Monthly Archives: January 2021

What the hell happened to the Republican Party?

Ive been asking myself this question since Donald Trump began his hostile takeover in 2015. After the insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, theres a whole new urgency to the inquiry.

The GOP bears a ton of responsibility for what happened at the Capitol, not just because it has nurtured Trumps excesses for the last four years but also because it has helped spread objectively false claims about the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Earlier this week, I spoke to authors Geoffrey Kabaservice and Daniel Ziblatt about the history of the Republican Party and why the radicalization were seeing today is different from that of previous eras. But I also wanted to talk to someone on the legislative side about what members of the party are thinking now and why they seem unable to pull back from the brink.

So I reached out to David Jolly, a former GOP congressman from Florida. Jolly left Congress in 2017 and, shortly thereafter, renounced his membership in the Republican Party. We spoke back in 2019 as Trumps first impeachment trial was about to begin, and at the time, Jolly told me that Republicans in Congress were tearing at the fabric of the Constitution every bit as much as Donald Trump and undermining the institution of Congress every bit as much as Trump.

But while hes grown estranged from his party, Jolly has kept up with his former colleagues nearly 150 of whom formally objected to the results of the 2020 election even after the raid on the Capitol. I wanted to pick up the thread with Jolly and get his thoughts on his former party, which appears to have gotten only more radical since we last spoke.

In this conversation, the following transcript of which has been lightly edited for length and clarity, we discuss how the GOP reached this precipice, why so many Republicans still refuse to do what they know they ought to do, and whether Jolly believes the party has to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up.

When we last spoke, we were on the verge of the first impeachment trial, and I think its fair to say that you were shocked by the shamelessness of so many of your fellow Republicans. Did you ever imagine that it would get this bad?

No. We certainly all hoped it wouldnt. We all hoped the division wouldnt break into violence. But I think we all feared it because there was evidence of it through the last four years. You take Charlottesville as an example. You take some of his rallies where candidate Trump or President Trump would suggest roughing up a protester or telling cops to maybe bang the heads of criminals as youre putting them in the car.

So, were we aware that this could happen? I think so. Were we hopeful it wouldnt? Certainly. Were we surprised that it finally did? Nope.

I think the more surprising thing is that Trump actually incited an insurrection and brought violence into the sanctuary of the House and Senate chamber and still, for the most part, maintained control of the GOP. That it took nearly a week to begin to see the slightest little fractures in support for the president from his GOP allies in the Senate and the House is surprising.

What do you think Republicans were telling themselves these last two months as Trump continued to lie about the election and they, for the most part, cynically indulged those lies? They had to see the dangers, right?

I dont know, because they havent faced any consequences for their actions these last four years. You could say we saw violence at the Michigan Capitol or that we saw unrest in the streets, but members [of] Congress are far removed from that. And so if the president of their party wanted to stoke this false information campaign, the Republican members I know were happy to just kind of smile and look the other way.

We essentially heard that narrative from members. People kept saying, Just let the president have his time to do his thing, and at the end of the day hell leave office peacefully. Well, they were wrong. And I think its telling that the members of Congress that are coming forward now to distance themselves from the president theyre all the members that actually knew better the last four years but didnt act.

And the ones that are defending him in this moment, I dont think they ever knew better. Theyre not just supporting the politics of the president this is their politics, too.

A question Ive been asking is whether these Republicans in Congress really believe what theyre saying, or whether theyre too cowardly or self-interested to do whats right because they fear the political consequences. If youre right, and youd know better than I would, its a bit of both.

Its interesting because I dont think even the Trump wing of the GOP is a monolithic body. And to your point, some of the members and I know this from personal conversations believe that the election was rigged. They really believe it. Now, is that because Trump said it, or Fox News echoed it, or their constituents in super-gerrymandered districts told them? These things definitely get amplified by right-wing media to the point where a lot of people fully absorb it.

So there are lots of these people who truly believe it, not because they saw anything with their own eyes but because theyve emerged as politicians in that type of echo chamber. But certainly there are others, and I would put Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley in this lane, that know the presidents claims are false. They know there is no evidence, and that a commission or a study would reveal nothing. And so they lean on the line that their constituents are concerned, and they owe it to their constituents to get answers.

You mentioned you still talk to some of your former colleagues who are in Congress and that some of them really believe this shit. Do you talk to others who tell you privately that they know its all nonsense but refuse to say so publicly?

Oh, yeah. I had a conversation just in the last 48 hours with a member who I thought would have voted to impeach the president. And when I asked him how he was going to vote, he almost scoffed. Hes a hard no on impeachment. I asked him if hes even given it a thought, he told me, No, Im already expecting a primary two years from now. Theres no way I can vote to impeach. Well, thats a member exercising purely political judgment.

I suppose there are defenders who would suggest that that is how political pressure is supposed to work from constituents to their elected representatives. But I think theres merit in Mitt Romneys view, which he articulated on the Senate floor, that its beyond time for our elected officials to tell the voters the truth.

I should say that there are reports today [January 13] that several Republicans in Congress want to vote for impeachment but literally fear for their lives if they do. What would you say to them if you were still in Congress? What are you saying to them now?

You know, Sean, the first thing Id say is that I understand. We currently have a restraining order against an individual who threatened my life. I tell you now because its a matter of public record. I was threatened for continuing to speak out against Trump. All I can tell you is that he expressed a clear interest in causing harm to me and my family. And for the last three years, weve lived knowing this individual is within miles of our home and that hes now wearing an ankle bracelet. Its on our mind every single day.

