Mitch McConnell: Savior of the Republic

Well today was uneventful.

Originally my post was inspired by recent Supreme Court decisions, but Anthony Kennedy’s sudden retirement announcement . . . well, actually, it didn’t change anything, because the basic theme is unchanged.

In light of the Supreme Court decisions handed down over the past week, most of them correctly (IMOHO) and narrowly decided, President Trump’s fanclub is crowing. Or as one Mensa candidate on Hot Air put it, “Never Trump cucks” should now realize their folly of their ways.

Indeed I have already praised President Trump’s nomination of not just Gorsuch, but a slew of other judicial candidates. That President Trump has almost totally farmed out judicial selections to the Federalist Society is a point in his favor.

Yet if we’re going to laud President Trump for putting on the Court the man who helped cast deciding votes in favorable outcomes, and as we look to Trump to nominate a Gorsuch-like candidate to replace Kennedy, we also have to give credit – maybe even more credit – to a man who is certainly no darling of the Trumpist right: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

I have hardly been a McConnell booster myself, but McConnell has stood firm on a pair of separate occasions, and those actions have enabled both Trump to be in a position to nominate Gorsuch, but also to get him and all those other nominess confirmed.

When Antonin Scalia died, Republicans could have been forgiven for doubting McConnell’s ability and resolve to refuse a vote on President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland. Not only did he hold the line, he did so in a fashion that signaled to Republicans that there would be no acquiescence, managing to keep his moderates in the fold all along.

Once Trump was elected, McConnell then followed former Senate leader Reid’s lead in nuking the judicial filibuster. And as a former writer for a blog called Confirm Them which advocated such a maneuver during the Bush administration, I had no issue with what Reid did, knowing that it would come to bite Democrats on the ass. And it did.

McConnell is now moving at warp speed (for the Senate) in pushing through a host of other Trump appointments. One journalist who follows the administration seems to think that this is McConnell’s main purpose in life: getting as many Trump judicial nominations through the Senate as is humanly possible.

For all his failures as majority and minority leader – real and imagined- McConnell ought to be commended for his overwhelming success in this arena.

Of course none of this solves the fundamental problem with the judiciary. That so much hangs in the balance based on a single Supreme Court Justice is deeply disturbing. This Jay Cost thread on twitter sums up the issues nicely. As he puts it in one of the tweets:

I am all in favor of institutions designed to strike down unjust or unwise laws. I just do not think that in a republic of 330 million people, it should be left to five lawyers who all hail from like 2 or 3 law schools.

While I feel confident Mitch McConnell will be able to shepherd Donald Trump’s Supreme Court selection through the Senate, my excitement is tempered by the knowledge that we have not quite grasped how to allow judicial review without the concomitant subservience to to the Judicial Branch. Be that as it may, a tip of my hat to Cocaine Mitch and his deft maneuvering.

A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds

Saw this tweet from Seth Mendel:

What if you think the Iraq war, the Iran deal, *and* the rush to embrace Kim were all mistakes?

Because there are lots of ppl like us, yet all I’m seeing is the assumption it’s between war hawks and appeasers. One reason political punditry can be so annoying.

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) June 12, 2018

President Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong-un has inspired – as every one of President Trump’s actions does – overheated rhetoric. President Trump is either demonstrating his 7,879 dimensional chess playing capabilities by meeting with the North Korean dictator, or he is a monster betraying everything America stands for by even acknowledging the existence of this petty tyrant.

I’m less interested in the rightness or wrongness of having the summit than in the conversation about hypocrisy. On one side you have Trump supporters yelling, “If Obama did this, you’d put him up for sainthood,” while Trump detractors scream, “If Obama did this, you’d want him impeached.” I’m normally all for pointing out how tribal loyalties dictate how people stand on an issue, in this case I’m not sure it’s particularly apt, even if it’s also true.

