The 2022 Midterms: Bracing Yourselves for the "Red Tsunami"

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

”Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
– Benjamin Franklin, November 11, 1755

When former White House strategist and long-time Donald Trump confidant Steve Bannon showed up in Washington, D.C. to be sentenced to four months in jail and a $6,500 fine for refusing to testify before the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, he couldn’t have been happier. “Remember this November when the Biden administration ends?” Bannon gloated. “Their judgment day is on 8 November.”

Bannon is almost certainly right. The midterm elections on November 8, 2022 are looking more and more like not only a pro-Republican “red wave” but a red tsunami. At this writing, less than two weeks before the midterms, the Republicans appear poised for a mega-sweep that will make 1994 and 2010 look like great years for Democrats by comparison. Those of us who hoped that Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in 2020 had meant at least a reprieve from the threats to democracy itself posed by an increasingly authoritarian, autocratic Republican Party are in for a rude awakening. The “red tsunami” will almost certainly make Biden a one-term President and pave the way either for Trump’s return to the White House in 2024 or the election of an equally creepy alternate Republican like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

And what is the reason for this abrupt turn in America’s political direction? In the immortal words of James Carville, who masterminded Bill Clinton’s successful campaign against then-President George H. W. Bush in 1992, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Bush, Sr. had had a huge leap in his popularity at the end of the first U.S.-Iraq war in 1990-91 (though he chose to leave Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in power because he wanted Iraq to remain a Sunni Muslim-ruled country to balance the Shi’a Muslim-controlled Iran), but a nose-diving recession in the U.S. economy doomed his chances.

When Bush campaigned for re-election in New Hampshire in 1992, he was greeted with signs reading, “Saddam Hussein still has a job. Do you?” He was widely ridiculed when video footage revealed he didn’t know how price-scanning machines at grocery stores worked. Carville and the others running Clinton’s campaign were able to portray Bush as an out-of-touch rich elitist with no idea of ordinary Americans or their problems. Coupled with a third-party challenge by self-made entrepreneur H. Ross Perot, which probably took enough votes away from Bush in several key states to hand the election to Clinton, Bush lost his re-election bid and withdrew to a quiet if sometimes cranky ex-Presidency.

Today the American economy is beset by relentless inflation, especially in food and gasoline prices. Americans keep getting hit by price increases and are having a harder time making ends meet than they did when Trump was President. Gas prices are especially difficult for an incumbent administration because they’re posted in big numbers outside gas stations, so even if you don’t directly consume gas yourself (as I don’t, since I’ve never had a driver’s license), you’re aware of how astronomically its price has risen.

It’s true that President Biden is doing what little he can to lower gas and food prices. He’s released oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to try to bring costs down by increasing gas supplies. It’s also true that there’s little a President can do to lower food and fuel prices. Those are controlled by private markets – unlike most countries that produce as many petroleum products as we do, the U.S. has no major publicly owned oil company – and, as Biden has explained on many occasions, world oil prices are rising for many reasons, including Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Biden also can tout good things that have happened to the American economy on his watch. Unemployment is down to historic lows, and wages are rising as the pandemic phase of COVID-19 draws to a close. And he’s been extolling the features of the Inflation Reduction Act, which he and Congressional Democrats passed with zero Republican support. Among other things, it will fund development of alternative energy sources to give America a badly needed recovery from its addiction to fossil fuels. It will also cap annual prescription co-payments for seniors on Medicare to $2,000 per year and cut the cost of insulin to $35 per dose. All these things will help many Americans pay their bills, and so will Biden’s plan of partial forgiveness of U.S. student loans. But, as James Carville also said, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

Polls Show Voters Favor Republican Issues

U.S. voters don’t feel good about the economy. And they’re reminded of it every time they buy gas or groceries. According to a recent poll conducted by Louis Harris in conjunction with the Center for American Political Studies (CAPS) at Harvard University, reported on TheHill.com, (https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/3693810-inflation-crime-immigration-top-voter-concerns-ahead-of-midterms-poll/) shows that voters’ top concerns ahead of the midterms are the issues Republicans are strongest on: inflation, immigration and crime.

According to Julia Manchester’s report on this poll on TheHill.com, “Seventy-four percent of voters surveyed named inflation as ‘very important,’ while 22 percent said it is ‘somewhat important.’ Sixty-eight percent, meanwhile, said crime is a ‘very important’ issue, while 26 percent said it is only ‘somewhat important.’ And 59 percent of voters called immigration a ‘very important’ issue while 31 percent said it is ‘somewhat important.’”

As for the issues the Democrats were hoping would save them from a Republican bloodbath on November 8 – the Supreme Court’s reversal of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion and women’s rights, and concerns over the fate of American democracy itself as the extent of the Trump administration’s attempt to remain in power no matter what became chear – those issues are simply not resonating with voters the way inflation, immigration and crime are. “Abortion was ranked fourth in the new survey, with 55 percent calling it a ‘very important issue,’ and 29 percent saying it is ‘somewhat important,’” Manchester wrote.

A recent New York Times/Siena College poll (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/us/politics/republicans-economy-nyt-siena-poll.html) had even gloomier news for Democrats. Only seven percent of the respondents in that poll named abortion as the most important issue facing the country, and only five percent said it was the Republican threat to democracy. A combined 44 percent of the Times respondents rated either “the economy” or “inflation” as their top concerns – and in the current moment those amount to the same thing. That number was up considerably from the 36 percent in the same poll in July.

The poll also found that non-party-aligned women have overwhelmingly shifted their support from Democrats to Republicans, largely over concerns about the economy and negative feelings towards President Biden. “In September, they favored Democrats by 14 points,” New York Times reporter Shane Goldmacher reported on October 17. “Now, independent women backed Republicans by 18 points — a striking swing, given the polarization of the American electorate and how intensely Democrats have focused on that group and on the threat Republicans pose to abortion rights.”