So, what would I say to members of Congress? Id say this is part of what we signed up for. And I dont mean we signed up for threats of violence. But in being willing to serve, you also have accepted the public role that comes with making hard decisions as to where our nation should be going and what constitutional values we are going to try to affirm in our role as elected officials. I dont think you can let the threat of violence influence a vote in this matter. And if you do, I suppose youre answering to the wrong conviction.

Youre still out there; youre still very public in your criticisms of the GOP. Are you still dealing with constant threats?

Its a daily thing. And its fine if you want to put this in the transcript, but just this morning actually, my wife and I, were moving into a new home and we have a new baby coming, and two cars pulled up and slowed down, likely just to look at who the new people in the neighborhood are. But my wife and I immediately looked with scrutiny at who it might be and whether or not we need to immediately prepare for our safety.

This is the political environment were in now, and its been fueled by the mere words of political leaders. But I want to say that I dont think we should have much sympathy for people in Congress, because whats come under attack, whats being threatened, isnt just the physical safety of elected officials but the nation itself. Were all living through this division together.

So rather than focusing on whether elected officials deserve our empathy in this moment, we should focus on the expectations that we deservedly put on them. And for some, that means you are a part of the last four years that enabled us to get to this moment, by empowering Donald Trump and by looking the other way as he continued to escalate towards what we saw last Wednesday.

I dont want to imply that Republicans arent responsible for doing the right thing, whatever the risks. But I do think its important to say that Republicans occupy an incentive structure in which doing the right thing basically means committing professional suicide.

Ill put it even more bluntly: The Republican Party is being held hostage by a violent cult, and that cult presents a massive demand-side problem for the GOP moving forward. According to one poll, 45 percent of Republicans agree with the assault on the Capitol. Thats totally fucking nuts, David, and I dont think anyone knows what to do about it.

Look, there is a violent political movement that has found safe harbor in the Republican Party. That is not to say the Republican Party writ large is a violent political movement. But the violence we saw in the name of politics emerged through Trumps GOP. And as swiftly as I criticize the president, I am measured and careful not to unnecessarily take a cheap shot.

The actions we saw last Wednesday have always been somewhere within our political culture, but we havent seen the level of violence. So what changed? What changed is an individual who emerged through the Republican Party, who was elevated by the Republican Party, who was embraced and celebrated. And even among his critics and detractors from within the party, they chose to enable him at every step.

Thats whats different in todays Republican Party. The leadership of one man, who has given a permission structure to a violent political movement to participate in what is otherwise the mainstream political activities of one of the two major parties in the country. And even though were seeing some signs of resistance, from people like Mitch McConnell and Liz Cheney, theyre not going to push Trump out of the party. Its not going to happen.

Youre probably right, but where does that leave the party?

The reality is that the GOP coalition has no shot at a majority if they lose either the establishment or the Trumpian populists. And so if theyre going to have this war, its going to put the GOP in the wilderness for a long time, and they each know it. And thats why its intriguing to watch what McConnell does. Its intriguing to watch the hypocritical gymnastics of Kevin McCarthy. Because they all know if they let this thing break wide open, theyre a minority party for probably a decade.

Is it possible maybe not likely, but possible that this moment will be some kind of tipping point for the party?

It may be a tipping point, and maybe the party breaks apart. But I dont think its a tipping point if by that you mean the party breaks away from Trump. Maybe this is some kind of shatter the glass moment, but theres no rebuilding strategy. Theres no post-Trump plan. And they all know it.

As we talk now, it looks like only six Republicans in Congress are supporting the impeachment resolution today [10 Republicans eventually voted yes]. Does that number surprise you at all?

No, it doesnt. I wish we saw something different. But it also doesnt surprise me who the six are. Its somewhat expected.

The story really is the number of Republicans who have stuck with the president. This was an incitement of an insurrection that led to the deaths of people and threatened the lives of members of Congress. And yet they dont see it, which goes back to my first point, which is that theyre underestimating the politics of the moment. Theyre underestimating the threat of this moment. And whether its out of ignorance or just a wishful thinking that this all goes away, I think Republicans are failing the nation and largely failing themselves in this moment.

If the party doesnt course-correct, if the cult of Trumpism survives the Trump presidency, does the GOP need to be destroyed from the ground up?

Look, thats been my case for a while because the entire class of elected Republicans are the ones that have enabled and celebrated Trump. I dont find them any more trustworthy than the principal himself.

I think what the future holds will depend largely on what Donald Trump does in the next few years. Does he try to keep control of the Republican Party? Because even if he fails, hell keep control of half of it. Or does Trump, in his own self-interest, find his fame and fortune in another endeavor outside of politics? The party will be stronger if Trump is gone.

Well see what route he takes. If Trump or his family tries to stay on top of the party, were in for a long road. I dont see how the GOP recovers from that. And yet, to put all this in context, even now were talking about a party that nearly won the presidency, still controls half the Senate, and has a chance of recapturing the House. So the party can still be a viable competitor to the Democrats.

But will we ever see the Republican Party of yesterday? I doubt it.

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Trump impeachment and the GOP existential crisis, explained by a Republican - Vox.com

An anti-tax group funded primarily by billionaires has emerged as one of the biggest backers of the Republican lawmakers who sought to overturn the US election results, according to an analysis by the Guardian.

The Club for Growth has supported the campaigns of 42 of the rightwing Republicans senators and members of the House of Representatives who voted last week to challenge US election results, doling out an estimated $20m to directly and indirectly support their campaigns in 2018 and 2020, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

About 30 of the Republican hardliners received more than $100,000 in indirect and direct support from the group.

The Club for Growths biggest beneficiaries include Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, the two Republican senators who led the effort to invalidate Joe Bidens electoral victory, and the newly elected far-right gun-rights activist Lauren Boebert, a QAnon conspiracy theorist. Boebert was criticised last week for tweeting about the House speaker Nancy Pelosis location during the attack on the Capitol, even after lawmakers were told not to do so by police.

