I was about to post my piece here — calling for the Democrats to wage the kind of aggressive campaign I describe below — when I came upon this in an opinion piece (9/10) by the Washington Post columnist Greg Sargeant:
[E]lecting more Republicans to positions of responsibility right now would likely mean more economic malaise, sickness, misery and death.
This is what Democrats come very close to saying in a new memo about the 2022 elections that their House campaign arm is now distributing. The memo is an important marker: It suggests Democrats are finally leaning into prosecuting the case against Republicans for actively impairing the nation’s response to the covid-19 resurgence.
This cannot come soon enough. A confluence of new factors is making it obvious that Democrats need to take on this argument much more forcefully, not just for the good of the party, but for the good of the country.
Maybe the Republicans’ Covid-related destructiveness is what most warrants emphasis. After all, when it comes to people’s priorities, their own health and wealth are high on the list.
But of course the flagrant destructiveness of today’s Republican Party is hardly confined to that arena. So, on with the show:
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The Extraordinary Democratic Campaign Called for by Today's Quite Extraordinary Republican Party
For the Democrats to meet the extraordinary political challenge of this moment, they will need to abandon their ordinary way of conducting their political battle.
In the campaign for 2022, a major focus of the Democrats – perhaps the major focus – should be to get as many Americans as possible to see the extraordinarily dangerous thing that the Republican Party has become.
To put – and keep – that ugly reality before the American people, the Democrats should continuously
- challenge the Republicans to debate issues (on none of which the Republicans are playing a constructive role) and especially
- throw down the gauntlet with serious – and valid – accusations about the Republicans’ indefensible conduct.
Shining a spotlight on the unprecedented destructiveness of today’s Republican Party is not only the Democrats’ best path to victory. It may well also be what’s required to save American democracy.
The Republicans’ acting in ways that damage the nation is visible in various arenas, such as:
- Using a deadly pandemic to posture for political advantage at the cost of the people’s lives (like Republican Governors DeSantis in Florida and Abbott in Texas), politicizing issues of life-and-death that should be above politics (with the consequent drag also on the nation’s economic health).
- Their consistent refusal to take the necessary actions to deal with climate change, even as “weather” – increasingly extreme – is repeatedly becoming the major news (wildfires, droughts, floods, hurricanes) in the U.S. and around the world.
- Obstructing the President to make him a failure rather than working with him to make the nation a success—and this at a time the nation faces multiple crises, which means a time when the failure to act both condemns the nation to deteriorate and squanders the opportunity for the nation to move forward in important ways.)
But among the many fronts in which the Republicans are wreaking destruction on America, nowhere is their conduct more dangerous than in the multiple ways they are attacking the very foundations of American democracy.
Helping Americans to see that should prove a winning political strategy for the Democrats, for it seems clear that the great majority of Americans don’t want to forfeit our Constitutional Order and fall under the authoritarian/fascist order toward which the Republicans are continually pushing. Yet it seems that a great many Americans need help seeing clearly that systematic Republican assault on our Constitution and the rule of law.
The time is ripe for calling out the Republicans because never has their contempt for the values of Democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law been more blatant, and thus more readily exposed.
Even though the Republicans destructiveness is dressed up in Lies, they are implausible Lies. It should not be impossible to get the majority of Americans to see through those Lies.
- The Republicans’ Lies to deny that the 1/6 Insurrection was an attempted coup d’etat are countered by what Americans saw on their TV screens as it was happening. (“Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”) And by what the trials of the insurrectionists are proving further.
- The Republicans’ attempts to prevent an investigation into that Insurrection, which will uncover the substantial Republican complicity in that attempted overturning of a legitimate election, exemplifies their assault on the rule of law – and their determination to keep truth away from the American people.
- The Lie about “voter fraud” and “election security” are transparent falsehoods to disenfranchise groups of voters who vote against the Republicans.
- Laws passed by Republican legislatures to enable those legislatures to overturn election results they don’t like.
All ways of attacking the Constitution that every one of those Republicans took a sacred oath to “Protect and Defend.”
Almost daily, the Republicans show their extraordinary darkness—like just recently:
- Who could have imagined the leader of the Republicans in the House would get up and issue a warning to telecom corporations, threatening to punish them if they were to furnish the information that the law requires them to provide. (Threatening them using a lie by pretending that they’d be violating some “federal law” that doesn’t exist.) Pure Thug Talk—which calls attention to how thoroughly the spirit of the whole Party has become, especially since Trump took the party over.
- Who could have imagined such an end-run around the Constitutional Order as the joint effort of the Texas Republicans and the Republican-dominated Supreme Court to take away Constitutional rights while setting up roadblocks to the “judicial review” process that has always allowed citizens to use the Courts to challenge unconstitutional laws and defend their rights.
The Democrats strategy should be to connect each such illustration of such Republican darkness with the larger picture—“This shows what the Republican Party has become.”
(E.g. McCarthy’s gangster-like attempt to obstruct a lawful congressional investigation – in violation of 18 USC 1505 (b) – should be connected with the wider pattern of Republican attack on the rule of law. And e.g. McCarthy’s false assertion about how the compliance by the telecoms would violate federal law should be connected with the GOP’s pervasive and wanton disregard of truthfulness.)
The Democrats have fourteen months (until the 2022 election) to bring that picture into clear focus for the American people.
A campaign of consistent challenge and denunciation – calling out the Republicans to respond in a public forum at a particular time -- can keep the spotlight on this extraordinary Republican destructiveness.
Laying down the gauntlet – challenging the Republicans to the political equivalent of a duel -- creates the kind of drama that can capture the attention of the media and the public. The news media and the public love confrontations, with this kind of aggressive challenging the Democrats can focus national attention on the truth about grotesque and dangerous nature of today’s Republican Party.
The strategy of consistent challenge to a public “duel” is a no-lose proposition:
- If the Republicans accept the challenge, the Democrats can duke it out with them in public, with the truth (and basic American values) on their side.
- If the Republicans refuse to respond, even when the Democrats throw down the gauntlet, then the Democrats can show up at the appointed place and have the platform to themselves to further call out this Republican Party.
Either way, over time, the American people can absorb the developing the picture of how today’s Republican Party has become so dangerous a threat to America’s well-being and to the democratic system that has been the foundation of so many of our blessings as Americans.
An ugly picture. A picture that can be artfully and powerfully presented.
We’ve seen people who do it superbly, like Adam Schiff – so eloquent and even prophetic in the First Impeachment Trial; and Jamie Raskin—so impassioned and righteous in the Second Impeachment Trial. Both of them powerful in argument—able to score well whether the Republicans send up anyone against them, or they have the platform to themselves.
And of course there are many other able Democrats – men and women, of various ethnicities – who can and should join in the effort.
Americans should be called to do their patriotic duty – the same one that every office holder is required to swear an oath to perform – i.e. to Protect and Defend the Constitution.
What that duty clearly requires -- at this particular threatening political moment – is to strip power away from the Republican Party from which – in ways quite unprecedented – the Constitution urgently needs to be defended.