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.
Here, perhaps, is the saddest commentary on the American electorate: that overwhelming majorities regard atheism as a most-disqualifying flaw and religiosity as a most-qualifying commendation.
This is to say that Americans require their leader not only to espouse, but also to demonstrate a decision-making process essentially–by definition–irrational, what Kierkegaard called an absurd “leap of faith”. Such demonstrated irrationality, in fact, is a requirement for true adherence to any faith, whether of extreme or moderate stripe.
Now of course, one of the oldest adages is “when in Rome, do as the Romans”; and none know this better than the politicians. One must genuflect before the idols for the sake of the form. But particularly in a secular state that maintains official neutrality among religions, the politician–as he always has–must do so with a wink and a nod. The 1st Amendment right to practice religion as one pleases is at stake, so the politician must maintain an official neutral stance, even if his values are influenced by his religious training–and even if he admits as much.
Neverthless, the soundness of the secular state is threatened when infested by “true believers” masquerading as politicians, rather than the other way around. We have seen the devestating effect with some of the Bushies. We see the worry in military quarters with the Turkish parliament’s election yesterday of Gul. We worry about the influence of the ayatollahs in Iran.
So, we should safeguard against such an infestation of the Democratic Party. As Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet illuminate in Mother Jones (Sep/Oct 2007), HRC holds hands weekly with mostly-GOP Christian ‘wingers at the Senate Prayer Breakfast and is a member of the shadowy Fellowship of Doug Coe. Many sources demonstrate a history of HRC’s knee-scraping religiosity, including her own statements and writings. The question Joyce and Sharlet ask: is this more Clintonian triangulation, a clever strategy for Senatorial achievement (ala those Romans), or is she really “down with” the theocratic aims of Coe, the Fellowship, and their congregants? The nod and wink have yet to come.