And it’s not just poll results, either. Washington Post economics reporter Ahba Bhattarai appeared on the October 21 PBS program Washington Week and said, “I spent the week talking with voters around the country. And I was really struck by how many long-time Democratic voters said that they were suddenly having to make these decisions that they never thought they would be making. They're wondering if they should prioritize the economy or abortion rights, gun control, these issues that are all very important to them. "

"But they feel like they have less and less of a choice when they are struggling to pay for groceries and pay for electricity and all these other essentials that have been going up in price. As one woman in Nashville told me yesterday, we can no longer afford to prioritize our principles over inflation. And so they're really rethinking their entire belief system in some cases.” In other words, the kinds of voters Democrats were hoping would at least stanch some of the bleeding in their support – the liberal pro-choice, pro-democracy voters – are deciding that democracy and choice are literally luxuries they can no longer afford.

The sweep towards Republicans has been most pronounced in what pollsters call the “generic ballot” – the direct question to respondents about which party they’d like to see control Congress. In just one week, according to MS-NBC political reporter Steve Kornacki, the Republican lead on the generic ballot leaped from 0.8 to 3.1 percent. Other polls have it even higher; the New York Times/Siena College poll has it at 4 percent and the Harris/Harvard poll has the pro-Republican margin at a whopping 6 percent.

This is even worse news than it seems at first glance because I’m convinced the generic ballot actually underestimates Republican strength. Due to partisan gerrymandering – which the Republicans have used far more effectively and aggressively in the states they control than the Democrats have – the Republicans are almost certain to do better in the actual House of Representatives races than the results of the generic ballot show.

Republicans Don’t Need to Offer Solutions

What makes the midterm landscape even more frightening for Democrats is that Republicans aren’t saying much of anything about what they would do differently to address the problems of inflation, the economy, immigration and crime. And to the extent they are talking about what they would do differently, it’s about things that would literally take money away from senior citizens (a bedrock Republican constituency) and others. Already House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy has announced that he will hold raising the debt ceiling hostage and demand that Biden and the Democrats agree to massive cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

Republicans aren’t offering alternatives, but they really don’t have to, either. As the late political scientist V. O. Key wrote in his last book, The Responsible Electorate (1966), American voters do indeed make decisions on political issues, but “retrospectively and negatively.” That is, they vote on past performance rather than future promises, and they vote against what they don’t want ratner than for what they do want. Given the way food and (especially) gas prices have soared under the watch of Biden and the Democrats, American voters are about to hand control of Congress to the Republicans based on nothing more than the vague hope that at least they can’t make things worse – though they can.

Senator Rick Scott (R-Florida), chair of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee, has pledged that a new Republican-controlled Congress will “sunset” the Social Security program. That means it would automatically die unless extended every five years. He’s also promised to make the Trump tax cuts for the richest Americans permanent and impose a minimum income tax on all Americans of $100 for singles and #200 for couples. Scott’s plan would make Social Security benefits taxable and, according to Dan Beyer of the Democrats’ Joint Economic Committee (https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/008860e7-93bd-47dd-a786-fbfdfee24868/jec---scott-plan-analysis---april-2022---final.pdf), would raise taxes for 43 percent of Americans and increase the tax burden on middle-class taxpayers by an average of $450 per year.

It’s not only on economic issues that Republicans are offering policy proposals that are decidedly unpopular. Senator Lindsay Graham (R-South Carolina) has proposed a nationwide ban on virtually all abortions, despite the vote in Kansas (not exactly a liberal bastion) last August in which a ballot measure to remove abortion protections from the state constitution lost by nearly 20 points. They’re pledging to repeal the Affordable Care Act that guaranteed health coverage to millions of Americans, and they will likely reverse the Democratic legislation to cap the costs of prescription drugs and allow Medicare to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices.

And while Republicans claim to be the party that’s “tough on crime,” they have almost totally blocked any government action to keep guns out of the hands of potential criminals. Instead they’ve locked themselves into the agenda of the National Rifle Association and other even more extreme gun-rights groups. Their current radical-Right revolutionary super-majority on the U.S. Supreme Court seems determined to read the Second Amendment so broadly that even the minimal gun regulation bill that squeaked through the Senate last summer will likely be declared unconstitutional.

Indeed, one of the few things that might actually turn back the tide of the “red tsunami” is overconfidence. Instead of pulling back on issue demands that polls show are unpopular with the American people, the Republicans are actively and proudly embracing them. Obviously they are hoping that they can claim a mandate not only for the economic parts of their agenda (which there really aren’t any, aside from cutbacks for everyone else to give tax breaks to the rich) but for everything else as well.

This gives the Democrats a potential opening for the last two weeks of the campaign – but only if they’re bold and assertive enough to use it. I think Biden should mention the Republicans’ tax policies, including the “sunsetting” of Social Security, the cuts in Medicare and the “minimum tax” plan that will raise taxes on over 40 percent of Americans in every stump speech he makes between now and the midterms. Instead of talking about reproductive choice or the future of American democracy, he should be saying that Republicans have promised to take money away from senior citizens who have paid into Social Security all their working lives so they can fund huge and unnecessary tax cuts for the super-rich.

Biden and the Democrats should also take advantage of the two-month “lame duck” session between November 8 and January 3, 2023, when the new Republican Congress will take power, to get rid of the insanity of the “debt ceiling” altogether. As Eric Lavitz explained in a New York magazine article called “Return of the Hostage Takers” (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/joe-biden-gop-debt-ceiling.html), under Senate rules they couldn’t abolish the debt ceiling but they could raise it so high it wouldn’t be reached for decades or even centuries.

But all this would take a major push from President Biden, and he’s already told reporters that getting rid of the debt ceiling would be “irresponsible.” “In so doing,” Lavitz wrote, “he affirmed the GOP’s fiction about what raising the debt ceiling actually means, while leaving the economy at its mercy. If the Republican Party’s commitment to brinksmanship threatens to upend the global financial system, the president’s nostalgic attachment to congressional conventions threatens to do the same.”