Public records show the Club for Growths largest funders are the billionaire Richard Uihlein, the Republican co-founder of the Uline shipping supply company in Wisconsin, and Jeffrey Yass, the co-founder of Susquehanna International Group, an options trading group based in Philadelphia that also owns a sports betting company in Dublin.

While Uihlein and Yass have kept a lower profile than other billionaire donors such as Michael Bloomberg and the late Sheldon Adelson, their backing of the Club for Growth has helped to transform the organization from one traditionally known as an anti-regulatory and anti-tax pro-business pressure group to one that backs some of the most radical and anti-democratic Republican lawmakers in Congress.

Heres the thing about the hyper wealthy. They believe that their hyper-wealth grants them the ability to not be accountable. And that is not the case. If youve made billions of dollars, good on you. But that doesnt make you any less accountable for funding anti-democratic or authoritarian candidates and movements, said Reed Galen, a former Republican strategist who co-founded the Lincoln Project, the anti-Trump campaigners.

Galen said he believed groups such as the Club for Growth now served to cater to Republican donors own personal agenda, and not what used to be considered conservative principles.

The Lincoln Project has said it would devote resources to putting pressure not just on Hawley, which the group accused of committing sedition, but also on his donors.

The Club for Growth has so far escaped scrutiny for its role supporting the anti-democratic Republicans because it does not primarily make direct contributions to candidates. Instead, it uses its funds to make outside spending decisions, like attacking a candidates opponents.

In 2018, Club for Growth spent nearly $3m attacking the Democratic senator Claire McCaskill in Missouri, a race that was ultimately won by Hawley, the 41-year-old Yale law graduate with presidential ambitions who has amplified Donald Trumps baseless lies about election fraud.

That year, it also spent $1.2m to attack the Texas Democrat Beto ORourke, who challenged and then narrowly lost against Cruz.

Other legislators supported by Club for Growth include Matt Rosendale, who this week called for the resignation of fellow Republican Liz Cheney after she said she would support impeachment of the president, and Lance Gooden, who accused Pelosi of being just as responsible for last weeks riot as Trump.

Dozens of the Republicans supported by Club for Growth voted to challenge the election results even after insurrectionist stormed the Capitol, which led to five deaths, including the murder of a police officer.

The Club for Growth has changed markedly as the groups leadership has changed hands. The Republican senator Pat Toomey, who used to lead the group, has recently suggested he was open to considering voting for Trumps impeachment, and criticised colleagues for disputing election results. Its current head, David McIntosh, is a former Republican member of Congress who accompanied Trump on a final trip to Georgia last week, the night before Republican candidates David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both heavily supported by the Club for Growth, lost runoff elections to their Democratic opponents.

Neither the Club for Growth nor McIntosh responded to requests for comment.

Public records show that Richard Uihlein, whose family founded Schlitz beer, donated $27m to the Club for Growth in 2020, and $6.7m in 2018. Uihlein and his wife, Liz, have been called the most powerful conservative couple youve never heard of by the New York Times. Richard Uihlein, the New York Times said, was known for underwriting firebrand anti-establishment candidates like Roy Moore, who Uihlein supported in a Senate race even after it was alleged he had sexually abused underage girls. Moore denied the allegations.

A spokesman for the Uihleins declined to comment.

Yass of Susquehanna International, who is listed on public documents as having donated $20.7m to the Club for Growth in 2020 and $3.8m in 2018, also declined to comment. Yass is one of six founders of Susquehanna, called a crucial engine of the $5tn global exchange-traded fund market in a 2018 Bloomberg News profile. The company was grounded on the basis of the six founders mutual love of poker and the notion that training for probability-based decisions could be useful in trading markets. Susquehannas Dublin-based company, Nellie Analytics, wages on sports.

In a 2020 conference on the business of sports betting, Yass said sports betting was a $250bn industry globally, but that with help from legislators, it could become a trillion-dollar industry.

A 2009 profile of Yass in Philadelphia magazine described how secrecy pervades Susquehanna, and that people who know the company say stealth is a word often used to describe its modus operandi. The article suggested Yass was largely silent about his company because he does not like to share what he does and how, and that those who know him believe he is very nervous about his own security.

Yass, who is described in some media accounts as a libertarian, also donated to the Protect America Pac, an organisation affiliated with Republican senator Rand Paul. The Pacs website falsely claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election.

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Billionaires backed Republicans who sought to reverse US election results - The Guardian

WASHINGTON As lawmakers entered the Capitol on Wednesday for one of the most solemn enterprises in American government, the impeachment of a president, Representative Lauren Boebert was causing a spectacle before even making it into the chamber. She pushed her way through newly installed metal detectors and ignored police officers who asked her to stop so they could check her with a hand-held wand.

This reprised a standoff from the evening before, when Ms. Boebert, a freshman Republican from Colorado, refused to show guards what was inside her handbag as she entered the building. In both cases, she was eventually granted access, but not before engineering a made-for-Twitter moment that delighted the far right.

After joining her colleagues on Wednesday, Ms. Boebert took to the House floor to denounce the vote on impeachment that passed a few hours later.

Wheres the accountability for the left after encouraging and normalizing violence? Ms. Boebert asked loudly, arguing that Democrats had tolerated excessive violence last summer during the unrest over racial justice. I call bullcrap when I hear the Democrats demanding unity.

The standoff at the metal detectors was a characteristic stunt by Ms. Boebert. She is only 10 days into her term but has already arranged several episodes that showcased her brand of far-right defiance as a conspiracy theorist who proudly boasts of carrying her Glock handgun to Washington. She is only one of 435 House members, but Ms. Boebert, 34, represents an incoming faction of the party for whom breaking the rules and gaining notoriety for doing it is exactly the point.