In the last post I discussed the strained logic of those attempting to distinguish between the Obama administration’s refusal to continue defending DACA in court versus the current administration’s refusal to support aspects of Obamacare (and Ramesh Ponnuru dismantled yet another such attempt today). But I’m not so sure the previous examples of accommodation (Nixon goes to China, Reagan’s nuclear deal with the USSR, Obama’s Iran deal) are all similar.

Getting back to Mandel’s tweet, I think foreign policy issues, maybe moreso than domestic issues, depend on the circumstances. Not every situation in which the United States deals with evil regimes requires the exact same response. For example, one could argue that the Soviet Union was a co-equal superpower with the United States, and thus some degree of rapprochement was not only appropriate but necessary for moving the ball forward, while North Korea is a vastly inferior country in every facet, and meeting with Kim Jong-un merely gives him credibility – which is all he really wants anyway. Conversely, maybe one could argue that precisely because of the uneven balance between nations, meeting with North Korea provides an opportunity for the United States to open negotiations and persuade the regime to liberalize at least a little bit, while engaging with the Soviet Union provided a public relations win the almost defunct communist party needed. I’m not suggesting that either interpretation is correct, just that the situations are not exactly the same.

As Mendel suggests, there are alternative approaches to foreign policy. Both Paulite reflexive opposition to foreign entanglements and McCainiac reflexive support of militarism are wrong-headed. Moreover, I’m not convinced that it’s wholly inconsistent to have, for example, supported Obama’s Iranian deal while opposing Trump’s meeting with Kim, or vice versa. Context in foreign policy is much more important than maintaining a rigid, ideological stance.

 

Some Thoughts on the Election

Pull up a chair. This could take a few minutes.

First of all, I am a little surprised at how surprised people are at the election results. True enough, I had written off Trump a while back, but the polling numbers were hardly such as to make Trump’s victory an impossibility, especially considering how bad the polling has been all year. What’s more, though no Republican presidential candidate had won Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin in three decades, none of these states are exactly rock-ribbed blue states, in particular Wisconsin and Michigan. Republicans have done well in state-level elections in all three states, as well as House and Senate races. Sure they are states of a purplish-bluish hue, but they are not Massachusetts and California.

For my own part, I was more accurate about Trump’s chances a year ago than I was a month ago. I am probably one of the few anti-Trump conservatives who never wrote off his general election chances, and as recently as a few months ago I actually thought he had better than even odds to win a general election, if for no other reason than Hillary’s putridness as a candidate. But I was swayed by the poll numbers, even as Clinton never achived 50% in those polls. Whatever the case, my opposition to Trump was ideological and character-based, not on his shortcomings as a potential general election candidate.

Before getting into what Trump’s presidency portends, it is perhaps worth taking a moment to note that, as much as internecine warfare has riven the Republican party, the Democrats are an absolute mess. Yes, they managed a two-seat Senate pickup and a few seats in the House, but their party is in shambles electorally. Republicans control governernorships and state houses in every part of the country, they still have a comfortable majority in the House of Representatives, a majority in the Senate, and now the presidency (well, kind of). Meanwhile, not only are the Democrats in a weakened state, they are not exactly brimming with a deep bench of young, shining stars. Certainly electoral fortunes can change in the blink of an eye, as we all learned in 2009-2010, but right now the Democrat party is the one on the precipice of annihilation.

When you throw that in with the general trend of Republicans running ahead of Trump in most states, and you do wonder if perhaps some of the narratives about Trump’s victory aren’t a bit overblown. As has been the case throughout the year, the anti-Establishment, kick all the bums out mood seems to only apply to Trump, because otherwise incumbents did awfully well up and down this great country. And then there’s the fact that Trump received fewer outright votes than Romney, and it does call into question how much of a revolution just occurred.

That being said, it would be a mistake to completely discount how much Trump was able to tap into the angry mood of much of the electorate, particularly of working class Americans. As someone said on Facebook, would another Republican have won Youngstown, Ohio? I still believe Rubio, Cruz, Walker, or just about any other Republican could have defeated Clinton, but Trump was the one who did, and he did so while completely defying just about every rule of electoral politics. So he deserves grudging respect for that accomplishment.