Republican Control Will Be Permanent

And once the Republicans regain control of the U.S. Congress in 2022 and the Presidency in 2024, they have no intention of ever letting themselves be voted out of it again. One reason America’s experiment in republican self-governance has lasted as long as it has – nearly 250 years – is that losing candidates acknowledged their defeat and used the time until the subsequent election to regroup and try to win the next time.

But today’s Republicans have no intention of either acknowledging defeat or accepting it. They are mounting a full-court press to make sure that they will never again lose elections, no matter what the will of the people is. They have targeted just about every office that has a role in administering elections, from the lowliest election clerks to state secretaries of state, the officials that actually run elections in each state.

I remember as a child being confused about what a state secretary of state actually did. I knew what the U.S. Secretary of State did – he (or, more recently, she) ran America’s relations with other nations. But since U.S. states don’t have foreign policies, it took me years before I realized that, among other things (including registering corporations), state secretaries of state run elections in their states and have broad latitude to determine how people vote and how their votes are counted.

This year, Republicans are putting up candidates for secretary of state all over the country – and in at least four critical swing states, Minnesota (Kim Crockett), Arizona (Mark Finchem), Michigan (Kristina Karamo) and Nevada (Jim Marchant), Republicans are either leading in the polls or the results are within the statistical margin of error. Marchant’s program is especially interesting because, among other things, he’s demanding an end to early voting and mail-in ballots, an end to machine counting of ballots, and an insistence that the results on election day are final regardless of how many ballots are still outstanding. If these rules had been in effect in the so-called “swing states” in 2020, Donald Trump would still be President.

Republicans are also mounting both public and private efforts to intimidate both voters and election clerks. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis formed what he called an “Election Integrity Task Force” to send police to the homes of former felons who were supposed to have had the right to vote restored under a 2018 ballot measure passed by over 60 percent of Floridians. DeSantis made the program so intimidating and scary that even the cops sent out to serve the warrants on people accused of having voted illegally often had no idea what the warrants were about and couldn’t explain them to the people they were targeting. The purpose was clearly to intimidate African-Americans in particular and scare them away from the polls this November.

Other intimidation tactics include the private posses being organized by militia groups and individuals in Arizona and elsewhere to park trucks outside election drop boxes. Often the people driving the trucks are wearing military armor and carrying guns. Similar groups are making calls all over the country threatening the lives of election workers for having certified the “wrong” winner – Biden instead of Trump – in 2020. The intimidation has become so serious it’s estimated up to 30 percent of election workers have quit or taken early retirement rather than risk staying on the job under threats to their and their families’ lives And as these people leave, they’re generally being replaced by Republican operatives pledged to do whatever it takes to ensure the “right” election outcome next time.

In short, in states Republicans control they’re using the same tactics Southern Democrats used to nullify African-American political participation. Between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Blacks were essentially locked out of politics through electoral sabotage, inability to register, being subjected to bizarre tests white voters didn’t have to pass, economic pressure in terms of being threatened with losing their jobs, and when all else failed, night rides by the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante groups either threatening or actually committing violent assaults against Blacks who dared try to vote.

This was something that was supposed to have been part of American history, but beginning in 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court started picking the Voting Rights Act to pieces and ruling major parts of it unconstitutional. With the great reversal of America’s two major political parties in their positions on civil rights in general and Black rights in particular – the Republicans, once the ”party of Lincoln,” took up the mantle of racism and white supremacy, while the Democrats, once the party of slavery, segregation and the Klan, became the party of racial equaility – Republicans are embracing a frankly racist agenda that aims to reduce Blacks and other voters of color to second-class citizenship.

Things will get even worse if the U.S. Supreme Court rules for the North Carolina state legislature this year in a case called Moore v. Harper. For over a decade the Republican-dominated legislature in North Carolina has been trying to draw legislative and Congressional districts that will systematically minimize the ability of Black voters to elect Black candidates to those offices. They’ve been stymied by the North Carolina Supreme Court, which has regularly thrown out their maps as violating the North Carolina state constitution and its clauses barring voter discrimination based on race.

All that could change if the current radical-Right revolutionary majority (which is routinely called “conservative” but it is anything but that) adopts the so-called “independent state legislature theory” advanced by the Republican North Carolina legislature in Moore v. Harper. This is a radical interpretation of Article I, section 4 of the U.S. Constitution – “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof” – that holds it gives absolute power to state legislatures to do whatever they want with regard to elections.

Under the “independent state legislature theory,” state legislatures could not only create their districts any way they liked, no one – not federal or state courts, and not state governors – would have the power to say them nay. This would also give state legislative majorities the power to set aside election outcomes either before or after the elections actually occurred. In 2020 Donald Trump and his attorneys appealed to legislatures, governors and other officials in states with Republican legislatures which had voted for Joe Biden to reverse these results and declare Trump the winner. In 2024, if the “independent state legislatlre theory” becomes U.S. constitutional law, they would have the power to do precisely that.

Until the 2000 election, the first since 1888 in which the outcome of the Electoral College diverged from the popular vote, most Americans assumed that they had a Constitutional right to vote for President, Since then, they’ve assumed that at least they had the right to vote for their state’s representatives to the Electoral College that actually picks the President. Now Presidential elections, if they continue to be held at all – and nothing in the Constitution requires them; Article II, section 1 says merely that Presidential electors shall be appointed “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct” – would just be popularity polls and the state legislatures could appoint whichever electors they wanted.

