Republicans Prepare to Give Hunter Biden the Benghazi Treatment
The New Republic / by Jason Linkins / 8h
At the end of two weeks of impeachment hearings, President Donald Trump’s defenders find themselves at a crossroads. What the president stands accused of doing is, as The Atlantic’s David Frum notes, “simple and straightforward,” summarizable in “a few sentences of plain English.” The attempts of Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee to defend Trump on something that could be called “the merits” all foundered, with the witnesses they had hoped would provide exculpatory testimony instead pushing the matter closer into the danger zone. The finishing blow added on Thursday by former national security adviser Fiona Hill—in which she characterized Trump’s actions toward Ukraine as a “domestic political errand”—left Republicans with little else to do but enter their own wan, frustrated monologues into the congressional record in an act of surrender.
Nevertheless, there is a path ahead for Trump’s allies. Rather than attempt to raise legitimate counterclaims, they hope to undercut the clarity of these hearings by spraying squid ink everywhere, continually asserting an array of banned-subreddit-level conspiracy theories into every waiting media maw. This sci-fi tapestry will undoubtedly include speculation about the infamous whistleblower and calls for their big reveal. You’ll hear them speak of Crowdstrike, a cybersecurity firm employed at this very moment by the National Republican Campaign Committee, as a nefarious foreign agent. And a leading figure in the upcoming fantasy saga will be Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son.
This is not a big surprise, since Hunter Biden is the reason all of this is even happening. In 2014, Hunter joined the board of a scandal-plagued Ukrainian natural gas company called Burisma. During the impeachment hearings, Republicans demanded explanations and peppered witnesses with suggestive inquiries: What was he doing at Burisma? What qualified him to serve on its board? Did his involvement raise concerns?GOP committee members made constant entreaties for Biden to appear before the committee under oath.
On Thursday, Senator Lindsey Graham announced that he was “seeking documents related to former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden’s previous work in Ukraine” from the State Department, a move that suggests he and his Republican colleagues are going all-in on this particular blind.
This is despite the fact that the original underlying concern about the Bidens—that they jointly acted to thwart anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine so that Hunter could enrich himself further from his perch on Burisma’s board—have been debunked. That is not to say that Hunter Biden’s involvement with the company does not raise red flags. But Republicans might be well served to pause and consider what plumbing the depths of his Ukrainian misadventures might reveal—and how it could backfire.
Republicans have Biden dead to rights on one matter: His involvement with the board of Burisma—and the $50,000 a month paycheck he was taking home—creates the appearance of a conflict of interest. That this is a cause for concern was plainly affirmed by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs George Kent on the very first day of impeachment testimony. “I became aware that Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma,” Kent testified. “Soon after that, in a briefing call with the national security staff of the office of the vice president in February of 2015, I raised my concern that Hunter Biden’s status as a board member could create the perception of a conflict of interest.”
It’s hard to get around this bare fact, and it’s not unreasonable to be put off by the taint of impropriety. As my colleague Libby Watson notes, “‘There’s no direct evidence of a quid pro quo!’ doesn’t do much to reassure voters that the appearance of corruption...is just an appearance.” There is little doubt that everyone involved would be better off today if Hunter Biden had found some other way of earning his keep. That includes the president. If he hadn’t discovered that Biden’s foreign entanglements presented an opportunity to run an election interference caper against the former vice president’s electoral hopes, he would not be facing impeachment.
Still, while the appearance of a conflict of interest is bad, it’s not novel. Washington basically runs on appearances of conflicts of interest and appearances of corruption. The $17,500 that Devin Nunes has taken from McKesson, a pharmaceutical company, during this election cycle creates these appearances. The $250,000 that was shoveled from the Secret Service into Donald Trump’s bank account in the first five months of his term creates these appearances. I’m keen to have a knock-down, drag-out over this; I’m fairly sure that Republican interest will stop short of the line where these concerns start to mess with their money.
What were Hunter’s qualifications? What was he doing at Burisma? We don’t need a congressional inquiry to determine the answers. Hunter was qualified to serve on Burisma’s board because he has connections to power. What Hunter was doing at Burisma was leveraging those connections in Burisma’s interests.
Again, this is unseemly, but not unusual. Eric Cantor did not become the vice chairman of investment bank Moelis & Company because of his penchant for sage investment advice. Chris Dodd was not named the chairman of the Motion Picture Academy of America because of his facility with filmic mise-en-scène. Billy Tauzin did not become the head of PhRMA because he had innovative ideas on how to run effective double-blind clinical trials. These well-connected politicians received these well-compensated sinecures because they possessed the very same skills that Hunter Biden brought to Burisma and nothing more. The vast majority of House members, currently waving their arms and frantically shouting, “How, oh how, did Hunter Biden manage this feat? How did this happen?” fully plan to feather their nests in the exact same way once their careers in electoral politics are over. It’s hard to imagine how deeply Hunter Biden’s situation can be interrogated before everyone runs headlong into the underlying hypocrisy.
Beyond these “This Town” matters, there’s a more pressing reason why a prolonged exploration of Hunter Biden is not likely to bear fruit: The president’s interest in Burisma has always been a con. Aside from exposing the fact that Biden had successfully joined the ranks of everyone else playing an angle with their connections to power and influence, at the core of the controversy is only a mad gambit, hatched by the president and his cronies, to bring the likeliest Democratic presidential nominee low. Trump’s defenders have attempted to paint the president as being uniquely interested in fighting foreign corruption, but he’s always lacked a sincere interest in such pursuits. In fact, any cursory examination of Trump’s records will reveal a deep and abiding interest in enabling such corruption, and numerous actions taken to further that interest, both in Ukraine and elsewhere.
There was never going to be a sincere investigation of Hunter Biden’s activities. Trump was never going to seek regular status reports from Ukrainian officials or report findings to the relevant authorities. Trump’s Biden exploit was to extort Volodymyr Zelenskiy into going on camera—the so-called “public box”—to announce an investigation, and then rely on the media to whip themselves into a rabid froth over the matter, exploiting the same crisis of adult newsroom supervision that led to the overwrought coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Were it not for the whistleblower, we might today be living in this alternate reality. Instead, the whistleblower put paid to the extortion of Zelenskiy, and ended anything that resembled a sincere interest in rooting out foreign corruption on the part of the president. There’s nothing else to get to the bottom of—what lies at the bottom is an aborted scam. This is literally the only thing that further inquiry will discover.
Which isn’t to say that the staging of such an inquiry won’t be perilous for Hunter Biden or the Democrats. The younger Biden has led something of a troubled life and would likely fare poorly under the kliegs of a congressional inquiry. And the media’s aforementioned crisis of supervisory constancy creates the searing potential for a prolonged shitshow, where even a dedication to debunking dark insinuations might only perpetuate them.
As The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent notes, the trajectory of Republican defenses of Trump—and the strategy they seem to be bent on should there be an impeachment trial in the Senate—looks to be one in which Republicans will attempt “to accomplish some of the very same goals (smearing Joe Biden) that drove the whole corrupt scheme all along.” Instead of Zelenskiy being shoved in the “public box,” it will be Republican electeds serving in that role.
