. But, since a 67‑vote supermajority is required for conviction, according to article 1 of the US constitution, it was obvious from the get-go that Trump would walk. And so he did, to absolutely no-one’s surprise, including the Democrats.

Conceivably, party members might have cut their losses at that point by conceding defeat and turning their fire on the constitution instead. After all, by setting an impossibly high standard for conviction, the ancient document cripples the legislative branch’s ability to defend against presidential overreach. But, since members of Congress are required to swear an oath to “support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic”, criticism is verboten. So Democrats did their constitutional duty by praising the sacred document to the skies for the umpteenth time, while vowing to fight on by other means.

The effect was to underscore their own ineffectuality. The next step downhill was the appointment of a special house committee, charged with conducting a second investigation into January 6. Why a second investigation was necessary was unclear, since it was by now blindingly obvious that Trump had urged the mob on, in order to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 election results - thereby forcing the contest into the House, where Republicans enjoy a built-in advantage, according to rules dating from the early 19th century. Still, the Dems hoped to turn up a smoking gun that would be so powerful that millions of Trump supporters would jump ship and attorney general Merrick Garland would have no choice but to hit the ex-president with a criminal complaint. Impeachment had flopped, but Democrats figured that they still had a chance to put Trump behind bars, so that he would never run again.

The result was Democratic flop number two. Nine prime-time televised hearings, stretching from June into the early fall, featured third-hand gossip about Trump cursing, throwing food and demanding to be driven to the scene of the riot, but little by way of hard evidence. Democrats registered the usual shock and dismay about Trump’s boorish behaviour, while Republicans wrote it off as yet another example of the media persecuting their lider maximo. The needle of public opinion did not move one inch as a consequence, as even the Trump-bashing New York Times was forced to admit,¹ while there is no indication that hearings brought Garland any closer to filing charges.

Flop number three was the outsized role the hearings gave to conservatives like Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. With the House Republican leadership refusing to cooperate, Democrats were desperate to find a Republican - any Republican - who would serve on their special committee. So they enlisted a couple of creatures from the party’s far-right fever swamps, hailed them as honest patriots, and then turned on the spotlight, so they could fuss and preen.

Never mind that Cheney had cheered on her father, ex-vice president Dick Cheney, as he pushed through the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq; that she had promoted the big lie that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was tied up with al Qa’eda; that she had defended the use of torture; that she had defended the ‘birther’ conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was a Kenyan-born crypto-Muslim, or that she had even condemned her own sister’s gay marriage in order to score points with Republican homophobes.² Never mind, similarly, that Kinzinger had voted against gun control and Obamacare and had cheered on Trump’s assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani (“Let see how long the #blameAmerica left takes to make him look like a poor victim,” he tweeted³).

None of it mattered because Cheney and Kinzinger now stood for something that bourgeois liberals describe as the ‘rule of law’. The Democratic message was plain: we are weak, we are bereft of ideas, and we are so lacking in self-confidence that we happily defer to ultra-rightists in order to show that liberals are not the only ones who detest Trump - honest conservatives do too.

Subpoena

And now there is the subpoena, which the anti-Trump press - basically any major news outlet not owned by Rupert Murdoch - all but hailed as a warrant for the ex-president’s arrest. But this is likely to fail as well and thus wind up as yet another chapter in the ongoing saga of Democratic self-destruction.

There are two reasons why. One is legal: even if the federal judiciary were not larded with Trump appointees, it would still turn thumbs down to the Democrats’ latest manoeuvre. As a legal expert named Mark J Rozell told the Times, the subpoena plunges the country into “a constitutional gray area” that will allow Trump’s legal team to “delay the process until it doesn’t matter any more”.

This is not the first time the problem has cropped up. Congress subpoenaed two ex-presidents in 1846 - one of whom agreed to testify, while the other merely submitted a written deposition. But when the notorious House Committee on UnAmerican Activities subpoenaed Harry Truman shortly after he left the White House in 1953, he turned the committee down flat on the grounds that it was exceeding its power.⁴

Since Congress then allowed the matter to drop, the upshot is a legal precedent that today’s judiciary is unlikely to overturn. This is especially the case, given the sweeping nature of the subpoena, which requires Trump to turn over thousands of documents related to phone calls, texts and emails “with any member of Congress” between December 18 2020 and January 6 2021; to relinquish any and all “electronic or handwritten notes, summaries, memoranda of conversation, readouts, or other documents ... relating or referring in any way to the joint session of Congress on January 6 2021 or to the riot”, and so forth. The purpose, as any criminal defence lawyer will attest, is to ensnare Trump in an endless back-and-forth over whether he has truly turned over every last shred of evidence and then hit him with a perjury charge if it looks like he has not.