The result would be a self-perpetuating one-party rule by the Republicans. Thanks to their current advantage in state legislatures, they could form their districts in such a way that they could never be voted out of office again. Republicans have been honest about what they wanted well before Donald Trump. In the early 2000’s Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s political strategist, said his goal was to win what he called “full-spectrum dominance” for the Republican party, after the doctrine of overwhelming military superiority with which the Bush II administration fought the second U.S.-Iraq war. But, as with so many of the negative aspects of American politics, Trump and his minions have turbocharged it.

Character Doesn’t Matter (If You’re a Republican)

One of the odder aspects of the current American political system and the different ways members of the two major parties vote is that, at least if you’re a Republican, issues of personal character have virtually ceased to matter. Despite their claims to be the party of “family values,” Republican voters have shown zero interest in holding their candidates to any standards of accountability in their personal behavior.

When Donald Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood tape came out in October 2016, a few old-style Republicans feared that Trump’s boasts of his ability to assault women sexually and get away with it because “when you’re a star, they’ll let you do anything” would sink his candidacy. There were even a few calls for him to withdraw from the race. Instead, if anything, it actually helped him. A lot of voters, especially men, thought it added to Trump’s credentials as a “real guy” to whom they could relate.

In 2012 Todd Akin, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Missouri, made an infamous statement that the reason he opposed allowing abortions in cases of rape or incest was that such pregnanties were “really rare. He added, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” Akin’s opponent, former Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill (who beat Akin but lost the seat in 2018 to an even creepier Republican, Josh Hawley), said recently on MS-NBC that if a Republican made a similar comment today, the party would be giving parades for him.

More recently, U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker (R-Georgia) has managed to survive bizarre allegations against him with barely a blip in his poll numbers. Not only did he pay for a then-girlfriend to have an abortion despite his current support for a nationwide ban on all abortions, he got her pregnant a second time, again offered her money for an abortion, and broke up with her when she insisted on having his child.

While campaigning against “absent fathers” in the Black community – men who’ve got women pregnant and then did nothing to help support their kids – Walker has had four children by four different women, paid only the legal minimum in terms of child support and has almost never visited them. But Georgia’s Republican voters couldn’t care less. To them, Walker is a “good Black man” who will vote the way Donald Trump and Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell tell him to. While continuing to use allegations – founded or not – as political weapons against Democrats, Republicans give their own candidates a free pass.

It’s amazing that the party that claims the mantle of “family values” is also the only major party which has elected Presidents who divorced and remarried – the twice-married Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the thrice-married Donald Trump in 2016. Democrats care a lot more than Republicans about the personal lives of their candidates, especially their sex lives and the way they treat women. If Elliot Spitzer, Eric Schneiderman, Anthony Weiner, Andrew Cuomo, Al Franken and Bob Filner had been Republicans, they’d almost certainly still be in political office today.

What Will Republicans Do with Congressional Majorities?

It’s not hard to guess. Republicans have already said they will hold the world economy hostage by threatening not to raise the debt ceiling unless President Biden caves and agrees to deep cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits. So far Biden has vowed to hold the line against such tactics, but he may not be able to. If it comes to a choice between agreeing to Republican demands to slash Social Security and Medicare and allowing the world’s economy to melt down on his watch, Biden will almost certainly bite the bullet and accept massive cuts in Social Security and Medicare as the lesser of two evils.

Indeed, it’s quite likely the Republicans will resort to struggles over the debt ceiling and periodic shutdowns of the U.S. government as leverage again and again to force Biden to make enormous concessions to them. They once again will likely try to repeal the Affordable Care Act (so-called “Obamacare”) and will almost certainly push through a nationwide ban on virtually all abortions. Their motive seems to be not only to force Biden to make concessions but to humiliate him and castrate him politically. They also want to demoralize Democratic voters by ensuring that the country is run by Republicans who serve Republican ideals whether that’s what voters want or not.

Previous Republican Congresses eventually backed away from repeated games of political chicken over the debt ceiling because their real constituency – the mega-rich whose huge donations, both to the party itself and to dark-money political action committees (PAC’s) that support it – stood to lose too much money themselves from the total meltdown of the world economy a U.S. default on its debts would create. But the current crop of Republicans may be just crazy enough to do it anyway – and there may be enough radical-Right donors to keep the party in business even if more rational corporate types back off.

Democrats didn’t help their cause any by deliberately intervening in Republican primaries to sink more moderate candidates and ensure the real crazies got the Republican nominations in state after state, district after district. I’m old enough to remember how spectacularly that styrategy backfired in 1966, when Californla Governor Pat Brown was preparing to run for a third term and knew it would be an uphill battle. So he sought to neutralize the Republican he was most worried about, moderate San Francisco Mayor George Christopher, and instead secretly helped the faded movie actor whom Christopher was running against in the primary. In so doing, he loosed Ronald Reagan on the political world.

So when Biden – who has lamented the increasing nastiness in American politics and looks backwards to the days when he could maintain cross-party friendships with Republicans and Right-wing Democrats like Strom Thurmond and James Eastland despite their political differences – looks for “moderate” Republicans in Congress with whom he can make deals, there won’t be any. The House and Senate Republican caucuses will be filled by all the crazies the Democrats helped elect, thinking they’d be easier to beat in the general election, and they will proudly and unashamedly take the American economy to the brink of disaster again and again to force Biden and the remaining Democrats to bend to their will.

And the poison of Republican control of Congress will spread beyond America’s borders. One of the biggest losers if the Republicans retake Congress will be Ukraine. Already Kevin McCarthy, House Republican leader who will almost certainly be the next House Speaker of the Republicans take power, has said there will be “no blank check” on funding Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia – which understandably freaked out Ukrainians, who realize their only defense against total annihilation by Russia is the high-tech weaponry the U.S. and other Western countries are sending them.. Though some Republicans still seem supportive of Ukraine, Donald Trump, the leader of their party in all but name, has made it clear where he stands. When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 Trump called Russian dictator Vladimir Putin a “genius” for invading Ukraine.