In the same way Republicans leaders had to adapt to the Tea Party over a decade ago, House leaders must now contend with a narrow but increasingly clamorous element of the party that not only carries Mr. Trumps anti-establishment message but connects with the voters who are so loyal to him and so crucial to future elections.

In the process, Ms. Boebert and her cohort have exasperated other lawmakers and Republicans.

There is a trend, in both parties, of members who seem more interested in dunking on folks on social media and appearing on friendly cable networks than doing the work of legislating, said Michael Steel, a Republican strategist and former press secretary for the former House Speaker John Boehner. They seem to see public service as more performance art than a battle of policy ideas.

In recent days, Ms. Boebert and a group of other freshman Republicans, including the QAnon devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina, a 25-year-old freshman who claimed he was armed during the Capitol riots, have questioned or outright flouted guidelines meant to protect lawmakers from violence, intruders or the spread of the coronavirus.

Their fluency in social media, access to conservative television and talk radio platforms and combativeness with reporters on live television allows them to gain notoriety in nontraditional ways.

There used to be a level of gatekeeping that went on with how members developed a profile when they got to Washington, said Kevin Madden, a strategist who served as a senior adviser to Mitt Romney during his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. Usually you had to work for it and earn that notoriety. Now its given to you with one YouTube video.

In an introductory video of sorts that she released last week, Ms. Boebert was shown walking against a Washington backdrop with a gun holstered at her waistline. I refuse to give up my rights, especially my Second Amendment rights, she said to the camera.

In her short time in office, Ms. Boebert has already sparred with a Republican colleague over security lapses at the Capitol last week and expressed interest in bringing her gun to work. Her Twitter account was temporarily suspended after she spread the falsehood that the presidential election was rigged.

She also faced criticism, and some demands that she resign, for tweeting out information about some lawmakers locations during the siege at the Capitol by a violent mob last week.

The behavior exhibited by Ms. Boebert and some of her fellow freshman Republicans prompted Timothy Blodgett, the Houses acting sergeant-at-arms, to send a memo to lawmakers on Tuesday notifying them that security screenings would be required for members seeking access to the chamber and that lawmakers who declined to wear masks would be removed from the House floor. Several Republicans responded by yelling that their rights were being violated as they passed through the metal detectors, behavior that has exasperated Democrats.

I dont know what the consequences are going to be for people who hold power and dont ever want to be held accountable, Rep. Tim Ryan, Democrat of Ohio, told NPR on Wednesday about lawmakers who bypassed security measures in the Capitol. He added that defiance by lawmakers was a sign of how obnoxious things have become for some of these folks who were supporting Donald Trump. The rules dont apply to them.

Ms. Boebert unofficially started her campaign for Congress in September 2019 in Denver, announcing to the Democratic presidential candidate Beto ORourke that he would not be taking one of the most potent symbols of rural autonomy: her guns.

I was one of the gun-owning Americans who heard you speak regarding your Hell yes, Im going to take your AR-15s and AK-47s, Ms. Boebert said to Mr. ORourke at the time. Well, Im here to say hell no, youre not.

She has expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy group, though she has tried to temper that by saying she is not a follower.

Ms. Boebert was running a restaurant in Colorados ranch country where she encouraged the servers to openly carry guns when she stunned the states Republican establishment by defeating a five-term incumbent in the primary and then winning the general election.

She was so inexperienced, said Dick Wadhams, the former head of the Colorado Republican Party. I dont think she even knew she had no chance, which turned out to be a good thing for her. She caught everyone by surprise.

So far, she has had the same effect on Washington. On Wednesday, the Capitol Police and Ms. Boeberts office declined to respond to requests about whether she had actually been carrying a gun either time she had trouble getting into the chamber. Ms. Boebert has said that she has a concealed carry permit, issued through the District of Columbia, for her gun and has claimed on Twitter that she has the right to freely carry within the Capitol complex, which is not true.

On Wednesday, a spokeswoman for the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department did not respond when asked if Washingtons police chief, Robert J. Contee III, had met with Ms. Boebert to explain the districts gun laws to her, as he had said he would do last week.

Ms. Boebert has frequently defended her behavior as one of the reasons she was elected. Just as Mr. Trump has done with his base, she tells her followers that she is fighting for them. As for her right to carry a gun, she has written on Twitter that self-defense is the most basic human right.

In Colorado, Ms. Boeberts district covers much of western Colorado, a sprawling, politically diverse landscape of mesas and jagged mountains that includes liberal enclaves like Aspen and Telluride as well as often overlooked towns where cattle ranching, mining and natural gas drilling pay the bills. For generations, the district elected deeply rooted local men who, whether Democrat or Republican, tended to be cowboy-boot-wearing moderates focused on the local economy and natural resources.

Once a reliably red state, Colorado flipped with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, and Republicans have struggled to regain a foothold. Democrats now hold both Senate seats, the state House and the governors office.

Republicans seeking to keep viability in the state regard Ms. Boeberts behavior warily.

I think most Republicans here are still behind her, Mr. Wadhams said. But she cant just pick fights in Washington. She has got to pay attention to the issues in her district, too: in water, natural resources, mining. If she doesnt do that, shes in real trouble.

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A Republican Lawmaker for Whom the Spectacle Is the Point - The New York Times

As the House voted Wednesday to formally charge President Trump with inciting violence against the government of the United States, exactly one week after the Capitol was breached by an angry mob of Trump loyalists, 10 Republicans cast their votes in favor of impeachment.