If this is the sort of inquisition every president can expect once he leaves office, then no-one will want to run for the presidency in the first place. Marxists, who would like nothing more than to see the crippling of the US executive branch, might welcome such a neo-Cromwellian solution to the problem of divided powers. But Democrats and Republicans will not, and it is a sure bet that a far-right Supreme Court will not either. If the subpoena does come before ‘the Supremes’, the outcome is all but certain to be a judicial slapdown that leaves Dems more dazed and confused than ever.

But it is highly unlikely that it will get that far. The second reason why the subpoena is likely to fail is the upcoming midterm elections - now just 12 days away, as I write. Elections are unpredictable, of course. But the pro-Democratic surge that followed on the heels of the Supreme Court’s shocking June 24 Dobbs decision overturning abortion rights, and then the Kansas state referendum upholding them, is now rapidly fading as inflation heats up and economic fears intensify. Biden’s growing senility - the man can barely make his way through a single sentence without stumbling - is not helping, and neither is Ukraine, in the face of an increasingly war-weary public.

“For months, Democrats were defying midterm gravity,” pollster Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website recently proclaimed. “Now it looks like they may be coming back down to earth.” In the last two weeks alone, the Democratic polling average has slipped from a 1.1% lead to a 0.5% lag - “suggesting,” the site says, that “the national mood has turned back toward the GOP”.⁵

With five seats needed to flip control in the House and just one in the Senate, a Republican takeover of one or both chambers seems more and more probable. If so, the Republican order of business is clear. Step one will be to subpoena Hunter Biden in order to learn more about his famous laptops and the information they contain about his father’s contacts with business associates. Step two will be to cancel the January 9 committee and thereby scuttle the subpoena.

The goal is to pay Democrats back for the tortures they inflicted on Trump by slowly roasting their leader over an open fire. Impeachment will follow, as White House paralysis deepens. Will it be a defeat for the rule of law, since Garland will now have to think twice before filing an indictment? Or will it be a victory, since it will all be in the name of a decrepit, 235-year-old constitution that is fast turning into a weapon of mass political destruction? We will have to leave it to the legal pettifoggers to sort it all out.

Why do Democrats behave in such a self-destructive way? The answer is that they have no choice because they are not the ones in charge - the ancient machinery is. Descendants of the “Republican-Democrats” established by Virginia slaveholders Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the early 1790s, they are products of the system and are therefore unable to see beyond its horizons. Instead of thinking for themselves, all they can do is follow a pre-arranged script. Since ‘liberal’ and ‘wimp’ are increasingly synonymous in the American political lexicon, they are determined to dispel all doubts as to their machismo by waging war against Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Trump, too. A warmonger like Liz Cheney is thus the perfect person to lead the anti-Trump charge. So is Adam Schiff - the neocon Democrat famous for declaring during Trump’s first impeachment that “the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here”.⁶ After egging on war in Ukraine, he is egging on war at home by taking a leading role in the January 6 committee.

Weakness leads to exaggerated bellicosity. Republicans are also following a script, but, curiously enough, one that is the opposite of what they followed in the 1850s, when the party emerged out of the wreckage of the American Whigs. Back then, Republicans were the party of free labour and national unity. Today, they are a neo-Confederate party that champions states’ rights, wages war on federal authority and seeks to enslave women by restricting abortion. Now that the dust has settled, the party has moved more and more to an open embrace of the January 6 insurrection, while at the same time rigging state electoral machines, so as to render a repeat performance unnecessary.

Liberal arguments that democracy is on the line in the coming elections are not the least bit exaggerated. In fact, it is hanging by a thread. Seventy-one percent of Republicans say they would feel “comfortable” voting for a candidate who thought the 2020 election was stolen, according to a recent poll, as do 37% of independent voters and a startling 12% of Democrats.⁷ Either they have bought into the big lie that Biden was falsely elected or they do not care. If so, they do not care either that hundreds of Republican candidates are campaigning on the grounds that the 2020 election was stolen and that Trump should have won. Not only is Biden being delegitimised, but elections are as well.

With all their blather about the rule of law, Democrats are incapable of turning this around. In fact, their rhetoric makes matters worse. The absurd January 6 subpoena is yet another sign that the march to civil war is intensifying.