Despite the fact that any further pressing into the Hunter Biden matter is at best going to reveal little more than the way Washington works, and at worst further bolster the case against Trump by putting yet another spotlight on the original con, there can be little doubt that Republicans are up for it. Back in September of 2015, then–House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy enthused about his party’s efforts to subject that cycle’s Democratic frontrunner to sustained investigation. “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee,” McCarthy said. “What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping.” Trump’s defenders will, similarly, gleefully implicate themselves in the furtherance of Trump’s scam. The only real question remaining is whether the media will do a better job telling the truth throughout these upcoming fugazi hearings then they did during the Benghazi hearings.
A national poll in September, one of the first taken after Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House of Representatives would initiate a formal impeachment inquiry regarding the president’s dealings with Ukraine, turned up a plurality of respondents already backing Trump’s impeachment. The spread of opinion was as follows: 42 percent of Americans thought Donald Trump deserved to be impeached, 22 percent thought it was too soon to say, and 36 percent had already made up their minds that Donald Trump should not be impeached.
An October 1998 poll conducted shortly after the House of Representatives opened a formal impeachment inquiry against Bill Clinton, unearthed by NBC News’ Steve Kornacki, showed that 60 percent of Americans did not believe Clinton deserved impeachment. And 37 percent believed he did.
That rough third of American voters who were convinced from the start that Clinton must go and Trump must stay are the same—functionally, not literally, as many among that cohort died off and were replaced between 1998 and 2019. Every serious attempt to remove a president has had to confront this segment of the electorate’s loyalty—or fervent opposition—to the president under investigation. If Democrats have spent much of Donald Trump’s presidency acting as if they fear Americans are not on their side, it is because these are the Americans they are thinking of.
In a bit of fortuitous timing, spring 2019 saw the publication of Brenda Wineapple’s The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, a new history of the barely remembered impeachment of the seventeenth president. Johnson is known mostly as Lincoln’s reelection running mate, a loutish, ticket-balancing Southern Democrat who, after his elevation to the presidency, became a bitter foe of the Radical Republicans’ plan for postwar Reconstruction in the former Confederacy.
Wineapple says she never intended The Impeachers to be as relevant to our own era as it’s turned out to be. She began it back when the prospect of a Trump presidency was a late-night monologue joke, and says her husband, the book’s first reader, was also the first to note how eerily it tracked the current moment. Other journalists and critics, including Mother Jones’s Tim Murphy, have noted how much Johnson resembles Trump, in word and deed. Johnson was erratic, racist, operatically self-pitying, and blamed every failure of his administration on enemies he believed to be trying to destroy him. He held wild, unscripted proto-rallies, in a nationwide tour called the “Swing Around the Circle.” These gatherings were nominally devoted to official presidential business, but instead served transparently political goals: to defeat the Fourteenth Amendment, to force Congress to seat members sent by Southern state governments still dominated by former Confederates, and to help Johnson win the next presidential election. He dragged along two nationally beloved war heroes, Ulysses S. Grant and Admiral David Farragut, to ensure he’d get an enthusiastic crowd at every stop.
During this tour, he let loose with some of the most inflammatory statements a president has ever made, often while those crowds alternated between goading him on and heckling him. Johnson actually got heckled quite a lot. In Cleveland, a crowd kept yelling, “three cheers for Congress!” At another stop, a newspaper reporter claimed, the crowd shouted down Secretary of State William Seward, with one person laying out the heckling strategy thusly: “We don’t want to hear you or Johnson. We shall only cheer for Grant and Farragut. You others are bad men.” Johnson, who would rant about his enemies even when speaking from prepared remarks, was also frequently just plain incoherent at these stops. When someone in the crowd, perhaps anticipating Twitter discourse, shouted at the president, “Don’t get mad!” he responded: “I will tell you who is mad…. ‘Whom the Gods want to destroy they first make mad.’” As Wineapple writes: “It wasn’t quite clear what or whom he meant.”
This was the raucous atmosphere in which President Johnson, on two occasions, called for two of the enemies he most bitterly despised, the Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens and the abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips, to be hanged. It should be remembered that political violence, up to and including assassination, was endemic at this time—indeed, an actual Civil War had just ended, and the president had been shot by someone from the losing side. In particular, politicians and activists who fought for the civil rights of black Americans, as Stevens and Phillips proudly and honorably did their entire lives, were common targets of white violence. Whomever Johnson might have meant for the gods to destroy, this was no purely rhetorical threat in 1866. And Johnson felt comfortable bandying such rhetoric because he considered men like Phillips and Stevens not just his political enemies, but enemies of the people. His view—common enough at the time, of course, and still active today in an only slightly evolved form—was that enfranchisement of black men was disenfranchisement of whites. And so Johnson could claim that in stoking the mood of vicious racist reaction, he was only trying to prevent an assault on American liberty. “I call upon you here tonight as freemen to favor the emancipation of the white man as well as the colored man,” he said in St. Louis.
We have no scientific polls from that era to quantify what percentage of the country was on Johnson’s side, but the numbers don’t matter—for the same reason the numbers didn’t matter to the Republicans who charged ahead with their unpopular impeachment of Clinton. In any momentous national political confrontation, it’s not about the raw number of people who back you, but the authentic Americanness of the people you claim to represent. This was as self-evident to Johnson as it is to any right-wing demagogue today. Johnson was a “man of the people,” and “the people” in American political discourse, dating back to “We the people” itself, have always been more a concept than a literal population.
And of course, Johnson’s base of support had to be a minority, because he was fighting to narrow American democracy at just the moment it threatened to expand enough to extinguish the white supremacy that men like Johnson believed was foundational to the entire American project. By definition, this version of the people could not include black Americans, and it would continue excluding fully half of the adult population of America from the franchise for another 50-plus years.
Even without polling, and within that narrow cohort of the actually existing American people, it’s unclear if Johnson had anything like the popular support he imagined he deserved. Though racist conservatives in the North and South cheered him on in his fight against Congress, Democrats never forgave him for joining Lincoln’s ticket. He did make an aborted attempt to revive a third party—a sensible, moderate, third-way party, which would unite white populist Democrats with conservative Republicans who felt the Radicals were taking the whole racial equality thing too far—that, as these things tend to do, pissed off both sides. But he had his fans. Wineapple describes a few pieces of correspondence he received from admirers, sounding remarkably like MAGA Twitter thirstily @-ing the object of their own devotion. One wrote him advising that if Congress tried to impeach him, he should simply “Arrest the traitors.” Lock them up!
But history does not actually repeat itself, and the differences between that era and ours are perhaps even more important than the similarities. Reading Wineapple’s book, one is struck by the degree to which the Radical Republicans controlling Congress (in the House, especially) were not cowed by the prospect of reprisal at Johnson’s hands. Congress repeatedly acted aggressively and decisively, with no cringing fear of backlash. A Johnson-supporting lawyer, Charles Woolley, refused to cooperate with a House committee investigation into possible corruption in the impeachment vote itself. So the House arrested him for contempt of Congress and locked him in the basement of the Capitol. It’s truly incredible to note how industrious and aggressive Congress was in this era: The 40th United States Congress managed to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, send the Fifteenth Amendment to the state legislatures, pass three comprehensive Reconstruction acts, and impeach the president, all within one term, back when members traveled to and from Washington by stagecoach and rail.
To be sure, all this aggressive oversight was only possible because Republicans had huge majorities in each chamber of Congress, and only because party leaders refused to seat representatives from the former Confederate states until they actually held elections black men could participate in. Still, even that strategic advantage speaks to their courage and resolution: They knew that their political project depended not on compromising with their enemies but on defeating them.
