Alexander, who is the main character in the children's book from which I borrowed part of the title, knew it was going to be a terrible, no good, very bad day because he went to sleep with gum in his mouth and woke up with gum in his hair. When he got out of bed, he tripped over his skateboard and by mistake dropped his sweater in the sink with the water running. There were lima beans for supper, and there was kissing on TV.
It was that kind of day for Republicans in the House of Representatives, and for Speaker Kevin McCarthy. First of all, the Senate, including most of the Republican members, have shown the way toward working out a deal to avoid a government shutdown. So he is faced with the choice of selfishly trying to protect his own rear end, and in so doing, creating misery for millions of Americans who will distinctly remember this as his and the small extremist minority in his party doing, which means his speakership is going to end after the 2024 election anyway, or doing the right thing, something which has been an increasingly difficult dilemma for Republicans over the past forty years or so.
Then, right down the line, the witnesses in the impeachment hearings that started today unanimously testified to absolutely nothing that would lead to any conclusion of wrongdoing on the part of the President. In fact, one of them actually said, there's no evidence here. If that wasn't bad enough, the Democrats on the oversight committee actually did their homework, looked through everything that was there, made a fine, virtually ironclad case that there is no grounds for impeachment, and then, if that wasn't terrible and no good enough, the number two Democrat on the committee found, and called out, an attempt to fabricate evidence by pointing out the obvious and deliberate deception, embarassing the congressman from Florida who had created the phony text message slide.
It can't get much more terrible, no good, very bad than it did today. Remember back at the the beginning of President Biden's term, when a few disagreements had the media declaring that the Democrats were "in disarray"? This is disarray to the tenth power.
It was such a clown show that Republican members of the committee, realizing they were in the middle of a terrible, no good, very bad day, left the room in embarassment. This is so important to them, and they are so confident that they are doing the right thing that they can't even keep their own party members engaged in the process! Does that tell you how ridiculously bad this really is?
I'm Almost Tempted to be Grateful
Republican behavior like this is handing the 2024 election to President Biden and to the Democratic party. I think we passed the point of no return on this shortly after the Republicans botched their first attempt at House leadership right after they got this minimal control. They've been on their heels ever since, right along with the composite pollsters who re-wrote the story of their predictions and odds shortly after the election they predicted to be a "red wave" turned out to be a pink trickle.
To the Republicans who seem to just now be waking up out of a Rip Van Winkle kind of sleep, I've got news for you. You're at the very last possible moment to save your party from electoral disaster. Push the extremists aside and figure out what's going on. Call their bluff. Let them bring a motion to vacate the chair, who are they going to propose who can win? No extremist is going to get enough votes for that to happen. But I can absolutely guarantee something that can be taken to the bank. If Republicans let the government shut down, that's all, folks. They're done. There's a whole new group of younger voters who are as far away from traditional Republicanism, let alone the extremism, as any group can get. It might be several generations before you can put together a party that can win nationally. Think "Whig Party."
And God help you if your members of the House keep moving forward with these impeachment hearings.
With the former failed President 45 facing 92 criminal counts in four indictments, this is really a Democratic party political dream. As hard as the media is trying to make this not the case, as hard as they are trying to get voters to focus on Joe Biden's age as an issue, and as hard as the pollsters are trying to mute the reaction to the indictments of Trump, we are seeing the radicalization of a major political party which will lead to its dissolution. Godspeed to that happening.
What Good Can Come Out of This Mess?
A Democratic sweep of federal and state elections in 2024 would be the place to start. And I think, with what we've seen as a prelude, in special elections and in what happened and didn't happen in 2022, that's coming. But beyond that, we have seen places where so much that has been taken for granted, or ignored, and which has turned out to be weak points in our democracy, must be shored up in order to avoid further threats to our freedoms and to the Constitution.
We've observed foreign interference in our elections, not just attempts to interfere, but actual interference. Alarm bells went off, an investigation was conducted that produced mountains of evidence, but the partisan political divide has ensured that nothing has been done about it. After much dawdling, fussing, hemming and hawing, we finally got indictments against a former President after a Congressional investigation and hearing produced a mountain of evidence of his involvement in seditious conspiracy in inciting a riot against the Capitol, and after public pressure pushed further investigation with a special counsel. But the Justice Department is still bending over backward, treating the former indicted and twice impeached failure of a President with kid gloves, letting him do his darndest to taint any potential jury pool with not much more than a tsk tsk tsk and pointing a finger as a warning. Anyone else who did what he has done up to this point would be held in jail until trial.
On top of that, it seems we expect that judges appointed to the federal bench owe the President who appointed them a favor. That's the very definition of corruption. And yet, it seems just a ho-hum matter of course that Aileen Cannon will do whatever she can to keep Trump from justice if she has anything to do with his trial. She's already run plenty of interference for him. And we tolerate this, "we" being a more collective term for the lack of noise and public pressure being brought to bear to make a real change and maybe enough to point her to the exit door, resignation in hand.
I don't know what we're waiting for or what we expect. But if we want to avoid a terrible, no good, very bad day of reckoning with the failure of our democracy to protect its citizens as a constitutional, representative Democracy should protect us, then this all needs to be fixed quickly. Once it is lost, it will be impossible to get it back.
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