Biden has tried to portray the war in Ukraine as a foundational struggle to preserve democracy worldwide, But given how openly Republicans have embraced autocracies and dictatorships both in the U.S. and elsewhere – not only by supporting laws making it harder for U.S. citizens, especially poor and working-class people and people of color, to vote but also by inviting dictators like Victor Orbán of Hungary to the U.S. Constervative Political Action Conference (CPAC) – it’s clear that in the struggle between democracy and autocracy, they’re on the side of the autocrats.

Another thing Republicans will do once they take back Congress is launch an endless series of so-called “investigations” of Biden, his scapegrace son Hunter and just about everybody in his administration. Already they’ve talked about calling various administration figures, including Attorney General Merrick Garland and retiring director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease Dr. Anthony Fauci, to testify before House and Senate investigatory committees.

Part of this seems to be sheer revenge – the Republicans saying to the Democrats, “You investigated us, and now we’re going to investigate you.” It’s almost certain that a Republican Congress will impeach President Biden to get back at the Democratic House of Representatives for twice impeaching Donald Trump. One dreads the thought of Republicans in Congress calling “witnesses” like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell to testify at length about his alleged (and phony) “statistics” proving that Trump really won the 2020 election.

It’s also virtually certain that once Republicans retake Congress, any attempts to prosecute Donald Trump and his associates for their actions before, during and after the January 6, 2021 riot on the U.S. Capitol will end. It’s likely the Republican Congress will attach a rider to the Justice Department’s budget forbidding it from mounting any prosecutions of Trump or any other people who allegedly committed crimes on January 6, 2021 but were not themselves present at the riot. One of the political imperatives of the current Republican Party is to defend Donald Trump at all costs, and to ensure that he keeps his current immunity from any and all consequences of his political and personal actions.

A Republican House will almost certainly impeach Biden, and probably Merrick Garland and anyone else in the government who dares do anything against Donald Trump. So far there have been four Presidential impeachment trials in American history, and I’ve been alive during three of them: the 1999 trial of Bill Clinton for allegedly lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky and the 2020 and 2021 trials of Trump over his attempt to blackmail the Ukrainian government to give him dirt on Hunter Biden and his role in the January 6, 2021 riot.

Like Clinton and Trump, Biden will almost certainly avoid conviction because of the Constitutional requirement that two-thirds of Senators vote to convict a President and remove him from office. Even the shrunken Democratic Party that will survive the “red tsunami” will almost certainly have enough Senators to block Biden’s conviction and removal – but given the power of Congressional Republicans and the media machine they have at their backs to shape the perceptions of their base voters, Biden will be, as U.S. Senator John Thune (R-South Dakota) confidently predicted at the start of the midterm campaign, a “half-term President,” unable to accomplish anything and a political “dead man walking” as he limps along towards a Jimmy Carter-style re-election debacle.

Michael Flynn: Influential Right-Wing Leader Seeks an American Theocracy

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Alas, just after showing Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s exalting episode of his Making Black America series on October 18, KPGS showed a swary Frontline documentary called “Michael Flynn’s Holy War,” about the fascinating history of retired general Michael Flynn, Sr. Flynn was raised in Rhode Island by a hard-core Roman Catholic family who began as Democrats but switched ideological sides because of the Catholic church’s opposition to abortion and the Democratic Party’s eventual embrace of the pro-choice position. Flynn remembers hos mother running for local office in Rhode Island (unsuccessfully) and drafting him to be part of her campaign – as my mother drafted me in activism at a tender age, albeit on the other ideological side – and the woman who reported and narrated this documentary, Michelle R. Smith of the Associated Press, managed to get at least the semblance of an interview with Flynn himself as well as lengthier conversations with Flynn’s brother Joe, who’s fully on board with Michael’s politics. “When I first saw Michael Flynn speak to an audience, it was hard to reconcile who he once was with who he had become,” Smith said at the outset of the program. “A retired three-star general once hailed as an intelligence genius. Today, he’s touring the country as a leader in a far-right movement trying to put its brand of Christianity at the center of civic life and institutions.”

Joe Flynn is quoted in the program as saying, “This country was founded on Judeo-Christian values” though it’s all too clear, especially from their endorsement of extreme Right-wing Christinas’ “end-times” prediction that as soon as Christ returns the remaining Jews will be given the option – either convert immediately to Chritianity or end up doomed for all eternity to Hell – they regard Jews as at best junior partners and at worst the scum of the earth. Joe Flynn continued, “I think [their mother] Helen would be proud of the activities that we're involved in. I think Christians are very involved in the conservative movement. It's no different than it was 30, 40 years ago, especially with Reagan.”

Michael Flynn started out as a member of the Army’s elite 82nd Airborne unit of paratroopers giving aid and comfort to the Right-wing contras Reagan funded during the 1980’s in Nicaragua and other countries in Central America and the Caribbean. Then during George W. Bush’s so-called “global war on terrorism,” Flynn becams a commander in Iraq and did intelligence for the the so-called Joint Strategic Operations Command (JSOC), which targeted raids on civilian homes in search of suspected terrorists, The problem was that Flynn insisted on ordering and carrying out the raids so quickly he didn’t stop to vet the intelligence on which they were based – which meant, inevitably, that the raids netted and often killed a lot of innocent civilians.