It was the largest number of lawmakers to ever vote to impeach a president from their own party; just five Democrats voted to impeach President Bill Clinton, and not a single Republican voted in favor of impeaching Mr. Trump in 2019.

House Republican leaders said they would not formally lobby members of the party against voting to impeach the president this time.

Representative John Katko of New York was the first Republican to publicly announce that he would back impeachment. Not holding the president accountable for his actions would be a direct threat to the future of our democracy, he said.

Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, said on Tuesday evening that she would vote to impeach, citing the presidents role in an insurrection that caused death and destruction in the most sacred space in our republic.

Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, joined his Republican colleagues on Tuesday evening, saying the nation was in uncharted waters. He said that Mr. Trump encouraged an angry mob to storm the United States Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes.

Representative Fred Upton of Michigan said he would vote to impeach after Mr. Trump expressed no regrets for what had happened at the Capitol.

Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington State said, The presidents offenses, in my reading of the Constitution, were impeachable based on the indisputable evidence we already have. (An earlier version of this item incorrectly stated which state Ms. Herrera Beutler represents.)

Representative Dan Newhouse of Washington State announced that he was backing impeachment, attacking his partys core argument, that the process was being rushed. I will not use process as an excuse, he said during the impeachment debate, to cheers and applause from Democrats. Mr. Newhouse also offered a mea culpa, chiding himself and other Republicans for not speaking out sooner against the president.

Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan said that Mr. Trump had betrayed his oath of office by seeking to undermine our constitutional process, and he bears responsibility for inciting the insurrection we suffered last week.

Representative Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio said Vice President Mike Pence and members of the House and Senate had their lives put in grave danger as a result of the presidents actions, adding, When I consider the full scope of events leading up to Jan. 6, including the presidents lack of response as the United States Capitol was under attack, I am compelled to support impeachment.

Representative David Valadao of California complained that the process had been rushed but said: Based on the facts before me, I have to go with my gut and vote my conscience. I voted to impeach President Trump. His inciting rhetoric was un-American, abhorrent and absolutely an impeachable offense. Its time to put country over politics.

Representative Tom Rice of South Carolina criticized Mr. Trumps response to the siege and concluded: I have backed this president through thick and thin for four years. I campaigned for him and voted for him twice. But this utter failure is inexcusable.

Four Republicans did not vote: Representatives Kay Granger of Texas, Andy Harris of Maryland, Greg Murphy of North Carolina and Daniel Webster of Florida.

Nicholas Fandos and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.

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Which Republicans Voted to Impeach Trump? Here Are 10 - The New York Times

Heres how it could happen. First, the partys non-Trumpist faction embodied by senators like Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, various purple- and blue-state governors and most of the remaining Acela corridor conservatives, from lawyers and judges to lobbyists and staffers pushes for a full repudiation of Trump and all his works, extending beyond impeachment to encompass support for social-media bans, F.B.I. surveillance of the MAGA universe and more.

At the same time, precisely those measures further radicalize portions of the partys base, offering apparent proof that Trump was right that the system isnt merely consolidating against but actively persecuting them. With this sense of persecution in the background and the Trump family posturing as party leaders, the voter-fraud mythology becomes a litmus test in many congressional elections, and baroque conspiracy theories pervade primary campaigns.

In this scenario, what remains of the center-right suburban vote and the G.O.P. establishment becomes at least as NeverTrump as Romney, if not the Lincoln Project; meanwhile, the core of Trumps support becomes as paranoid as Q devotees. Maybe this leads to more empty acts of violence, further radicalizing the center right against the right, or maybe it just leads to Republican primaries producing a lot more candidates like Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, to the point where a big chunk of the House G.O.P. occupies not just a different tactical reality from the partys elite but a completely different universe.

Either way, under these conditions that party could really collapse or really break. The collapse would happen if Trumpists with a dolchstoss narrative and a strong Q vibe start winning nominations for Senate seats and governorships in states that right now only lean Republican. A party made insane and radioactive by conspiracy theories could keep on winning deep-red districts, but if its corporate support bailed, its remaining technocrats jumped ship and suburban professionals regarded it as the party of insurrection, it could easily become a consistent loser in 30 states or more.

Alternatively, a party dominated by the Trump family at the grassroots level, with Greene-like figures as its foot soldiers, could become genuinely untenable as a home for centrist and non-Trumpist politicians. So after the renomination of Trump himself or the nomination of Don Jr. in 2024, a cluster of figures (senators like Romney and Susan Collins, blue-state governors like Marylands Larry Hogan) might simply jump ship to form an independent mini-party, leaving the G.O.P. as a 35 percent proposition, a heartland rump.

None of this is a prediction. In American politics, reversion to the gridlocked mean has been a safe bet for many years in which case youd expect the MAGA extremes to return to their fantasy world, the threat of violence to ebb, Trump to fade without his Twitter feed and the combination of Biden-administration liberalism and Big Tech overreach to bring the rights blocking coalition back together in time for 2022.

But if Biden governs carefully, if Trump doesnt go quietly, if MAGA fantasies become right-wing orthodoxies, then the stresses on the Republican Party and conservatism could become too great to bear.

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Opinion | How the Republican Party Could Break - The New York Times

After the US Capitol was stormed by insurrectionists last week, American democracy is teetering on the precipice.

Democratic politics, at its core, has always been about navigating the tension between stability and progress. If a society resists change for too long, it becomes inert; if it changes too quickly, it becomes unstable. Traditionally, conservative parties have privileged stability and left-leaning parties have privileged change. Thats an oversimplification, but you get the point.

But what happens to democratic societies when conservative parties become radical in their defense of the status quo?