So where are we now? Like many non-Trump supporting conservatives, I earnestly hope my misgivings  about Trump prove to be unfounded. I’ll be genuinely happy to watch Donald Trump become a champion of liberty, limited government, and constitutionalism. Yet I also know that’s probably not going to happen.

While I take a certain glee in seeing Hillary Clinton rebuffed, it doesn’t erase who Trump is and what he has stood for his entire life. I still do not trust him to make wise Supreme Court appointments, and I certainly have no faith in his ability or willingness to completely transform the rest of the judiciary. Again, I honestly pray I’m wrong. But I doubt I am.

Meanwhile the Republican party, and the American republic for that matter, is at a true turning point in its history. Right now there are three main factions battling for the heart of the party: conservatives, the “Establishment,”* and now the Trumpublicans. Right now  Donald Trump is really the only elected member of this latter faction, yet it is the one gaining power. This mish-mosh of economic populists and outright bigots (this is not an overlapping group, per se) has a powerful voice. Therefore conservatives are fighting a two-front battle within their own party.

*Yeah, I hate the term myself, but it is a useful short-hand for moderates and spineless conservatives.

Despite Trump’s win, I find myself somewhat more optimistic than I did a day ago. Republican victories won by good, solid conservatives (for the most part) reminds us that conservatives remain a strong part of this tattered coalition, and perhaps the strongest for now. It is possible that despite the demographic changes taking place, the cause of liberty has not quite been extinguished.

Yet we will have to fight harder than we ever have before to make sure our ideals are the ones which prevail in the fight to come. Conservatives need to continue making our case, carefully and convincingly. It means shedding some of the cliches we’ve grown accustomed to relying on, and truly  digging deep into first principles. Most importantly, it requires some self-reflection (though not too much, because naval gazing is tedious if overdone), and a LOT of listening. Instead of dismissing the concerns of the Trumpublicans, we need to truly comprehend where they are coming fromand to speak to them in a language that doesn’t leave them feeling cold. And not just them – other Americans who we tend to casually dismiss.

It also will require ditching some of the institutions which have failed us. It means tuning out the infotainment wing. I’m not into purges, but we have got to turn off Rush, Hannity, and others and start thinking a little more critically. They may have served a useful purpose at one time, but they are now active detriments to our movement.

One last thing before I close out. I absolutely opposed Donald Trump from day one and didn’t think twice before writing in Evan McMullin on Tuesday. Yet I sense I do not have quite the same visceral hatred of Trump as some other Trump opponents on the right, and certainly not as much as the left. While I completely sympathize and agree with most of the concerns about his character, disposition, and ideology, as alluded to in my previous post the anti-Trump rhetoric has gotten completely out of hand. Look, if Trump’s victory caused you to break down in tears and/or skip work today, then maybe you need to reexamine your priorities. Donald Trump is not going to repeal the 13th Amendment. He is not shipping off every person with brown skin. In fact it’s more likely he’s signing off on amnesty legislation a year from now than he is to be adding the final brick to his wall. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were both awful candidates – too awful to vote for, yet not so awful that it justified voting for the other. So if you’re absolutely despondent over Trump’s victory, get a freaking hold of yourself and chill out.

And with that, I’m completely spent when it comes to contemporary politics. Every sign-on to Facebook and Twitter is a near occasion of sin as I interact with people on both sides who make me wish to punch a computer screen. So I’m signing off of Twitter, or at least am muting all political-related accounts, for the rest of the year. I’m also dialing back on Facebook, and will not be reading political blogs. I hope to continue hammering away here, time permitting, but mainly to continue with my American project series. I need to recharge my batteries and will get back to contemporary events in January.