As Flynn got involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, so-called “radical Islam” replaced Communism as the all-embracing enemy America faced abroad, while Flynn’s always strong belief in a radical-Right version of Christianity led him to believe that America is full of domestic enemies who need to be fought to the death, if need be, to redeem the U.S. for God and a peculiar interpretation of the Constitution that countenances events like the January 6, 2021 riots which were quite obviously an attempt to disrupt and prevent the peaceful transition of power after a Presidential election. In fact, one of the peculiarities of the modern American Right is the Orwellian doublethink that allows them to pose as defenders of the Constitution while participating in frankly unconstitutional attempts to reverse the outcome of an election because it didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to, and to resort to violence when their efforts politically and judicially met with failure. Michael Flynn doesn’t come right out and say that Democrats are the agents of Satan, but he does say things like, “The enemy of 1984 is 1776!” It’s also clear he and his followers think the Democratic Party, if left in power, will turn America into Venezuela or Nicaragua, a failed state witn an increasingly miserable and impoverished population – which makes it ironic that among the demands the Republican Party’s candidates for the House and Senate are currently making include big cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Michael Flynn’s America would be a Christian theocracy in which secular lawmakers would be ruled by his sort of Right-wing faith, including an end to women’s bodily autonomy (ironically, Iranian women are putting their lives on the line for just this right, while the American Right, which claims to be against Iranian-style “radical Islam,” wants to impose the same sort of faith-based regime on U.S. women!) and, of course, an end to Queer rights as well (even though nothing Flynn himself said in the Frontline documentary mentioned Queer people one way or the other, but being anti-Queer comes with the territory)and mayve even an Iranian-style “morality police” force to punish men who have sex with men, women who have sex with women, and women who seek, let alone get, abortions. While the Black church has its own set of problems – it, too, is anti-Queer and years ago I attended a service at a Black church in which a well-known minister preached against the theory of evolution and said it had destroyed all morality – nonetheless the Black church has been a leading voice of liberation, especially for Black people themselves, while Michael Flynn’s white church is an instrument of authoritarianism and domination.

Thirteen Senate, Governor and Congress Candidates Who Need Your Help!

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Raphael Warnock (U.S. Senate, Georgia), https://warnockforgeorgia.com

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Mandela Barnes (U.S. Senato, Wisconsin), https://mandelabarnes.com

Maggie Hassan (U.S. Senate, New Hampshire), https://maggiehassan.com

Cheri Beasley (U.S. Senate, North Carolina), https://cheribeaslwy.con

Catherine Cortez-Masto (U.S. Senate, Nevada), https://catherinecortezmasto.com

Tim Ryan (U.S. Senate, Ohio), https://timforoh.com

Val Demings (U.S. Senate, Florida), https://valdemings.com

John Fetterman (U.S. Senate, Pennsylvania), https://johnfetterman.com

Josh Shapiro (Governor, Pennsylvania), https://joshshapiro.org

Mark Kelly (U.S. Senate, Arizona), https://markkelly.com

Katie Hobbs (Governor, Arizona), https://katiehobbs.org

Michelle Vallejo (U.S. House, District 15, Texas), https://michellefortx15.com

Donald Trump IS Above the Law!

Frontline’s "Lies, Politics and Democracy" Episode Highlights Trump’s and His Followers’ Ongoing Threat to the American Republic

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Donald John Trump really IS above the law!

He bestrides the world like a colossus, doing whatever he pleases and wrecking everything he touches in his wake. Trump is what Superman would have been if his creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, had gone ahead with their original plan to make him a super-villain instead of a superhero. Trump stands firmly for lies, injustice and the un-American way. Those of us who aren’t part of his cult look at him the way a lot of decent Germans in the 1930’s probably looked at Hitler: “Who IS this guy? I thought we were better than this!”

By one of the macabre coincidences that have become all too common in the Age of Trump, PBS aired the latest episode in their long-running documentary series Frontline on September 5, the same day a Trump-appointed federal judge in Florida named Aileen Mercedes Cannon (how appropriate that her middle name is the same as Hitler’s favorite brand of car!) gave Trump everything he had asked for in the case of the documents the FBI seized from his personal residence/golf club at Mar-a-Lago, Florida.

Judge Cannon not only granted Trump’s request for a so-called “special master” to review all the seized documents, she ruled that he should check the documents not only for possible violations of attorney-client privilege but also for so-called “executive privilege.” She wasn’t fazed by the fact that Donald Trump is no longer President of the United States, and the current President, Joe Biden, specifically waived executive privilege in connection with these documents.

Judge Cannon also ruled that Donald Trump has special privileges due to his status as an ex-President, especially an ex-President who because he only served a single term is not barred by the 22nd Amendment from running for the office again. "As a function of Plaintiff's former position as President of the United States, the stigma associated with the subject seizure is in a league of its own," Judge Cannon wrote. "A future indictment, based to any degree on property that ought to be returned, would result in reputational harm of a decidedly different order of magnitude."

While Judge Cannon didn’t give Trump everything he had asked for – including a guarantee that any documents not needed by the government for its investigations be returned to him – the ruling was such a major giveaway for Trump that even the judges of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals drew back from some of it. Even though two of the judges on the three-judge panel that heard the appeal were Trump appointees, they ruled unanimously that Trump had no legal right to own the estimated 100 classified documents seized by the FBI.

"It is self-evident that the public has a strong interest in ensuring that the storage of the classified records did not result in 'exceptionally grave damage to the national security,'" the three-judge panel stated in a 20-page opinion. "Ascertaining that necessarily involves reviewing the documents, determining who had access to them and when, and deciding which (if any) sources or methods are compromised."

“Sources and methods” are a Holy Grail to the intelligence community. No country in the world that has an intelligence service wants other countries’ officials to know who we are spying on, how, when and with what sources of data – especially human beings who may literally be risking their lives to provide us with information. As the Eleventh Circuit’s three-judge panel wrote in their opinion, “[W]e cannot discern why the Plaintiff [Trump] would have an individual interest in or need for any of the one hundred documents with classification markings,"

Things didn’t get any better for Trump when the special master was appointed. Judge Cannon ordered both sides – the government and Trump – to nominate two candidates each for the position. Either side could object to the other side’s nominees, and Trump’s attorneys promptly vetoed both names the government put forward. Of Trump’s nominees, the government vetoed one – a man whose wife sits on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which would hear any of the special master’s rulings – but agreed to the other one, Judge Raymond Dearie. So Dearie got the jub – and proceeded to make mincemeat of the Trump side’s claims.

