For years, as a conscientious Christian, I have tried to understand the point of view of those fundamentalists, supposedly guided by nothing but Scripture, who seem to believe the Bible clearly instructs us that Human Life begins at conception; that homosexuality is a major threat to godliness, and that equal rights for women represents a rebellion against the divine order. Sure, you can nitpick your way through law, prophets, Gospels, and Epistles, like one of those “activist judges,” and justify this point of view, but it hardly seems obvious, much less obligatory for Bible Believers. Still, there is some support for their position in the letter of The Word, even if I personally think it violates its spirit. But the current effort by Christian Right activists and the Grand Old Party to suggest that conservative evangelical Protestant Christians have a religious obligation to oppose the use of Senate filibusters against judicial nominations goes so far beyond any conceivable scripture-based approach to public life as to be actively hilarious. (Catholics, of course, are a different matter, since their tradition makes church teachings, the Early Fathers, and Natural Law important sources of moral guidance alongside scripture, and indeed, keys to interpreting scripture. But American Catholic leaders, much as many of them may desire a judicial revolution that could lead to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, are not likely to join this particular partisan campaign). The patent absurdity of pretending that evangelicals have to go so far in the tank for the GOP as to support their parliamentary tactics probably explains why the proponents of this campaign have adopted so paranoid a message. This is not just a matter of obedience to scripture or to God’s Will, they say: it’s an act of self-defense against a judiciary that hates Christians and is determined to stamp out religious freedom. Never mind that a majority of federal judges were appointed by Republican presidents; this is a life-or-death matter for faith itself. I think these fanatics are egregiously over-reaching on this subject, and are also offering Democrats a big opening for outreach to people they normally don’t talk to. It’s a great opportunity for Democrats to simply say to conservative evangelical Christians: we don’t hate you, we don’t support judicial actions that abridge your rights, and by the way, you might want to take a long look at the leaders who would subordinate your faith to partisan politics. Let the GOP try to explain to people of faith why the filibuster is the worst threat to Christian religious freedom since Julian the Apostate. And don’t give them the illegitimate ammunition of buying into the idea that Phil A. Buster’s fate is a struggle between religious and non-religious points of view.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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March 14: Democrats Really Were in Disarray Over Spending Bill
Having spent much of the week watching the runup to a crucial Senate vote on appropriations, I had to express at New York some serious misgivings about Chuck Schumer’s strategy and what it did to his party’s messaging:
For the record, I’m usually disinclined to promote the hoary “Democrats in Disarray” narrative whereby the Democratic Party is to blame for whatever nightmarish actions Republicans generally, or Donald Trump specifically, choose to pursue. That’s particularly true right now when Democrats have so little actual power and Republicans have so little interest in following laws and the Constitution, much less precedents for fair play and bipartisanship. So it really makes no sense to accuse the powerless minority party of “allowing” the assault on the federal government and the separation of powers being undertaken by the president, his OMB director Russ Vought, and his tech-bro sidekick Elon Musk. If congressional Republicans had even a shred of integrity or courage, Senate Democrats would not have been placed in the position this week of deciding whether it’s better to let the government shut down than to let it be gutted by Trump, Vought, and Musk.
Having said all that, Senate Democrats did have a strategic choice to make this week, and based on Chuck Schumer’s op-ed in the New York Times explaining his decision to get out of the way and let the House-passed spending bill come to the floor, he made it some time ago. Nothing in his series of rationalizations was new. If, indeed, “a shutdown would be the best distraction Donald Trump could ask for from his awful agenda,” while enabling the administration to exert even more unbridled power over federal programs and personnel, that was true a week ago or a month ago as well. So Schumer’s big mistake was leading Senate Democrats right up to the brink of a collision with the administration and the GOP, and then surrendering after drawing enormous attention to his party’s fecklessness.
This doesn’t just look bad and feel bad for Democrats demanding that their leaders do something to stop the Trump locomotive: It also gives the supreme bully in the White House incentive to keep bullying them, as Josh Marshall points out in his postmortem on the debacle:
“[P]eople who get hit and abused and take it tend to get hit and abused again and again. That’s all the more true with Donald Trump, a man who can only see the world through the prism of the dominating and the dominated. It is a great folly to imagine that such an abject acquiescence won’t drive him to up the ante.”
The reality is that this spending measure was the only leverage point congressional Democrats had this year (unless Republicans are stupid enough not to wrap the debt-limit increase the government must soon have in a budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered). Everyone has known that since the new administration and the new Congress took office in January. If a government shutdown was intolerable, then Democrats should have taken it off the table long before the House voted on a CR. Punchbowl News got it right:
“Let’s be blunt here: Democrats picked a fight they couldn’t win and caved without getting anything in return. …
“Here’s the lesson from this episode: When you have no cards, fold them early.”
Instead, Democrats have taken a defeat and turned it into a debacle. House and Senate Democrats are divided from each other, and a majority of Senate Democrats are all but shaking their fists at their own leader, who did in fact lead them down a blind alley. While perhaps the federal courts will rein in the reign of terror presently underway in Washington (or perhaps they won’t), congressional Democrats must now become resigned to laying the groundwork for a midterm election that seems a long time away and hoping something is left of the edifice of a beneficent federal government built by their predecessors from the New Deal to the Great Society to Obamacare. There’s a good chance a decisive majority of the general public will eventually recoil from the misrule of the Trump administration and its supine allies in Congress and across the country. But at this point, elected Democrats are going to have to prove they should be trusted to lead the opposition.