Evan McMullin for President

I watched almost none of the third and, mercifully, final presidential debate. I tuned in just long enough to see the candidates respond to a question about gun rights. In that minute I saw Hillary Clinton dissemble about her support for the Second Amendment, followed by an outright falsehood about the Heller case. Given a hole a mile wide to drive through and dismantle Clinton’s farcical response, Donald Trump did what Donald Trump does best: offer an utterly incoherent, babbling jumble of words about how Hillary was totally pissed – yeah Donald saw her that day and she was mad – about the decision.

And I wept. And then I went back to the baseball game.

As I said on twitter, imagine how great the response would have been if only Republicans had nominated the person who actually argued the Heller case before the Supreme Court. I was corrected – Ted Cruz wrote briefs, but did not argue the case. Nonetheless the overarching point still stood. It’s difficult to watch any of these debates and not visualize Ted Cruz meticulously slicing and dicing Hillary Clinton to shreds. Heck, despite his pre-New Hampshire primary debate meltdown, it’s difficult not to envision Marco Rubio absolutely destroying Hillary Clinton during these debates. Or, for that matter, just about any Republican capable of stringing together two complete, coherent sentences together (I’m being generous on his ability to get one out).

In a completely depressing election cycle, that might have been the lowest point. Indeed I was struck by a deep melancholy over what might have been. I know many of us snark and crack jokes on social media about the election, but last night it seemed so much less fun than usual. It really isn’t funny, in any way. Conservatives had literally the greatest opportunity in the history of this republic to finally put forward a capable, intelligent, stalwart candidate capable of winning a general election. For, contrary to what many have said, just about any in the Republican field, in particular Cruz and Rubio, would have wiped the floor with Clinton. And once either of them had been elected, they would have had much more stable Congressional majorities to work with than any of their GOP predecessors, at least since the New Deal era.

Instead we got Donald Trump, a man nominated on the backs of moderate “Republican” primary voters who never voted in primaries before. People saw the flashy red hats, the repeated incantations of a catchy slogans, and the constant blathering of an idiot who told them exactly what they wanted to hear, and they said, “That’s the man who will make America great again and stick it to the establishment RINOs.” You know, the guy who is the very definition of a political insider and is, literally, a Republican in name only.

I don’t want to go too far afield in this post, but I’m frankly done with all the apologies for Trump primary voters. I’ve read the approximately 8 million “this is why Trump was nominated” stories, and while many of them make good and true points, it doesn’t really nullify the fact that many of his most ardent supporters were conned, not to mention that yes, some of them truly are deplorable alt righters who absolutely should be shunned once the orange goblin has been defeated. Unlike some I won’t be calling for a round of purges (other than some of the more notorious elements of the infotainment industry), but there will be nothing wrong with Birching the alt right.

With all that out of the way, it’s time to pick an actual candidate. Yes, as I was reminded, four years ago I wrote “to cast a ballot for some third party is the equivalent of not voting for president.” Painful as it is, there is still some basic truth to that, but the circumstances have changed. Unlike four years ago, there was truly daylight between the two major party candidates, and despite his many flaws, Mitt Romney was worth voting for ahead of Barack Obama. I cannot say the same of Donald Trump with regards to Hillary Clinton.

We’ve also reached a point that there is much of a chance that Evan McMullin, the man whom I will be writing in for president, will be our next president as Donald Trump. No amount of fantasizing will make the polling chasm between Trump and Clinton disappear. And I say this as someone who was not completely dismissive of Trump’s general election chances at the outset. But he’s done.

I’ll admit we don’t have great options before us for third party options. Again, to quote myself, “It would be a curious choice for any Catholic to vote for Gary Johnson out of protest against [Donald Trump] considering that Johnson is pro-abortion, favors legalizing prostitution, and would have government out of the marriage business altogether. In other words, voting for him is truly cooperating with evil.” Johnson is a non-starter. As usual, the Constitution Party candidate has surface appeal until you start peeling back the layers. Jill Stein . . . no. And so there is Evan McMullin.