The House would eventually impeach Johnsonmostly for a crime that sounds narrow and technical in scope—violating the Tenure of Office Act. In reality, though, this action pointed up exactly what was at stake. Over Johnson’s constant vetoes, the Republican-controlled Congress had undertaken what is now referred to as Congressional Reconstruction—a series of policies designed to crush the white supremacist governments of the former Confederate states and refuse to admit them back into the Union with full privileges until they created representative bodies untainted by the rebellion. Crucially, the main qualification for readmission was to permit black men in those states to vote. The military that had just defeated the government of the Confederacy would manage these states until they drafted new state constitutions with the full participation of all adult male citizens. Once Congress signed off on those constitutions, and after the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, they could have their senators and representatives seated in Congress. The entire plan depended on Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to oversee its implementation—much to Johnson’s consternation. Stanton was a Lincoln holdover, who, while no Radical, fully backed the political destruction of the remnants of the Confederacy.
When Johnson sought to remove Stanton, it was to pursue a far more ambitious goal. Personnel is policy, as they say in today’s Washington, and Johnson wanted to replace Stanton with someone who’d undermine Congressional Reconstruction, place lackeys in charge of the military governments, and allow former Confederates to reestablish states that looked exactly like the ones they had prior to the war. Yes, they would no longer harbor the official legal institution of slavery—but they would be free, at the federal government’s connivance, to make white supremacy the foundation of their political life. He was impeached for violating the Tenure of Office Act because of what that violation represented, and because of the likely consequences of that violation.
And of course, later historians would decide that Congress’s action was tyrannical. To force white Southerners to live in a multiracial democracy against their will was extremism. Worst of all, it was partisan. (Johnson was a former Democrat, and effectively a man of no party during his presidency, but he had the support of the few Democrats in Congress.)
As Wineapple puts it, critics of the Radicals have always said, “Well, those Republicans, they just wanted to keep power. Well, yeah, of course. They wanted to keep power because they wanted to use power, to make sure that blacks were enfranchised, that there was political representation, civil rights, due process, all of that. And you need the power to be able to do it.”
Pennsylvania Republican Representative Thaddeus Stevens well understood the stakes of allowing Johnson to direct Reconstruction. Writing to a former colleague, he foresaw “the Republicans once beaten into a minority by the force of negro prejudice will never again obtain the majority, & the nation will become despotism.” Those who dismiss the Radicals as rabid partisans should note that Stevens’s worries were eminently justified: If the South had been allowed to restrict the franchise, the result would have been the electoral defeat of Republicans—and despotism. By the time of the 1868 election, Alabama had 95,000 registered black voters and 75,000 registered white voters. Partisanship meant allowing the majority to select its representatives. Even to this day, expanding the electorate sounds like cheating to a certain brand of American moderate.
Johnson’s impeachment finally failed in the Senate, in part because senators retreated from high principle into legal formalism, because Johnson had some excellent lawyers, because some key senators may have been actually bribed—and in large part because some moderates simply wanted the thing to go away. There was an election coming up that they expected Republican war hero Ulysses S. Grant to win.
So Johnson was allowed, effectively, to get away with it. The moderates wanted to move on and campaign for Grant. Radicals like Wendell Phillips had already warned, prior to impeachment, what a lame-duck Johnson might do with the power he would retain if he were not removed. And while Johnson had very little time left, he did manage to deliver one last massive fuck you to his congressional tormentors on the way out: He issued a general amnesty pardoning every single Confederate, allowing them to rejoin public life immediately.
Because the bad guys won, the impeachment of Johnson was eventually dismissed, even among those not seduced by Lost Cause rhetoric or the racist fables of the alleged extremist excesses of Congressional Reconstruction, as a slightly embarrassing mistake—a bit of political exuberance that got out of hand.
The late constitutional law expert Charles L. Black Jr.’s Impeachment: A Handbook, a Watergate-era guide to the legal arguments around impeachment, is an essential text for understanding the midcentury liberal legal consensus on the history and legitimate purpose of the process. It mentions Johnson’s impeachment—the only existing precedent—only once, and dismissively at that.
Black offers a concise definition of what the Constitution’s impeachment clause means by “high Crimes and Misdemeanors”: “offenses which are rather obviously wrong, whether or not ‘criminal,’ and which so seriously threaten the order of political society as to make pestilent and dangerous the continuance in power of their perpetrator.” The Radical Republicans who led the impeachment of Johnson were operating with a strikingly similar definition of such trespasses. “Practically it would be found impossible to anticipate by specific legislation all cases of misconduct which will occur in the career of criminal men,” Johnson impeachment manager Representative George Boutwell said at the time. For example, Boutwell explained, “we have no law which declares that it shall be a high crime or misdemeanor for the President to decline to recognize the Congress of the United States, and yet should he deny its lawful and constitutional existence and authority, and thus virtually dissolve the Government, would the House and Senate be impotent and unable to proceed by process of impeachment to secure his removal from office?”
President Johnson, it should be noted, had recently made Boutwell’s question about Congress’ prostration before spreading executive tyranny slightly less hypothetical. He had just sent a message to the members of Congress informing them he’d decided not to send in the armed forces to shut them down—a tactical reference to imperial Oval Office prerogatives not yet exercised that also calls to mind Trump’s regular threats of civil war, recession, and worse should he be impeached.
Despite Johnson’s efforts to marshal a quasi-imperial backlash, the 40th Congress continued hewing to this same understanding of the purpose of impeachment—that it is for addressing serious abuses of power, and not for enforcing specific statutes in the criminal code. When the House decided to impeach Johnson based on his violation of one recently passed (and dubiously constitutional) statute governing federal appointments, Thaddeus Stevens insisted on adding two sweeping charges encompassing the entirety of Johnson’s offenses against the authority of Congress and the public good. And these charges again went back to Johnson’s attempts to thwart Congress’s authority to manage Reconstruction. And yet Black—a lifelong supporter of civil rights, someone who ought to have considered Thaddeus Stevens one of the great American heroes—dismisses Stevens’s entire case as a politically embarrassing ploy that mostly managed “to bring disgrace and ridicule on Congress.” The proceedings against Johnson hinged, in Black’s estimation, on “a ridiculous charge.” This is what happens when the actual stakes of politics are forgotten, or become muddied by self-justifying moderates. In America, extremism in defense of equality is always a vice.
Black’s 1974 essay—rereleased for the Trump era, with a lengthy additional essay by contemporary legal thinker Philip Bobbitt—is a fascinating document. It is lucid and fair-minded. It also describes a world that no longer exists—one that seemed ironclad and permanent at the time, but turned out, under the pressures of a disingenuous right-wing legal ideology, to have been extremely fleeting. It is a world before the Federalist Society, before the ascendance of originalism, before Bush v. Gore. It’s a world where most reasonable people agree on the plain meaning of statute, precedent, and the Constitution, and most people in law or in Congress are reasonable.
As Black says in his introduction, “it is the cardinal principle at least of American constitutional interpretation that the Constitution is to be interpreted so as to be workable and reasonable.” And because the Constitution makes removing the chief executive (through a legislative process that the British invented and have long since abandoned) extraordinarily difficult, it therefore follows that this process has to be workable and reasonable on the face of things—even if other fully functional democracies have long made it significantly easier to remove heads of government.