Its a question we have to ask given the current state of the Republican Party. Even after the events of last week, even after at least five people were killed at the seat of American democracy, nearly 150 Republican lawmakers formally objected to the results of the 2020 election anyway. And even if that vote was performative, that so many GOP officials are still willing to play chicken with American democracy in this way speaks volumes about the state of the party.

Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt (most recently co-author of How Democracies Die) argued in a 2017 book that the importance of conservative parties in democratic systems has been largely underappreciated. Democracies tend to evolve in the direction of more equality, and how a society responds to those changes determines how healthy and stable it is over time. Since its often the conservative parties that dictate this response, how theyre organized and what they do (or dont do) is hugely consequential.

I reached out to Ziblatt to talk about his level of concern and how he views the GOP in historical terms. We discussed why democracies have buckled when conservative parties were too weak to control their more radical elements, why the Republican Party has become such an outlier, and why major constitutional reforms might be the only way to fix the problem.

Much of this conversation occurred before the US Capitol was besieged, so I contacted Ziblatt again after January 6 to get his thoughts on what transpired and what it means for the future of the country. After processing the attack, Ziblatt says its become clear that were facing a regime-threatening moment and a real tipping point for American democracy.

You can read a lightly edited transcript of our entire conversation below.

Well, here we are, just a few days after the riot at the US Capitol. What were you thinking when you watched this unfold? Do any historical analogues spring to mind?

I think what was so striking for everyone watching this is just how unfamiliar it all felt and looked to American eyes. There is a record of these sorts of uprising across US states in recent years and in the past, but having this happen at the seat of power was so disorienting. Hence the proliferation of names to describe it: coup, putsch, riot, insurrection, and so on. We just dont know how to make sense of it.

But in the days since, it has become clear this was a regime-threatening moment. Not only because of the violence but also because the aim was to disrupt the constitutional transfer of power. This is serious business, and most worrying is that it has, at the very least, the tacit support of some leading figures in the Republican establishment.

As I saw the video of Sen. Lindsey Graham being harassed at the Washington, DC, airport for having failed to sufficiently support President Trump, I was reminded of Churchills definition of an appeaser as one who feeds a crocodile, hoping he will be the last one eaten. We have a rotten sore in the midst of our political system, infecting the whole system, that isnt going anywhere anytime soon.

Why are properly functioning conservative parties so essential to the health of democratic systems?

Im not sure if theyre more important than liberal or progressive parties, but their importance is definitely underappreciated by most liberals and progressives.

If you look at the history of democracy in Western Europe, and the US, to a degree, a pattern emerges: When economically powerful groups arent well-organized into parties that can compete and win in a democratic process, then those groups tend to go outside of the political process and undermine democracy. In places where youve had strong center-right parties, like Britain in the 19th century, there was a much more stable constitutional order, and in places where conservative parties were weaker, like Weimar Germany, democracy was much less stable.

Can you clarify what you mean by well-organized conservative parties? Because in the case of the Republican Party, theyre still winning elections but theyre not strong or organized by your standard.

The key thing is that conservative parties are governed by professional politicians who have a stake in the continuation of the political system. Thats more important than whether conservatives win elections or not. So you can imagine a situation like late 19th-century Spain or late 19th-century Germany where conservatives do really well in elections, but its because the elections are rigged, and you have state officials tampering with the election and repressing the vote so that conservatives win. Thats a strong conservative party but not in the sense that I mean it.

Its critical that conservatives discover the power of political organization within the democratic context. Sometimes people will say, Well, what about the Nazi Party? This was a strong party. This wasnt good for democracy. And thats certainly the case, but thats sort of the end of a long process under which conservatives hadnt been particularly well-organized. And what happens when conservatives arent well-organized is they cant control their most radical base and that might be the clearest parallel to our current period.

If you look across the democratic world today, how much of an outlier is the GOP?

I dont really have to guess at this. Theres an organization called Varieties of Democracy that we used in our book to categorize parties as abiding by democratic rules or not. And theyve taken that and applied it to every major political party in almost every democracy since 1970. And what you see, based on the expert evaluations, is that in the mid-1970s, the Republican Party is basically in the same grouping as other major center-right parties throughout Europe.

Beginning in the 2000s, however, it goes dramatically off course in terms of its commitment to democratic norms. The American Republican Party now looks like a European far-right party. But the big difference between the US and a lot of these European countries is that the US only has two parties and one of them is like a European far-right party. If the GOP only controlled 20 percent of the legislature, like you see in a lot of European countries, this would be far less problematic but they basically control half of it.

So I think the central weakness of our political system right now is the Republican Party. We had what was basically a center-right party and over time its become more ideologically extreme while still doing well electorally, and that opens the system to further extremism and risks a kind of spiral in which both parties become more radicalized in response to the other.

There arent any perfect historical parallels, but what are the most instructive examples in your mind?

Its a tough question, but Ill go back to the German example. When I wrote the book on German conservatives, I was writing between 2010 and 2015 and I saw the Republican Party losing control in ways that reminded me of 19th-century Germany. It kind of freaked me out.

I remember Romney running for the GOP nomination, and so many people assumed he would win the primary because the party has all the control and he was the establishment incumbent guy. But I kept thinking, Yeah, thats true right now, but historically there are lots of cases where the grassroots gets control of the party, and when they do, its bad news for democracy. Fast-forward to 2016 and Trump and you can see how that played out.

I do want to be cautious about this comparison, because there are a couple major differences. One is that Germany had a proportional system, so it was much harder to hold the conservative base together in a highly fragmented system. Also, the conservative party in Germany was very young, didnt have deep roots or a deep history. Were not talking about the party of Lincoln going back 150 years or whatever. The Republican Party is more substantial as an organization than the German conservative party ever was.