To be honest I am not sure I’d even give Evan McMullin a second look if this were a Republican primary. He seems solidly pro life, even if his campaign website’s language is fairly milquetoast. His response to the Obergfell decision was cringe inducing, as was his later effort to distinguish between wanting justices to overturn Obergfell versus overturning Roe. He supports a path to legalization, and otherwise seems to take the John Kasich tact of ignoring threats to our national security and our sovereignty.

And yet he is the best of the lot that remains.

Perhaps my support for McMullin should put to rest the idea that I’m looking for ideological purity, for if I were, I’d just write myself in. I’m not looking for purity, but rather someone who can cogently defend some basic conservative principles. While not ideal, he is the only candidate I can even think of supporting, and so I will offer up my utterly useless, tepid endorsement.

Can he win? I’m not about to engage in the flights of fancy that translate a win in Utah into him somehow capturing an election thrown to the House of Representatives. As an historical curiosity he does seem somewhat likely to win Utah, which would make him the first third party candidate to win a state since 1968. Beyond that, he is not likely to make too much noise.

But why not? A majority of Americans are disgusted with both major party nominees. I don’t see a gun pointed at any of us forcing to vote for either. Why have we so lazily accepted this fate? Yes, I know what I said four years ago, but we’re presented with a situation in which both candidates are manifestly unfit and unworthy. It is beyond idiotic to be offered the choice of a turd sandwich, shit salad, and wedding banquet chicken breast, and insist on pretending that chicken breast isn’t there. So excuse me while I enjoy this utterly dry, tasteless, yet healthy and not foully offensive bit of chicken.

29 Days to Go

So, quiet weekend, huh?

Let me take everything  in order. As one of the few Trump critics* who acknowledged he actually had a fighting chance in the general election, I really don’t get to say I told you so. Sure we all expected some October surprises, but I didn’t necessarily expect something of this magnitude, though in retrospect I’m not sure why. It should have been clear that someone who has lived so much of his life on camera, and without a filter, would have a bombshell such as this, and it’s likely to get much worse.

*I prefer not to use the #NeverTrump moniker, if for no other reason than it generally meant #NotCruzEither for much of the primary season. And though they are a minority element of #NeverTrump, some within the movement are so filled with disdain towards Trump that they’ve almost abandoned reason. If you regularly retweet leftist journalists, including Kurt Eicehnwald, it might be a sign you’ve taken you Trump disdain too far. 

The excuse-making is fairly sick, and if I’m to believe his sycophants, I’m the weirdo because I have never remotely spoken like Trump. Sure a lot of guys engage in crude sexual talk, and I’m not going to feign shock over that. But if you can’t recognize the difference between a bunch of 20-year olds talking in a locker room about all the action they got over the weekend and a 59-year old, married Trump bragging to a stranger about behavior bordering on sexual assault, then I promise you I’m not the one with the problem.

In order to defend Trump we’re to resort to labeling all men as sexual predators. Funny, I thought part of what fueled Trumpomania was revulsion towards the absurd exaggerations and stereotypes of Social Justice Warriors about men. I thought the Rolling Stone rape fabrications, and the ensuing cycle of stories about a rape epidemic on campus had enraged the very folks who saw in Trump a champion against these attitudes. And yet his very supporters are the ones who are implicitly attempting to validate the narrative.

The other defense of Trump, such as it is, is that Bill Clinton said and did worse. To which I reply: yep. Bill Clinton is every bit the pig he’s been made out to be over the years, and Hillary Clinton enabled him every step of the way. But again, I don’t think the argument of “Democrats rally around and enable their sexual predators, we should, too” is a winning one for conservatives.

And yet it must be said that most Clinton supporters  who are clutching their pearls at Trump’s words do need to be condemned as hypocrites. Just as Clinton being a monster doesn’t excuse Trump, Trump’s disgusting remarks don’t suddenly make Bill and Hillary saints. Trump’s little p.r. stunt of bringing in a bunch of Bill’s accusers may have been some revolting c.y.a. political theater, yet they serve as a reminder that a parade of victims only seems to be cheered on when it’s convenient to one’s political party.