Or later, when defining what Congress should consider an impeachable offense, Black writes, “whatever may be the grounds of impeachment and removal, dislike of a president’s policy is definitely not one of them, and ought to play no part in the decision on impeachment.” It’s a sound and worthy principle, and in a measured appreciation of all things workable and reasonable, Black adds: “There is every reason to think that most congressmen and senators are aware of this.” Bill Clinton’s impeachment was less than a quarter-century away—though to be fair, that proceeding happened not because Republicans disliked his decidedly centrist policies so much as because they disliked him.
Or when describing how the Constitution requires that removal in the Senate be a legal trial, despite lacking an element considered crucial to legal trials in the United States—impartial jurors—Black says that a senator simply must strive to rise above his (since yes, they were overwhelmingly he’s back then) personal feelings toward a given president and “try as far as possible to divest himself of all prejudice. I see no reason why this cannot produce a satisfactory result.” Black’s casual evocation of male leadership privilege here should occasion more than our own enlightened, equality-minded disapproval. Seen from the vantage of the broad centrist consensus informing his analysis, these minor examples of reflexive sexism say a lot about the assumptions Black was working from: Senators and congressmen would be wise, dignified men, capable of putting partisanship aside to accept the mainstream legal community’s interpretation of a reasonable Constitution. They would not be self-interested, in other words—they would not, as Thaddeus Stevens had, try to use impeachment to boost their party.
At around the same time that September 2019 impeachment poll was released showing precisely the size of Trump’s base of support, Delaware Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat, said something curious at a panel discussion. Asked if the increasing diversity of Congress had played some role in growing polarization and gridlock, Coons answered:
I want to believe of our country and ourselves that a more diverse Senate that includes women’s voices, and voices of people of color, and voices of people who were not professionals but, you know, who grew up working class and were the first in their family to go to school and so forth, that we can engage those voices and that they can be part of the debate, and that that doesn’t produce irreconcilable discord. I think history may judge otherwise, but I appreciate your raising both points.
This, in other words, is Charles Black’s conception of congressional wisdom in the wild, in 2019. Its guiding assumption—Coons doesn’t want to believe it, but he clearly can’t help but entertain it—is that those whose privilege affords them effective immunity from the actions of a government also have the privilege of believing that their enlightened status allows them to think more dispassionately—and hence correctly—about politics than those who know that what happens in Congress has real-life effects on real-life people. Such above-the-fray tribunes of the public good are, as Coons suggests, on the right side of history, more or less by definition.
However, the actual lesson of Johnson’s impeachment could not be more different. The Radicals were right about nearly everything, and the moderates—who made a big show of caution and deference to the Constitution and generous accommodation to the office of the president—were plainly wrong. The ones who didn’t even have skin in the game but who wanted representation for those who did were correct to be fanatical in their pursuit of a more perfect country—and, more important, they were right about the baleful and regressive consequences of moderation in the face of extremist and reactionary unreason.
And any actually reasonable observer of American politics over the last several decades would have to conclude that it isn’t the diversity of one party that has led to gridlock. Rather, it’s been the brittle, homogeneous outlook of a conservative party that increasingly counts on a base that is overwhelmingly white and male—but, of course, anyone posing as a moderate interlocutor of good faith can blame their extremism on the diversity of the other side. “Radical liberals made me more racist” is, alas, not a remotely novel claim in American politics. Wineapple writes how, after Johnson angrily declared that “this is a country for white men, and, by God, as long as I am president it shall be a government for white men,” The Chicago Times—a reasonable Republican paper of the time—wrote: “If he used the language attributed to him, it was undoubtedly in reply to fanaticism and impudence.” In other words: The Radical Republicans made him do it.
But the belief in the reasonableness of the dispassionate white male senator walks hand-in-hand with the Johnsonian (and Jacksonian) belief that the real American subject is the humble white working man. When you wonder why it took so incredibly long for today’s Democrats to hint that their oversight of the president’s crimes amounted to preparations for impeachment, remember that many leading liberal legal and political theorists have long taught that the moderates were the unacknowledged heroes of the Johnson impeachment debacle. Yes, Democrats also initiated impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon’s criminal presidency in 1973, but the lesson there also ultimately proved to be a moderate one: The president, recognizing he could no longer function as an effective arbiter of the people’s business, resigned in 1974, before things got too ugly and confrontational. The lesson of the Watergate inquiry was that the system worked, as the self-congratulatory consensus of that moment went—which is to say, Congress was relieved of forcing any kind of ultimate showdown with the executive branch over matters of serious constitutional principle. But while Nixon may have relied on white reaction for his political power, he was never its overt avatar in the White House—as the longtime right-wing activist M. Stanton Evans put it to Rick Perlstein: “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate.”
Today’s congressional Democratic leaders know as an article of faith that they must, at all costs, refrain from awakening the electoral giant of white reaction. There were men, too, in Johnson’s time, who believed in something very much like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s utterly incoherent idea of “self-impeachment”—a mystic process by which the president is allowed to run amok while the opposition holds very still, waiting for him to go away on his own. And they advocated this dangerous fantasy for much the same reason that Pelosi did: Like today’s timorous Democratic leaders, moderates in the Johnson-impeaching Congress believed that a favorable-looking presidential election was on the horizon, and knew with utter assurance that opposing the racist president too vigorously would lead to a politically damaging national backlash by his supporters. This faux-savvy posture was and remains an abdication of both political and moral responsibility, particularly when the president isn’t just a criminal, but is actively using government power to entrench racialized despotism—even if permitting him to go ahead and do so is electorally advantageous over the near term.
At the time of Johnson’s impeachment, the Democratic Party very much was what Steve Bannon hoped Donald Trump could turn the Republican Party into: a white worker’s party, mixing outspoken defense of white supremacy with something much closer to a populist economic agenda than anything today’s Republican Party has ever managed. This has always been a heady brew in American electoral politics, especially when combined with state and local regimes dedicated to restricting the franchise, and an opposition that is only weakly committed to true multiracial democracy.
This set of arrangements described the United States for decades after Reconstruction ended. More than a few left-of-center observers, echoing Thaddeus Stevens’s warnings about the implications of a Johnson victory, have wondered if it also describes the United States after Donald Trump’s 2016 election. Then, as now, this dark political vision depends on the continued suppression of popular democracy—something enabled in part by our archaic Constitution, which every year looks less reasonable than Charles Black imagined it to be. The U.S. constitutional order is certainly less reasonable now than it was in the days when Congress could force through multiple revolutionary civil rights amendments at a pace shocking to modern observers. The Founders, in their infinite wisdom, created a government that was designed to perpetuate white supremacy, that allowed men like Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump to ascend to the most powerful role in that government without anything resembling majority support. The Constitution’s sage authors also created as the only recourse to those men’s abuses of power a process that requires the opposition party to hold both houses of Congress and embrace hard-core partisanship. It’s hard to believe such a lopsided arrangement could ever produce a just result.