So there are real differences, and Im always careful when making these Weimar comparisons. But as dangerous as it is to go wild with the Weimar comparisons, its just as dangerous to foreclose that comparison because it ended so badly.

There do seem to be problems today that are unique to our time, or maybe it just seems that way. Im thinking of the media landscape and the fact that so much of the GOP base has been captured by misinformation and false narratives.

Are there any examples of parties being subsumed by alternative realities in this way, or is this something that wasnt really possible until the digital age?

One of the most uncanny parallels to the Weimar era is that the leading figure in the German nationalist scene in the mid-1920s was this guy named Alfred Hugenberg, who had no political career. He was an adviser and a businessman. But slowly, he built up a media empire. He owned movie theaters and newspapers and even the official German wire service, which provided news to local newspapers.

As this new media infrastructure was developing, he was pushing a total nationalist agenda, infusing nationalist themes into newspaper stories. And he then got himself selected as the head of the German Conservative Party in 1928. He was uncharismatic and a failure as a politician, but he helped turn the political debate in a more nationalist direction.

Today, its more complicated because the media infrastructure is so all-encompassing. But Ive seen people draw parallels to the end of World War I where you had this narrative emerge in Germany that basically said that Germans were stabbed in the back by liberals and Jews and communists, that they didnt really lose the war. This myth was perpetuated after 1918, and it slowly spread throughout the political system. You could say that as people retreated more into mythology, they started to believe what today wed call alternative facts.

But I do think our situation is much better because in the case of Germany, the entire national political system had experienced this humiliating defeat. The country was decimated by a major war. Were not there. So whatever were dealing with here, its on a much smaller scale.

Given everything youve said here, how alarmed are you not just about the Republican Party but the overall trajectory of American democracy?

The need for major institutional reforms has become much clearer in my mind. The Republican Party is supposed to moderate in order to win votes. Youre not supposed to be able to go too far to the extremes and keep winning votes in a two-party system. Thats the puzzle in front of us. Two-party systems are supposed to be self-correcting. When it goes too far away from an average voter, you get punished and you moderate and go back to the middle.

This isnt happening because our constitutional system is filled with all of these counter-majoritarian crutches (like the Electoral College) for any party that does well in rural areas, and that allows Republicans to win office without winning a majority of the electorate. So we have to reform our institutions to compel the GOP to compete in more urban, more diverse areas thats the path to moderation.

Sometimes people will say to me, Well, we cant engineer our way out of this problem. There needs to be deep societal change. They say its naive to think we can reform our institutions. I say its naive to think we can get out of this without reforming our institutions. We simply have to change the basic incentives governing our political system.

Its hard to imagine a realignment like the one that eliminated the Whigs in the 1850s. And that didnt end well. The big dilemma is whether it makes more sense to keep the white nationalist anti-system elements within our system outside of the party. But that only works if their isolation can be accompanied by their weakening. My concern is that the electoral base for Trumpism is, at this point, real, broad, and deep.

More broadly, we should begin to think about the idea that Germans in the postwar period called wehrhafte Demokratie this is a defensive democracy one that embraces the inclusion, competition, and civil liberties of liberal democracy but one that doesnt take democracy for granted.

In Germany, the theory of defensive democracy had two main thrusts one is the attempt to bolster a democratic political culture through education, and the other is an aggressive willingness to isolate and exclude from political debate those views that endorse violence and that actively engage in violence. This doctrine was invented in the 1930s in response to Nazism. We may, ultimately, need a wehrhafte Demokratie for the social media age.

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Continued here:

The Republican Party is the problem - Vox.com

Watching history unfold in Washington DC from her home in London, Jan Halper-Hayes admitted to being slightly incredulous about the images of Donald Trump supporters storming the US Capitol.

It was kind of in some ways unbelievable, says the long-term activist in the Republican party and former vice-president of its UK branch. She claims she has received good information to indicate that Antifa people were present at the riot.

The unsubstantiated claim that Antifa a catch-all term used by the president and others to describe anti-Trump protest movements had infiltrated the mob is one that some of his most die-hard supporters have clung to.

That the idea has made the leap across the Atlantic underlines how the Republican diaspora have not been immune to some of the bitter controversies splitting the party in its homeland.

In the UK, the Trump presidency has taken something of a toll on the local branch of Republicans Overseas, which largely operates as a social circle for expatriate supporters who organise a 4th July party each year and carry out voter registration.

Some members, and particularly young women, previously involved with the group have stepped away since the presidents 2016 election and, in some cases, even voted for Joe Biden.

Halper-Hayes, a former member of Trumps White House transition team and visitor to his Mar-a-Lago resort, remains loyal nevertheless, insisting that it has never been hard to square support for Trump with traditional Republican values.

I knew him when I lived in New York, so I have known him through all his iterations. I was on his transition team, and from encounters and observations I can tell you that he is so friendly and funny. Its a shame that he used Twitter for a nasty side because thats not who he really is.

Whether I am in an Uber car or in a supermarket, people love Trump here in the UK. Its the BBC and the Guardian that take on a different mainstream media narrative.

Molly Kiniry has a very different take on Trump. She watched his rise both within the party and in national US politics with what she says was increasing amounts of horror. She views his most recent conduct as a manifestation of the mental instability that has been there all along.

Not that being a Republican supporter in an often left-leaning city like London was ever without complexities. What I normally say when people express surprise that Im a Republican is something to the effect of I am, I just hide the horns very well.

Casting her US presidential vote for Joe Biden this time came easily, says Kiniry, a former spokesperson for Republicans Overseas UK and now a graduate student at Cambridge who acknowledges that the president and his loyalists would likely regard her as a Rino [Republican in name only].

Like others, she says she is looking forward to her party regaining its traditional identity. She remains optimistic. I dont think I would still be a registered Republican after the last five or six years if that was not the case.

