Republican Support for Insurrection

David Hilfiker

On Wednesday, January 6th, Congress met in joint session in the Capitol Building to certify the results of the Electoral College vote.  Over sixty unsuccessful lawsuits had previously proven beyond doubt that the electoral votes were legitimate and accurate.  By a vote of 306 to 232, Joe Biden was President-Elect of the United States.  There was no constitutional way for Congress to deny that certification.  Vice-President Pence had no power to challenge the results, only to report them to Congress.

Nevertheless, over half (139) of the Republicans in the House of Representatives and eight senators had announced their intention to vote to delay their approval pending further investigation of the results.  

Before the vote could occur, insurrectionists, incited by President Trump, overran the building.  Follow-up reporting has indicated that the attack on the Capitol was more than the exuberance of an excited crowd.  Michael Gerson writes:

In the days since the attack, … our picture of the event itself has evolved. From long-distance camera lenses, it might have looked like a protest that grew out of hand. But many of the insurrectionists came prepared with tactical gear and communications equipment. They roamed the halls with zip ties hunting for Pence and congressional leaders. At a distance, they carried crosses. Close up, they built gallows and chanted death threats. At a distance, they carried “thin blue line” banners. Close up, they savagely beat police officers who resisted them.

One moment captured on video stands out to me for its brutality and symbolism. An insurrectionist pulls a police officer down the steps of the Capitol, where he is stomped and beaten with the pole of a U.S. flag. The crowd chants “USA, USA.”

Congresspeople were hiding under their desks before being whisked away to “undisclosed locations” for their safety.  After convening again, a few of the objecting members of Congress agreed to certify the election.  Nevertheless, the majority of the objectors from the House still voted in defiance of the expressed will of the people of the United States.  To be clear, this was not an illegal action.  It’s also clear, however, that everyone knew the vote would not succeed, for it would have required Democratic votes to pass.  Additionally, the Federal Election Commission had issued a statement that the election was the “most secure in US history.”  So, it was only to appease President Trump and his supporters that over 100 members of Congress, led by Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Josh Hawley, voted to undermine the legitimate results of a presidential election.

In the long run, does it really matter?  Yes, it does.

• The attack on the Capitol is just one result of the lies by Trump and his Republican followers.  When millions of people who don’t trust the government in the first place observe their Congresspeople trying to overwhelm the will of the people, even violent insurrection should be no surprise.  
• Those members of Congress thus joined Trump in convincing well over fifty million Americans that in fact, the election was stolen.  Large numbers of Americans, therefore, will continue to believe that Joe Biden will not the be the legitimate president of the United States.

Most Republicans had already demonstrated their support for reversing the results of the election by supporting Trump’s previous legal attempts to do so.  To my knowledge, none of these defiant Republicans had expressed resistance to Trump’s empty lawsuits, thereby supporting his efforts, some tacitly but others explicitly.  Again, the lawsuits were not illegal, but these Congresspeople supportive of the President knew or should have known that the suits had no chance of success, that in fact Biden had won the election.  Therefore, even tacit support for overturning the results of the Electoral College election indicated that they also disbelieved Biden’s victory.  If the Republican leaders of the country do not consider Biden legitimate, why should citizens?  Trump and his congressional followers, therefore, have deeply damaged our democracy.

While their actions were not, as said above, illegal, these Republicans have forfeited their right to be in office.  

There are only two ways to remove a president Trump from office: Article 25 of the Constitution and impeachment.  Vice-President Pence, who alone has authority to initiate Article 25, refused to do so.  The House has impeached the President.  The unexpected good news is that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has expressed his willingness to hold conviction hearings.  There is almost no chance that the Senate will convict before Trump leaves office next Wednesday.  I support impeachment, mostly because the divisiveness in the country will not be healed unless we confront head-on what has happened to our country.  Nevertheless, others have offered good reasons for not taking that route.  (See my posts here and here for the debate for and against the first impeachment.)  But, at the very least, all Republican members of Congress, have the moral responsibility to work to remove those who voted against certification.  They are ethically bound to support Democrats or third-party challengers in the next election.  As I argued earlier in the year, the Republican Party must either disavow them or be dismantled.

Breaking Norms

[This post was written in the weeks before the insurrection at the Capitol.  That event, the President’s role in it, and its impact on our democracy deserve a separate post.  I hope the following will serve as an introduction to those dramatic escalations.]

In assessing the damage that Donald Trump and his presidency have done, perhaps the most important thing to remember is that government, like most institutions, operates on the basis of unwritten norms that constrain behavior.  The Constitution actually says very little about what the president can and cannot do.  Those unwritten traditions and expectations are, in one sense, then, soft guardrails that may occasionally be violated without harm to the democracy, for instance, when President Carter stepped out of his limo and walked much of the inauguration route or when news media stopped self-censoring stories of politicians’ private lives.  But when those norms are shattered willy-nilly, injury to the democracy can be irreversible.  I have written previously about the destruction of some of its these norms, eg here, here and here.

Trump has revealed that the presidency was built on a basic assumption about a range of reasonableness among presidents, a range of willingness to play within the system, a range of at least a modicum of understanding of political and normative constraints.

Trump has delighted in stepping outside the range of reasonableness, refused to play within the system, and ignored the usual normative constraints of office.

Washington Post writer David Montgomery’s recent column “The Abnormal Presidency” examines twenty of the most important norms the President has broken during his presidency.  It’s worth reading in its entirety.

Here’s just a selection of shattered norms.  I’ve ordered them by category.  I would invite you to consider each of them individually, for in any normal time — when Congress took its responsibilities seriously — any one of these norm violations would have risked impeachment.  But, of course, this is not a normal time.