Perhaps we’ll know soon if it can. Trump, like Johnson before him, is very much one of the architects of his own impeachment—and he’s belligerently made that case in the face of a Congress that wanted more than anything to allow a few quiet investigations to play out in the background while presidential candidates talked kitchen-table issues and congressional leaders passed bipartisan retirement security legislation. Because of who Trump is, and how he’s spun his abiding flaws of character into ideological selling points for his base, he was simply unable to help himself from indulging in ridiculous, scandalous behavior. House Democrats had their hand forced, but as long as Rudy Giuliani is shouting at Howard Kurtz on Fox News instead of sitting in the Capitol basement room that once held Charles Woolley, it’s difficult to imagine today’s Democratic leaders in Congress acting with the same zeal in pursuit of justice as their Radical Republican forebears. The Radicals had a clear understanding of what they were fighting for—Johnson had to be stopped, not for the sake of restoring a comfortable status quo, but in order to allow the Radicals to remake the country itself. Today’s congressional Democrats are hoping to pass a bill to allow annual price negotiations for 250 prescription drugs. Expecting them to go to war with a president who will go to any length he can to shield himself from scrutiny of his activities or consequences for his actions seems a lot to ask. As the consensus has long held, impeachment is a political process, and many of the leaders of today’s Democratic Party long to hold power in a world without politics.
The impeachment hearings got their first made-for-TV moment during
ousted Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch’s testimony, thanks to a
cameo from President Trump. Early in Yovanovitch’s testimony, the
president lashed out in a tweet denigrating her service in Somalia and Ukraine. This was an opening
for House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, who asked for her response.
“It’s very intimidating,” Yovanovitch said. “I mean, I can’t speak to
what the president is trying to do, but I think the effect is trying to
be intimidating.”
Schiff readily agreed, referring to the tweet
as witness intimidation. We seemed to witness, in real time on national
television, a new article of impeachment being written. It was
immediately treated as an “extraordinary” moment. Even Fox News couldn’t
ignore its significance.
Here was what the media had been
waiting for, after many dismissed the first day of testimony on
Wednesday as a high-profile flop, if not quite a Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark–level debacle. Two Reuters reporters dismissed
it as “consequential, but dull,” adding that “unlike the best reality
TV shows—not to mention the Trump presidency itself—fireworks and
explosive moments were scarce.” NBC’s Jonathan Allen bemoaned
the lack of “pizzaz” (a word that should be forcibly excised from the
English language), claiming that the hearings “felt more like the dress
rehearsal for a serious one-act play than the opening night of a hit
Broadway musical.”
After day one, the verdict was clear: The
Democrat’s big impeachment show was a boring bust. Day two, in contrast,
is already being spun as a blockbuster. But in terms of
substance, there were few differences between the first and second day
of hearings. Daniel Goldman, the attorney who has led much of the
questioning for the Democrats, has built a strong case against the
president, brick-by-brick. The witnesses have easily dismantled every
cock-eyed narrative put forth by the president and his defenders about
his involvement in the Ukraine scandal. That all this is happening
during an impeachment hearing is extraordinary in and of itself, a
moment of undeniable high drama. The idea that any of this is boring
reveals how media has changed in the past few years: It has become addicted to Donald Trump.
Theater
criticism in political media is nothing new, of course. “While these
events aren’t mere entertainment, they are attempts to affect public
opinion, and they’re staged (the word choice is deliberate, and
accurate) to generate maximum effect,” Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein wrote
about the media response to day one of impeachment. “How politicians go
about that job, whether they’re any good at it, and what they’re really
trying to achieve is important to know.” Given the importance of public opinion on impeachment—it ultimately decided Richard Nixon’s fate in 1974 and saved Bill Clinton in 1998—gauging the public’s potential reaction has some value.
Theater criticism can even be newsworthy. A report
on Axios in advance of Friday’s second day of testimony dinged
Democrats for failing to win the battle for the public’s attention. “New
data about Wednesday’s hearing shows the difficulty in capturing the
attention of a nation that’s developed a higher tolerance for permanent
political drama under the current president,” wrote Neal Rothschild and
Sara Fischer, noting that day one’s ratings paled in comparison to those
for high-profile appearances from Robert Mueller, Brett Kavanaugh, and
James Comey. Unlike these one-off events, impeachment is a marathon,
which may have driven down interest. Furthermore, none of those
testifying are household names. Axios also contended that the
“pre-determined” nature of the proceedings, in which the essential facts
have been reported beforehand, meant that there was little drama (it’s
worth noting, however, that William Taylor, the acting U.S. ambassador
to Ukraine, did break some news in his testimony). There’s
an assumption in many of these reports that substance is useless
without spectacle. The tension between an upright civil service and a
president intent on abusing his office for personal gain is inherently
dramatic—it is the kind of conflict one would expect in an Aaron Sorkin
show. The emphasis on theater shows that the media has come to privilege
the aesthetics of fictional politics—shouting, ornate monologues,
clear-cut victories—over reality, however significant actual events may
be. There is, similarly, an assumption that the public is as jaundiced
as the media, that viewers are hooked on the manic highs of the
president’s tweets and are unmoved before Goldman’s patient excavation
of his crimes. Spectacle, it seems, equals
Trump. No political event is exciting or worthy of your attention until
he inserts himself into it, preferably in real time. The Democrats’
sober approach to impeachment can never compete with the never-ending
pro-wrestling match that follows the president wherever he goes. For all
of the ardent protests on cable news and the Sunday shows about Trump’s
debasement of the office, journalists now judge historical events based
on a scorecard he has devised.
When discussing corruption in the Trump era, it’s easy to focus on the most flagrant examples. The Trump Organization announced last week
that it plans to sell its infamous D.C. hotel, which gave businesses
and foreign governments seeking the White House’s favor a high-profile
mechanism to funnel cash into the Trump family’s coffers. Subtlety has
never been their strong suit. “People are objecting to us making so much
money on the hotel, and therefore we may be willing to sell,” Eric
Trump, one of the president’s sons, told The New York Times.
Easier
to miss are the more innocuous and pedestrian ways that
money—especially large sums of it—shapes American politics. Over the
past 15 years, the Supreme Court has aggressively struck down
campaign-finance regulations on First Amendment grounds. The system
they’ve carved out of Congress’s efforts to constrain public corruption
rests upon a series of assumptions that have proven laughable.
Joe
Biden’s presidential campaign is experiencing a cash crunch of sorts,
with only $9 million in the bank as of last month’s filing report. Some
of the vice president’s rivals, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth
Warren, rely on broad pools of small-money donors who can chip in on a
regular basis without hitting the $2,800 federal donation limit. Biden,
on the other hand, is more reliant on donors who have already
contributed the maximum legal amount to his campaign. That helped him
build a substantial war chest when he entered the race six months ago,
but has narrowed the opportunities to replenish it.
His campaign’s
most recent solution to these money woes was the creation of a super
PAC. Federal law limits the amount of money that individual donors can
give to a campaign, as well as to how much can be given to party
organizations and traditional political action committees. But donors
face no such restrictions when giving money to super PACs. There’s a
catch, however: Candidates and super PACs are not allowed to
“coordinate” their activities, lest that coordination become a means to
skirt federal donation limits. The Supreme Court first articulated this
divide in the 1974 case Buckley v. Valeo when it struck down federal limits on “independent expenditures,” concluding that the lack of coordination reduced the risk of quid pro quo corruption.