As for the debate, I said on twitter that the first 30 minutes were  without exaggeration the low point in American democracy, and I stand by those words. When half an hour of a presidential debate is centered around which side is the worse sexual predator, and who is really the bigger liar, then we’re right and truly screwed as a nation. I also observed that just about every accusation Trump and Clinton hurled at one another was 100 percent accurate, and yet just about every word uttered in their own defense were blatant lies.

That being said, Trump did far better than could have reasonably been expected. Perhaps he’s being graded on his own low curve, but he beat Hillary at her own spin game. I’ll further observe that the collective fainting spells of the left at the supposed political prosecution Trump is promising of Clinton is just a little much. Trump is not promising a prosecution for the sake of a prosecution against a political opponent, as these purveyors of horse manure would have you all believe. Trump has cited a very real crime Clinton has in all likelihood committed, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with anything Trump said on this specific topic.

Yet Clinton may have won by Trump’s not losing. A disastrous performance by Trump could have had the rest of the Republican rats scurrying off the ship. Trump did just well enough to keep the GOP establishment at least partially in camp Trump. There was never really much of a chance of Trump being replaced at this point, but this guarantees it won’t happen. It also keeps the GOP tethered close enough to Trump that when the next bomb drops – and it will – it will sink not just Trump, but the entire party. Granted it may have already been too late to salvage the party, but November 8 could be far worse than we previously anticipated.

Rick Perry Was (Mostly) Right

Rick Perry has not covered himself in glory recently. A man who once called Donald Trump a “cancer” on the Republican party – in a speech that has since been memory holed, at least on Perry’s website – has become an ardent Trump supporter. Then in an interview yesterday, well, I’ll just copy and paste the Texas Tribune headline:

Rick Perry to Fallen Muslim Soldier’s Father: “Shame On You”

That indeed looks bad for Perry. What could have made Perry say such a stupid thing to a fallen soldier’s father?

As you undountedly guessed, the father in question is Khizr Khan, the man who gave a firy speech at the DNC attacking Trump, to which Trump shot back and reponded to . . . inelegantly.

But let’s look at what Perry said in full.

“In a campaign, if you’re going to go out and think that you can take a shot at somebody and not have incoming coming back at you, shame on you,” Perry said in an interview Tuesday on CNN.

So that is the context of his “shame on you” comment. Well that’s certainly a bit more revealing than what was transcribed on twitter.

Here’s more on what Perry said:

On Tuesday, Perry made clear he saw Khizr Khan as fair game. He insisted he admires veterans and their families but said the patriarch “politically used his time on that stage to go after Donald Trump.”

“Why in the world that he thought he was going to get a free ride with that is beyond me,” Perry said. “He shouldn’t get a free ride when he’s going to inject himself into the political arena.”

Here’s the thing: Perry is right, at least in the abstract. No one who makes a speech at a national political convention, no matter their history or background, and denounces another individual should be free from criticism. Khizr Khan placed himself into the political discourse, and he should not be immune from having his words challenged.

Donald Trump had absolutely every right to respond, and in fact one of the few almost commendable things about the Donald is his refusal to remain silent against all attacks. I agree with those who think George W. Bush made a mistake in never hitting back against his critics. While I understand the gentlemanly code of conduct Bush was attempting to live up to, his complete silence allowed his critics to define him. So, in a sense, Trump’s insistence on defending himself is the right move.

However, as is always the case with Trump, the way he shot back was the completely wrong approach- first attacking the man’s wife and inferring she was domineered into silence, then questioning (or having his surrogates question) Khan’s loyalties. When I say it’s fair to respond to criticism, you do have to do it with a measure of tact. That’s just not in the cards when it comes to Trump.

So I don’t think Perry’s words are as awful as some on Twitter made them out to be, but Perry also should have acknowledged that the way in which Khan was personally attacked was inappropriate.