She is withering about those who have stood by the president in the US seat of power and, as a native Washingtonian, admits that the destructive events in DC had cut deep. I think the members who did not vote to impeach the president will have to answer to voters, and to history as well, quite frankly.

A third view of sorts is espoused by Greg Swenson, a spokesperson for Republicans Overseas, who insists that Trump managed to win over him and others who had originally wanted someone else to be the partys 2016 candidate. It was notable today that the majority of the UK branchs board were women, he says. I criticised him, but I can say that I have been very happy with what he did.

As an investment banker, he was attracted in particular to Trumps stewardship of the US economy. I became more of a supporter as we saw the results, for example, of tax deregulation, but it was also the massive pushback against him from Democrats and the left. As they became more unhinged, the more dug in Trump supporters have become.

That said, Swenson confesses that he is relishing a spell in opposition after four years defending a president who, he concedes, finally overdid it. He adds: Trump fatigue is exhausting for every one, whether they are supporters or opponents so Im kind of looking forward to it.

See the original post here:

'Kind of unbelievable': US Republicans in Britain mull over Trump impact - The Guardian

The appalling siege of the U.S. Capitol by pro-Trump insurrectionists, on the heels of their upset defeat in two Georgia Senate races the previous night, will require soul searching among Republicans about the direction of their party. Republicans will certainly seek to pivot from the riot, but the nativism, extreme polarization, truth-bashing, white nationalism and anti-democratic policies that we tend to identify with President Trump are likely to remain a hallmark of the Republican playbook into the future. These qualities will outlive Mr. Trumps presidency because they predate it: Republicans have been fueling the conditions that enabled Mr. Trumps rise since the 1980s.

A growing Southern and Western evangelical base pushed the party to replace its big-tent, bipartisan and moderate Republicanism of the mid-20th century with a more conservative version. Under President Dwight Eisenhower, the party had made peace with New Deal social provisioning and backed large-scale federal spending on infrastructure and education. Even as late as the 1970s, President Richard Nixon passed legislation expanding federal regulatory agencies. Yet when Ronald Reagan moved into the White House in 1981, the Republicans sharply slashed government regulations. They cut taxes for the wealthy and oversaw a hollowing out of the American welfare state. At the same time, the party shored up its heavily evangelical base with tough-on-crime policies, anti-abortion rhetoric and coded racist attacks on welfare queens.

But the past 40 years of Republican-led (but bipartisan) neoliberalism left large segments of the partys social base, like many other Americans, with declining standards of living Economic crisis and the browning of America opened new avenues for calculating politicians to exploit white cultural resentments for political gain: Isolationism, nativism, racism, even anti-Semitism roared back. Long part of the mix of American conservatism, these ideas had been increasingly sidelined during Americas midcentury golden age of the 1950s and 1960s.

But by the 1990s, greater numbers of the Republican Partys grass-roots activists blamed declining standards of living not on the free market individualism they believed in almost religiously, but on job-taking immigrants and the shadowy machinations of the global elite. Such scapegoating is strikingly reminiscent of the radio priest Charles Coughlins attacks on the Rothschilds and money-changers during the Great Depression.

Mr. Trump championed ideas that had been bubbling up among the Republican grass roots since the late 20th century. His great political talent has been to see the extent of these resentments and rhetorically, and to some extent politically, speak to those concerns. His hold on his supporters is not just a cult of personality but grounded in a set of deeply rooted and increasingly widespread ideas within the Republican Party: ending birthright citizenship for immigrants, militarizing the border, disenfranchising Americans under the guise of protecting the integrity of the ballot, favoring an isolationist nationalism.

To put the full power of the nations chief executive behind such proposals was uniquely Trumpian, but the animating ideas have precedent in Republican politics. In Orange County, Calif., Republicans had already in 1988 stationed uniformed guards outside polling stations when rumors circulated that Democrats were planning to bus aliens to the voting precincts. They carried signs in English and Spanish warning Non-Citizens Cant Vote. Some intimidated immigrant voters by writing down their license plate numbers. Republican nativists warned of the takeover of America. Their greatest fear, according to one prominent Republican activist, was that illegal aliens will stuff the ballot boxes. Mr. Trumps genius was to recognize the opportunity to mobilize such anti-democratic resentments around himself. By articulating a right-wing America First populism already deeply rooted in many circles of the Republican Party, Mr. Trump turned himself into the messiah for MAGA-land. He was an innovator.

Yet party elites struck a Faustian bargain to secure tax cuts for wealthy Americans, business-friendly deregulation and conservative court picks. They understood that in a world of economic anxiety, disempowerment of the middle class and colossal income inequality, such policies would deliver majorities. The successful combination is most likely to encourage many Republicans to continue to embrace it. It lets them mobilize, at least in some places and at least for now, a majority of voters. With the partys elite disinclined to grapple with extreme wealth inequalities and the increasing immiseration and insecurity of the American middle and working classes, the only way to win votes may be to pander to cultural resentment.

Mr. Trumps style of personalistic authoritarian populism is his alone. It is unfamiliar to most American politicians, and the messianic loyalty he commands among his most martial followers is unlikely to be replicated by those within the party who seek to pick up his mantle. But Mr. Trumps Republicanism, despite his belief that everything is about him, has always been about more than that. He has forged what is likely to be the Republican blueprint for the future, absent his most unhinged behavior. Without major party reset, the heirs apparent to Trumpism, probably with the party elites blessing, will continue to pander to visceral cultural resentments, champion outsider status, war against the very government they are part of and in the process continue to weaken our already fragile democracy.

Read more from the original source:

Opinion | Trump Is the Republican Partys Past and Its Future - The New York Times