In
other words, Biden and his campaign staff can’t create a super PAC
themselves or personally ask donors to fund one. They are, however,
permitted to take the steps the Biden campaign took last month: reveal
to reporters that they’ve dropped their opposition to super PACs and let
news outlets publicize that information. As expected, a group of longtime Biden allies quickly organized
a super PAC named Unite the Country and began using the funds they
accrued to push back against Trump’s attacks. And while these activities
are technically independent, they are unabashedly pro-Biden. Larry
Rasky, the group’s treasurer, told Fox News
that Unite the Country will “do our best to try and level the playing
field and to use whatever is in the arsenal to take on lies and defend
Biden’s record.”
Under the technicalities of the law, Biden and
his campaign can’t coordinate with Unite the Country on strategy and
messaging. Were a Biden campaign official to call a super PAC official
to, say, urge them to not run attack ads against other Democratic
presidential candidates, that conversation could run afoul of federal
campaign finance restrictions. But if that same official were to tell
journalists that the campaign would be unhappy if Unite the Country
attacked other Democratic candidates, the super PAC could receive that
message and everyone involved would be on legal terra firma. “Our
campaign would be extremely frustrated if the super PAC was used to
attack other Democrats,” Greg Schultz, Biden’s campaign manager, told reporters last week.
Biden’s
super PAC shenanigans aren’t that extraordinary by recent standards.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign also maintained kayfabe with Correct the
Record, a well-funded pro-Clinton super PAC that vociferously defended her throughout the 2016 election. It all underscores how the Supreme Court misjudged the importance of independent expenditures in Buckley as well as subsequent cases that relied upon it. “The absence of prearrangement and coordination,” the justices wrote in 1974,
not only reduces the risk of corruption but also “undermines the value
of the expenditure to the candidate.” The fact that donors are willing
to pour millions of dollars into these groups suggests otherwise.
Federal campaign finance laws are supposed to reduce
the reality or appearance of corruption in American politics. In recent
years, however, this regulatory regime has lent corruption a legal
structure in which to flourish.
President Donald Trump will
almost certainly face a Senate trial in which the body’s 100 members
will decide whether or not to remove him from office for the Ukraine
scandal. In recent weeks, he’s aggressively pressured the Senate’s
Republican majority to defend his actions in public. Some have declined,
noting that they’re likely going to act as jurors in Trump’s Senate
trial if the House approves articles of impeachment against him.
That isn’t enough for the president. Politicoreported last week
that Trump is using his network of donors to bolster senators who
defend him while ignoring those who don’t. The news outlet pointed to a recent fundraising pitch
from Trump’s re-election campaign that invoked the impeachment fight
while offering to split the donations with three GOP senators facing
re-election next year: Colorado’s Cory Gardner, Iowa’s Joni Ernst, and
North Carolina’s Thom Tillis. “If we don’t post strong fundraising
numbers, we won’t be able to defend the President from this baseless
Impeachment WITCH HUNT,” the pitch stated. As Politico noted,
Maine’s Susan Collins—who didn’t join a Senate resolution criticizing
the House’s inquiry—is facing a tough re-election fight but wasn’t
included on the list. This week, Trump will host his first joint
fundraising dinner of the cycle with a Republican senator this week when
he heads to Atlanta to support Georgia’s David Perdue. Consider
the strangeness of this dynamic. If the average American defendant used
their influence to direct hundreds of thousands of dollars toward a
likely juror in their case, prosecutors would probably consider
jury-tampering charges. But when a president facing an impeachment trial
funnels campaign donations to senators who hold his fate in their
hands, it’s a standard political fundraising tool. Trump isn’t
necessarily doing anything illegal. But he’s demonstrating how campaign
donations, especially at scale, can amount to an unfair level of
influence.
The Supreme Court has struggled with this concept and erred on the side of donors. In the 2003 case McConnell v. FEC,
then–Justice Anthony Kennedy argued the dynamic is inescapable in
democratic politics. “It is in the nature of an elected representative
to favor certain policies, and, by necessary corollary, to favor the
voters and contributors who support those policies,” he wrote. “It is
well understood that a substantial and legitimate reason, if not the
only reason, to cast a vote for, or to make a contribution to, one
candidate over another is that the candidate will respond by producing
those political outcomes the supporter favors. Democracy is premised on
responsiveness.” He later quoted from that passage in his majority
opinion in Citizens United v. FEC.
A central theme in Citizens United is that quid pro quo
corruption—cash for votes or some other official action, in other
words—is the only form that Congress can police without violating the
First Amendment. The court’s post-Buckley precedents conclude that “independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo
corruption,” Kennedy wrote. “In fact, there is only scant evidence that
independent expenditures even ingratiate. Ingratiation and access, in
any event, are not corruption.” Tucked away in his opinion was a
prediction of sorts as well. “The appearance of influence or access,” he
wrote, “will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.”
That prediction has not aged well. I wrote last week
about the unseemly bipartisan tradition of turning donors into
ambassadors, which reached its logical conclusion with Gordon Sondland,
the U.S. ambassador to the European Union and a key figure in the
Ukraine scandal. What’s striking about him and other donor-ambassadors
is that their largest donations didn’t go towards Trump’s campaign.
Sondland, for example, donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural
committee. Others gave large sums to the RNC and various Trump-aligned
super PACs. It seems like the only people who haven’t figured out that
indirect donations can, in fact, purchase direct access and influence
are a majority of Supreme Court justices.
In the White House’s telling of events, the two staffers who
testified on Tuesday morning weren’t credible and also cleared the
president of any wrongdoing. “We have learned nothing new in today’s
illegitimate ‘impeachment’ proceedings,” the White House said in a
statement. “However, buried among the witnesses’ personal opinions and
conjecture about a call the White House long ago released to the public,
both witnesses testified the July 25 transcript was ‘accurate’ and
nothing President Trump has done or said amounts to ‘bribery’ or any
other crime.” In short, the White House tried to have it both ways.
Trump’s
allies have struggled for two months to put forward a coherent,
credible narrative that defends him against allegations of wrongdoing.
As the second week of hearings began, they adopted a
choose-your-own-adventure approach: making as many points as they can,
no matter their coherence, in the hopes that one of them stuck. It
hasn’t been persuasive, to say the least. It hardly helps that they do
not seem to have persuaded themselves.
Tuesday’s morning session
centered around Jennifer Williams, a foreign-policy staffer in the vice
president’s office, and Alexander Vindman, the National Security
Council’s Ukraine expert and an Army lieutenant colonel. Both of them
listened in on Trump’s infamous July 25 call with Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican member of the
House Intelligence Committee, spent his allotted time on Tuesday morning
asking the witnesses if they were “aware” of various conspiracy
theories surrounding Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Burisma, CrowdStrike, and
the 2016 election. His questions likely made little sense to anyone
who’s not well versed in the Fox News Cinematic Universe.
Vindman
testified that he thought the call was improper and that he had reported
its contents to NSC lawyers. Steve Castor, the committee’s Republican
counsel, tried to discredit him in a grotesque manner. One of his lines
of questioning implied that Vindman, a Ukrainian-born American who left
the Soviet Union as a baby, might have divided loyalties between Ukraine
and the United States. Castor homed in on a putative offer made to
Vindman to become Ukraine’s defense minister. The offer came from
Oleksander Danylyuk, a top Ukrainian defense official at the time, who told
The Daily Beast’s Erin Banco on Tuesday that he was kidding when he
made the offer. (Danylyuk noted that he lacked the authority to make
such a proposition.)