Trump himself had been giving interviews to favorable news outlets like Fox and Newsmax (a hard-Right Web site for people who think Fox is too liberal for them) in which he made sweeping claims that the FBI had planted classified documents and other papers, and that he had personally declassified all the records during his term as President. Judge Dearie told the Trump side, essentially, to put up or shut up. Judge Dearie ashed Trump’s lawyers for a list of the documents they’re alleging the FBI planted, and a list of the ones he supposedly declassified. So far Trump’s attorneys have not come up with any of the lists Judge Dearie asked for.

Obviously Trump’s strategy is to delay and stall the proceedings as longas possible. People who have followed Trump’s career from his emergence as a New York real-estate developer to successful Presidential candidate have noted that delay is his principal legal tactic. Trump is waiting and hoping that Republicans will win back control of both houses of Congress in this November’s midterm elections, and a Republican President – either Trump himself oir one of his clones, like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or Texas Governor Greg Abbott – will win the Presidency in 2924 and appoint an Attorney General who will cancel all the ongoing investigations of Trump and allow him once again to go scot-free from any consequences.

A Sore Loser and an Even Sorer Winner

The September 5 PBS Frontline episode, “Lies, Politics and Democracy,” aired on the same day Judge Cannon gave her Trump-fawning opinion, It began with a montage of film clips of defeated U.S. Presidential candidates conceding the elections and offering congratulations to the winners. From Wendell Willkie in 1940 to Hillary Clinton in 2016, the pattern held. Even candidates who lost close elections based on disputed results from one state, and could therefore have claimed with some legitimacy that the election had been stolen from them – like Richard Nixon in 1960 or Al Gore in 2000 – publicly acknowledged that they had lost.

Not Donald Trump. As New York Times reporter Peter Baker, who covered Trump’s Presidency and has since written a book about it, The Divider, told Frontline, “He has done this every step of the way through his career, long before politics. When The Apprentice lost an Emmy to The Amazing Race, he claimed that the Emmy contest was rigged. … Every step along the way, anything he has ever lost is because somebody else has cheated and stolen it from him.”

The importance of The Apprentice, the “reality” TV show that cast Trump as the smartest and most successful capitalist of all time – a perception wildly at variance with his actual record as a businessperson – cannot be overstated. It sold millions of Americans – including people who never actually watched it – on the idea that Trump was such a brilliant manager people would literally flock to him and allow him to humiliate them publicly in hopes of learning his secrets to success.

So when The Apprentice repeatedly lost the Emmy for Best Reality TV Series to The Amazing Race – a show that celebrated athleticism over business savvy – it was more than Trump’s fragile ego could handle. He went on his then-favorite social media platform, Twitter, to grouse about the outcome and say the process was rigged: “Amazing Race winning an Emmy again is a total joke. The Emmys have no credibility. The Emmys are all politics, that’s why The Apprentice never won.” In another venue, Trump said, “The public is smart. They know it’s a con game.”

When Barack Obama, a man Trump both publicly and privately hated, successfully won re-election against Mitt Romney in 2012, Romney himself conceded – but Trump didn’t. In statements chillingly similar to the way he would react to his own electoral defeat in 2020, Trump tweeted, “This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy. More reports of voting machines switching Romney votes to Obama. Let’s fight like hell and stop this great and disgusting injustice! We can't let this happen. We should march on Washington.”

During one of the debates between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump was asked point-blank if he would accept the results of the election – and he said, “If I win.” As Daniel Ziblatt, author of a book called Hoe Democracies Die, told Frontline, Trump’s comments about the 2012 and 2016 elections “set off alarm bells. To be a small-’D’ democrat means to know how to lose elections, and a democracy can’t survive if politicians and political parties don’t know how to lose. Sometimes people have even said democracy is for losers; it’s a system that allows losers to come back and fight another day. And so if the losers deny that they’ve lost, the system can’t endure.”

What’s more, Trump’s refusal to accept defeat has become a role model for other Republican candidates. Many of the major Republican nominees for governor, U.S. senator and other major offices have already announced that if they don’t win, they will declare that the election was stolen. Doug Mastriano and Judy Hice, Republican gubernatorial candidates in Pennsylvania and Arizona, respectively, have all but promised that they will refuse to certify the 2024 election results if a Democrat wins their state’s vote for President.

Not Just Trump: Republicans Reject Democracy

The Frontline show “Lies, Politics and Democracy” featured many interviews with traditional Right-wingers who feared Trump’s authoritarian tendencies when he first ran for President in 2016 and even earlier. Among them were Bill Kristol, founder of the Right-wing magazine The Weekly Standard, who said, “He had a real feel for people’s anxieties and unhappiness about various things. He was willing to stoke those anxieties and hatreds, in some cases, resentments, in ways that other politicians weren’t willing to. … I was publicly saying that Trump was unacceptable, people shouldn’t support him. They should make clear they couldn’t support him in the general election even. They should band together against him.”

Another Right-winger, columnist Mona Charen, told Frontline, “There were many, many signals throughout 2016 that this was not just a showman, but no, somebody who had definite authoritarian sympathies. And there was violence at his rallies that he openly encouraged. I mean, it wasn't a joke.”

The Frontline documentary featured clips from Trump himself at his 2016 campaign rallies, mocking people with disabilities and urging his supporters to beat up hecklers in the audience. “Knock the crap out of him, would you?” Trump told the crowd at one such rally. “Just knock the hell.” adding that if anyone in his crowd were arrested for assaulting a heckler, “I promise you I will pay for the legal fees. I promise.” At another rally on February 22, 2016, he said, “I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks. I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell you. Ah, it’s true.”