1.    Dividing the nation in times of crisis.

A.  Perhaps most important of all, Trump has repeatedly challenged US elections as “rigged.”  Even after he won the electoral vote in 2016, he still called the election rigged … because the results showed he lost the popular vote.  Despite the clear loss this past November and the unmitigated failure of his many legal challenges, Trump still claims that he won the election.  It’s become obvious that he will continue to make this claim long after he leaves office.  That it will be a significant danger to our democracy that cannot be overemphasized. 

B.  General and former Chief of Staff James Mattis wrote: “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try.”

2.    The President lies over and over again.  The media have documented tens of thousands of these lies, yet the President repeats them over and over.

3.    Trump denigrates truth and objective fact, refusing to acknowledge unassailable truth:

A.  He denies uncomfortable reality, both minor (eg, claims that his inauguration crowd was larger than Obama’s) and major (rigged elections).

B.  Truth becomes one among many “alternative facts,” from which to select the most advantageous. 

C.  The President has verbally assaulted bedrock institutions

1)   The President personally attacks the Supreme Court and other federal court decisions, or even the judges themselves.  He reduces the judiciary to one more partisan body whose judgments are considered by Trump mere opinions.

2)   He delegitimizes intelligence and law enforcement agencies, whose best judgments he feels free to ignore or deny.

3)   Trump also feels free to contradict scientific conclusions, saying, for example, that the coronavirus is going away and will just magically disappear.

4)   He brands the press as “the enemy of the people.” 

4.    The Executive Branch has gradually become a personal tool for the president.  He has fired officials who are not devoted enough to him, for instance, Jeff Sessions, and replaced them with the loyalists who will not question his judgments.  Those who do disagree, for instance, General James Mattis, are fired. 

5.    The President abused his power to appoint “acting” Cabinet Secretaries, who, because of their temporary status, do not need to be confirmed by the Senate.  But Trump has allowed many of them to remain “acting” so as to avoid confirmation hearings.  These temporary officials have little political power and are even more subject to Trump’s whims since they can be fired so easily.  In has first 2½ years in office, Trump appointed more acting Secretaries than any other president did in their full 4-or 8-year terms.

6.    The President uses government power for partisan ends.  All presidents do this to some extent but Trump’s use has been especially egregious.

A. He has used the military for political goals, eg threats to use military against demonstrators.

B.  He has politicized foreign policy and diplomacy, eg Ukraine.

C.  He has politicized court appointment, for instance, the ten judges determined by the American Bar Association as unqualified.  Most were confirmed by the Republicans in the Senate, anyway

D.  He has corrupted the use of the pardon.

E.   The President has used the White House as a political stage, quite literally when he accepted the Republican nomination at the White House.

7.    Trump has refused to accept oversight

A.  The President has blocked administration officials from testifying in legitimate congressional investigations.  He has refused to open his tax returns to the public as has been the norm for over half a century.  Tax returns would be especially important for revealing possible foreign involvement in his business affairs.

B.  Trump has fired five Inspectors General, at least in part because of their critical reports of his administration’s policies and actions

C.  He has challenged, often successfully, the independence of the Justice Department — including the FBI, intelligence services, inspectors general, CIA and many other agencies — by personally intervening, eg pushing Attorney General William Barr to investigate rigged elections without evidence that they exist.

8.    The President has used the power of his office to enrich himself personally.  All presidents since Richard Nixon have voluntarily placed their investments in blind trusts so that they cannot because be accused of using their power to increase their wealth.  This President not only gave to his sons control of his business empire but he also remains active in managing it.

9.    The president encourages violence among his supporters:

A.  told an audience at a campaign rally that he would pay their legal fees if they engaged in violence against protesters. 

B.  By demonizing immigrants, Trump has encouraged violence against them, for example, During his campaign, the President characterized Mexican immigrants as “Drug dealers, criminals, rapists.”

C.  The President has also attacked Congresswoman Alexandria Octavio-Cortez and others in “the Squad,” Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), saying they should “go back to where they came from.”  (Three of the four were born in this country.)

10.     From the very beginning of his campaign Trump has embraced authoritarians around the world, e.g., Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Erdogan, the Philippines Duterte and others.

11.     Recently, the President has almost certainly broken the law by pushing (even indirectly threatening) the Georgia Secretary to “find” 11,800 votes, which would have given Trump the victory in that state.

The list could go on.  The point is that, in themselves, none of these (except the last) is illegal.  These unspoken rules are not written down anywhere.  So, when they’re violated, there is no concrete basis on which to object.  But each violation weakens the democracy by decreasing the respect for and the confidence in the government and in democracy itself. 

The frequency and brazenness of Trump’s attacks can make our eyes glaze over. “We know all that!” we say.  Indeed, part of Donald Trump’s power is the normalizing of anti-democratic values.  But it’s important we keep our vision clear.  Spending some time with this list or, perhaps, with David Montgomery’s (above) can help us remember as many examples as we can, perhaps even to begin to immunize our democracy from the likes of Donald Trump.

For our future, the President’s behavior leaves a trail of tattered norms that could serve as an established path for the next demagogue who comes along who is more competent than Trump at subverting democracy.  The last four years have taught us that our Constitution is no match for a corrupt president, venal political party that is willing to sell its soul for power or for individual politicians who forego their sworn responsibilities and their deeper principles for fear of political consequences.  Our country, long the beacon of freedom across the world, has darkened its light.

The President has revealed to us the deadly decay of partisan politics.  (We should remind ourselves that a switch of 43,000 votes over three states would have thrown the election to Trump.)

The future of our national politics is, at this point, very uncertain.  We are more politically polarized than at any time since the Civil War.  In a future post I’ll look at what we might do about it after he leaves the presidency.