In that sense, the offer calls to mind the 2014 World Cup meme
that anointed U.S. men’s soccer goalkeeper Tim Howard as U.S. Secretary
of Defense—a joke shared online by the actual Department of Defense at
the time. Castor quizzed Vindman at length about it nonetheless. Did you consider taking the job? “I am an American,” the Army colonel testified. “I came here when I was a toddler and I immediately dismissed these offers.” Did your report it to your superiors? Yes, Vindman said, following standard counter-intelligence protocol despite the obvious joke. Did Danylyuk make the “offer” in Ukrainian or in English? In English, Vindman said.
Questioning
the loyalty of a naturalized U.S. citizen, let alone an active-duty
Army colonel who fled the Soviet Union as a small child, smacked of
xenophobia and bigotry. Trumpworld, naturally, relished it. Dan Scavino,
the White House social-media director, posted a clip
on Twitter of the exchange with the caption, “#ICMYI: Lt. Col. Vindman
was offered the position of Defense Minister for the Ukrainian
Government THREE times! #ImpeachmentSHAM” His clip included the
questions asked by Castor, but cut the part where Vindman said he had
rejected the offer, reported it to superiors, and did not take it
seriously. The result is astoundingly deceptive, even by the Trump White
House’s standards.
House Republican lawmakers didn’t fare much
better. At times, they insisted that Trump was simply following the
long-standing U.S. anti-corruption policy in Ukraine in good faith. At
others, they said he had the right to change it and set a new one. They
insisted that Trump had every right to block U.S. funds until he ensured
Zelenskiy was committed to fighting corruption. Then they claimed he
wasn’t serious when asking Zelenskiy for a “favor” when it came to
investigating Biden and the 2016 election. During last week’s hearings,
House Republicans complained that none of the witnesses had first-hand
accounts of what happened. This week, they dismissed those who did.
The
overall message was nihilistic. If you’re a Democrat who criticizes the
president, you’re trying to overturn the 2016 election. If you’re a
Republican who criticizes the president, you’re a Never Trumper who
can’t be trusted. If you’re a non-partisan civil servant, you’re either
an arrogant unelected bureaucrat or a foreign-born subversive with
questionable loyalty to your adopted country. There are no legitimate
critics of this president’s actions in the House Republicans’ eyes. As I
noted on Monday,
Trumpworld increasingly believes there can be no justifiable challenge
of how he exercises the immense constitutional powers with which he has
been entrusted. Power justifies itself.
The afternoon session did
not go well for Republicans, either. Lawmakers questioned Tim Morrison,
who was the top National Security Council advisor on Russia and Europe
until last month, and Kurt Volker, the former U.S. special envoy for
Ukraine. Whereas Democrats had summoned the morning witnesses to
testify, GOP lawmakers had called Morrison and Volker to provide their
versions of events. If Republicans had hoped they would help exonerate
the president or strengthen his defenses, they were sorely mistaken.
Volker
largely rejected Republicans’ version of events. He described spurious
allegations about Ukraine and the 2016 election as a “conspiracy theory”
and defended the integrity of Trump’s foremost target. “I have known
Vice President Biden for 24 years,” Volker told lawmakers. “He is an
honorable man and I hold him in the highest regard.” What’s more, he
said that Giuliani agreed with his assessment that Ukraine’s disgraced
prosecutor-general wasn’t credible. House Republicans have argued that
Trump and Giuliani had a good-faith interest in corruption in Ukraine;
Giuliani’s remarks to Volker undercut that claim. Most
importantly, he revised his closed-door testimony in ways that bolstered
the Democrats’ core allegations. “In hindsight, I now understand that
others saw the idea of investigating possible corruption involving the
Ukrainian company, ‘Burisma,’ as equivalent to investigating former Vice
President Biden,” Volker said in his opening statement. “I saw them as
very different—the former being appropriate and unremarkable, the latter
being unacceptable. In retrospect, I should have seen that connection
differently, and had I done so, I would have raised my own objections.”
Again, this is a witness called by Republican lawmakers, not Democrats.
Volker
wasn’t an ideal witness for either side. His version of events suggests
that he was aware Giuliani wanted Ukraine to investigate the Bidens in
Ukraine, and that he was aware that the White House wanted Ukraine to
investigate Burisma. But Volker says that he didn’t connect the dots
between Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and the Ukrainian company on whose
board Hunter served until after the fact. This stretches credulity, to
say the least. Giuliani made no secret about his reasons for being in
Ukraine. And some of Volker’s contemporaries, such as acting U.S.
ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor, put the pieces together far sooner.
But Volker somehow remained blissfully ignorant.
Morrison, for his
part, was expected to be a strong witness by Republicans. Indeed, he
affirmed his prior testimony that he had concerns about Vindman’s
judgment while supervising him on the National Security Council. The
White House had already posted
an excerpt of that deposition on Twitter to slam Vindman, who still
works on the National Security Council. But many of Morrison’s answers
seemed dubious. He told lawmakers that he had no concerns with anything
said during Trump’s infamous July 25 call with Zelenskiy. Despite that,
he said he asked other White House staffers to restrict access to it,
suggesting that at minimum he realized how explosive it could be.
Tuesday’s
hearings were essentially the undercard match. The main event this week
is the Wednesday morning hearing where Gordon Sondland, the U.S.
ambassador to the European Union, will testify in public for the first
time. Other witnesses have challenged key portions of his closed-door
deposition and he’s already revised his testimony once before. Some Republicans reportedly told CNN
that they are worried Sondland will “flip” on the president. If he
does, Trump’s most fervent defenders in the House will take it in
stride. After all, they’re not trying to make intellectually coherent
arguments or defenses. They’re just trying to get through the day, one
Fox News hit at the time.
Who gets the nomination will tell us a lot about how strong the party is
Photo by Seth Masket
By Seth Masket
November 12, 2019
Is the Democratic Party weak or strong? That is, does it have the power to determine who gets its nomination? Or is that just subject to voters' whims?
This is a subject of considerable importance as we get into the crucial and competitive phase of the 2020 presidential nomination cycle. One of the major questions on the minds of parties scholars is whether the Democratic Party of 2019 is in roughly the same shape as the Republican Party of 2015 -- lots of candidates, few coherent elite preferences, and no real way for the party to pick favorites or winnow out undesired candidates. We're going to get a test of this soon.
What I'd like to do here is suggest what a victory by some of the major candidates on the Democratic side should tell us about the strengths and weaknesses of the party. I'm not saying whose nomination is more likely, and I'm definitely not saying whose would be good for the party or the country. I also recognize that there are a lot of aspects of party strength and weakness that I'm simplifying here (screening some candidates out and actively picking the nominee are not exactly the same thing). Nonetheless, for each candidate I list, the question is, what would their nomination inform us about how strong or weak the Democratic Party is? I list them in declining order of apparent party strength.
Cory Booker and Kamala Harris - Strong
I'm classifying both these candidates the same way, since they face similar circumstances. Both have strong and longstanding support within the activist community, and both have substantial numbers of endorsements. At least at the moment, though, this support from the party is not translating into support from primary voters and caucusgoers. Either of them winning the nomination, despite tepid early support from rank and file voters, would be consistent with a strong Democratic Party that can pick the sorts of nominees it wants and pull party voters along.
Joe Biden - Moderately strong
Biden, as the two-term Vice President in a popular Democratic administration, whose ideological stances seem roughly at the party's median, is the sort of candidate who would normally have a pretty easy time winning the nomination. He's filling the slot of previous party nominees like Al Gore (2000), George H.W. Bush (1988), and Richard Nixon (1960). He's popular among key constituencies within the party, particularly African Americans and union members, and many voters within the party are convinced he is the most electable potential candidate. However, the party has rejected his nomination bid several times before, and it's not clear what he's done to overcome the shortfalls that existed at those times. He also has seemed to underperform in public appearances this cycle, occasionally fumbling with words and saying borderline offensive statements. Nonetheless, given that he's the sort of candidate parties often seek to nominate, his nomination here would suggest a moderately strong party.
Amy Klobuchar and Julián Castro - Somewhat strong
These two have demonstrated some real strengths as candidates in recent debates, and it's not crazy to imagine them doing well in later polls. They have some support among party insiders and are clearly speaking to important constituencies within the party. Neither is particularly poised to be the nominee right now, but one could imagine party elites rallying behind one of them and giving them the boost they need to be competitive in the early primary states.
Elizabeth Warren - Mixed
Warren is possibly shaping up to be a candidate not unlike Howard Dean in 2004 or Gary Hart in 1984 -- someone beloved by college-educated liberals and some marginalized groups, but not necessarily universally embraced by the party. She has been gaining in support among activists and primary voters, and these gains seem very much earned, but that's a mixed lesson; party elites didn't necessarily embrace her earlier, but have come to like her as she's impressed them with her debate performances and other campaign appearances. That's to her credit, but it's also something of a candidate-centered style of politics that isn't indicative of a strong party. That said, while her policy stances are to the left of the party's median, they are still within its mainstream. Nominating her would be consistent with past party stances.
Pete Buttigieg - Somewhat weak
The mayor of Indiana's fourth-largest city, who was not yet alive when the first two "Star Wars" films were released, would not be a conventional party nominee. He has not been at the top of activists' favorites, nor has he shown great strength in endorsements. Yet he's a proven fundraiser and a skilled campaigner, apparently connecting with a number of primary voters and doing impressive ground-game organization in the early contest states. He's also tapped into at least some of the coalition that gave Obama the nomination a decade ago (recent misquotes notwithstanding). Overall, Buttigieg's nomination would seem to be largely a function of his own skills rather than a product of the plans of party leaders.
Bernie Sanders - Weak
Sanders' cool relationship with the Democratic Party has continued throughout this season. He continues to distance himself from the party and thumb his nose at the DNC whenever he can. And substantial numbers of Democratic insiders are really not comfortable with him. That said, his views seem far less distinct from the party's in this cycle than they did four years ago -- more due to the party's movement than his own. It would be surprising if he won the nomination, but he's hardly the least likely candidate.
Michael Bloomberg - Extremely weak
If a wealthy candidate can skip half a year of debates, dismiss most of the key activities candidates do during the invisible primary, ignore the first four state contests, and then just jump in and win the nomination by virtue of his own resources, that's a really weak party.
Tulsi Gabbard - Dead
Gabbard does not seem particularly well-liked among Democrats, and her main support has been among Republicans. What's more, she's mostly campaigning on Breitbart, Fox, and other conservative outlets. Say what you want about Gabbard as the Democratic nominee, but it would signal a party with just about no agency whatsoever.
The Media Has a Right-Wing Bias. Politico’s Founder Just Admitted It.
The New Republic / by Alex Shephard / 1h
November 8, 2019.
Getting the headline right is often the hardest part. Politico took several stabs at the inaugural entry of John F. Harris’s new column, “Altitude,” which aims to offer “weekly perspective on politics in a moment of radical disruption.” There was “Why the Media Is Biased Against Elizabeth Warren,” which was certainly clickable but didn’t quite fit the column or, for that matter, press coverage of Warren, which has been kind. “Behind the Beltway’s Freakout Over Elizabeth Warren” came closer—the Beltway is freaking out about Warren, though not to the same extent that billionaires are. As I write this piece, the headline on my screen reads, “One Big Thing the Dems Get Wrong About Warren.”
But Harris isn’t really writing about Warren. Harris, the founding editor of Politico and the very epitome of establishment Beltway media, is writing about himself—specifically, what heand his confreres get wrong about politics. His conclusions are striking. “A quarter-century covering national politics has convinced me that the more pervasive force shaping coverage of Washington and elections is what might be thought of as centrist bias, flowing from reporters and sources alike,” he writes. “This bias is marked by an instinctual suspicion of anything suggesting ideological zealotry, an admiration for difference-splitting, a conviction that politics should be a tidier and more rational process than it usually is.”
It’s hard to think of an analogy that does this justice. Phil Jackson admitting the triangle offense has lost its potency in the space-and-pace NBA? Paul Ryan turning on trickle-down economics? This is not exactly a mea culpa. Instead, it’s a forthright description of the way that D.C. media works, all but acknowledging that liberal critics of mainstream news coverage have been right all along. Despite what the right might say, the problem with the news isn’t a liberal bias—it’s bias toward an arbitrary, made-up center that ends up tilting reality against liberal policies and politicians.
Harris chalks much of this bias up to institutionalism. Washington is a company town, and in this case the company is the U.S. government. “Here’s something I’ve long believed—more or less—that many in Washington media and operative classes in both parties also believe,” he writes. “For all the talk of ‘polarization,’ if you sent delegations of high-level Washington Democrats and Republicans to a secret retreat (say, to Andrews Air Force Base) and all sides were insulated from backlash from their party’s own activists, this group would not have an especially difficult time striking a comprehensive agreement on immigration reform, or modifying Obamacare, or a long-term budget accord. David Gergen would approve.”
Here one of the nation’s preeminent political journalists is admitting that he and other members of his class adhere to a rather cynical ideology—the ideology of finding the midway point between a normal party with normal policies and proposals and an intellectually bankrupt tribe of troglodytes that gets crazier and more morally repugnant by the day. The problem, in the view of Harris, is that pesky “activists” (which is really just another word for “voters”) get in the way. Candidates like Warren and Bernie Sanders suffer in this environment because their ideas are out of step with the D.C. consensus. They are automatically categorized as “extreme,” their ideas “unworkable,” all because they reject the midway-point mode of governance, which only ends up favoring the actual extremists on the right.
What’s striking about this ideology is that it has no significant constituency outside Washington. Third Way, the centrist think tank whose work most aligns with Harris’s thinking, has struggled to remain relevant. Michael Bloomberg, the politician who best embodies Harris’s ideal, is poised to enter the Democratic primary and almost everyone agrees he has no chance of winning—except, tellingly, the mandarins in elite Washington media.
What Harris appears to have realized in his great epiphany is that conflict plays a crucial role in politics and that bipartisanship is not an axiomatic good. “A fair appraisal of the past generation has to acknowledge that bipartisan assumptions in the Washington governing class and establishment media are at least partially complicit in some of the largest policy debacles of the past generation (bogus assumptions before the Iraq War, the 2008 financial meltdown),” Harris writes.
The stifling media paradigm Harris describes has implications not only for Warren and Sanders, but the entire Democratic Party and any liberal movement that wants a fair shot at convincing the public that its ideas are superior to those of its opponents. John Harris woke up. Will the rest of Washington?