“The nastier he got, the more excited the crowd got,” Danien Ziblatt told Frontline. “And rather than trying to clamp that down and sort of pull back, he egged on the crowd further. And that dynamic of the angry crowd and the demagogic leader fomenting anger and using violent rhetoric was a sign that this is somebody who had no democratic core, liberal democratic core. And it was not clear what the limits of this style of politics were. So I think that was very frightening.”

Once again, it’s not just Donald Trump but most of the Republican Party which has rejected the basic tenet of democracy – the idea that the people, or a majority of them, should be able to decide who will lead them and what the people they elect should do. In a July 2022 speech before the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a Right-wing policy group that writes model bills and gets state legislators to pass them – former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) openly called for a second constitutional convention to rewrite the U.S. Constitution to enshrine the policy priorities of the American Right.

Citing Article V of the existing Constitution, which provides that the votes in a new Constitutional convention shall be one state, one vote – not one delegate, one vote – Samtorum boasted that because the convention would be dominated by the voters of smaller, more Right-wing states, "we have the opportunity … to have a supermajority, even though …we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who we agree with." (The speech was reported by Business Insider at https://www.businessinsider.com/constitutional-convention-conservatives-republicans-constitution-supreme-court-2022-7.)

One of the keys to the Republican Party’s outsized dominance of America’s current political system is their shrewd use of the anti-democratic features of the original Constitution. The framers guaranteed each state, no matter its size, two U.S. Senators – which may have seemed like a livable compromise in 1787, when the largest state, Virginia, had nine times the population of the smallest, Rhode Island. Today the largest state, California, has 80 times the population of the smallest, Wyoming.

Under the original Constitution, actual voters would elect no higher office than their member of the House of Representatives. The Senate was chosen by state legislatures, and the President by an Electoral College made up of the total number of House and Senate members – which once again extended the outsized power of small states in the overall design of the U.S. government. Later developments, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s assertion of the right to nullify legislation as unconstitutional ini 1803, and the evolution of the Senate filibuster from 1837 to 1975, added arrows to the modern-day Republican Party’s anti-democratic quiver.

Today we have a six-member radical-Right majority on the Supreme Court which – contrary to the usual designation of them as “conservative” – is on an ideological tear, upending a 50-year-old precedent that guaranteed women autonomy over their own buddies and a 100-year-old law in New York that banned the carrying of concealed weapons. And in its upcoming term, the Supreme Court will take up a case brought by North Carolina Republicans who assert that state legislatures have “plenary power” (a phrase we heard a lot in Trump’s unsuccessful attempt to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election) to do whatever they like in setting up their districts, and neither the courts nor anyone else can check them.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have essentially given up on the idea of winning the Presidency through the popular vote. Republicans have won three Presidential elections since 1992, but only once did their candidate, George W. Bush in his re-election in 2004, win a plurality of the actual vote. In the other two cases – Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 – the Democrats won the popular vote but the Republicans won the Electoral College, and with it the presidency.

If the 2024 election turns out the way 2020 did – a Democrat wins the Electoral College by carrying states with Republican legislators and/or governors – and the Supreme Court endorses the “plenary power” of state legislatures, they could do what the Trump team unsuccessfully tried to get them to do in 2020: refuse to accept electors pledged to Biden or anyone else who might be the Democratic nominee, and seat electors pledged to Trump or whoever is running as the Republican candidate.

A Worldwide Tidal Wave of Authoritarianism

And it’s not just the United States of America. In country after country throughout the nominally democratic world, autocrats are coming to power with many of the same principles, strategies and tactics as Trump. Strongmen like Vladimir Putin in Russia, Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Andrzej Sebastian Duda in Poland, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines have won power based on Trumpian hyper-nationalistic appeals to “make [their countries] great again.” The recipe includes attacks on immigrants, racial and religious minorities, and anyone perceived as a threat to “traditional family values.”

And once these people take power, they have no intention of ever relinquishing it again. They systematically go after all other institutions in society that might put a brake on their power, including the courts, the media and ordinary citizens. They also use their power, as Republicans are doing throughout the U.S. states they control, to rewrite the elections laws to make it more difficult for people who would vote against them to be able to vote at all. And their bases of support are consistently among working-class people and others with less education – precisely the sorts of voters who in many of these countries (including the U.S) used to be bulwarks of the Left until they were swayed to the Right by appeals to traditional cultural values.

The latest example of a former democracy which has turned to the dark side and become a neo-fascist country is Italy, where the original Fascist movement started exactly 100 years ago next month. In October 1922 Benito Mussolini staged his famous “March on Rome,” in which he organized 30,000 armed militiamen to advance on the nation’s capital and demand – and get – absolute power. Mussolini stayed in office for 23 years until his nation ended up on the wrong side of World War II and he was captured and hanged by anti-fascist Italian partisans in 1945.

But Mussolini’s last chief of staff, Giorgio Almirante, was not idle. In 1946 he formed a new political party, the Italian Social Movement (MSI), with the stated goal of keeping Mussolini’s political legacy alive. Barred by the postwar Italian election law from calling his party fascist or using the ancient Roman symbol of authority, the Fasces (a bundle of twigs with axes embedded in them; the Romans had used this as a symbol of power and Mussolini not only copied it but derived the term “Fascism” from its name), Almirante devised a flame-like symbol based on the colors of the Italian flag – red, white and green – that the party, now called Fratelli d’Italia (“Brothers of Italy”) since it was reorganized in 2012, has used ever since.

On Sunday, September 25, Fratelli d’Italia and its current leader, Giorgia Meloni, won 26 percent of the vote in Italy’s national elections. Together with two other Right-wing parties in their coalition, Meloni’s neo-fascist forces will control 42 percent of Italy’s next legislature and therefore, under Italy’s constitution, will run its government. Meloni expressed her views on cultural issues during her campaign in a speech to another far-Right party, Vox. In words that might have come from a Trump Republican in the U.S., she said, “Yes to the natural family, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology ... no to Islamist violence, yes to secure borders, no to mass migration ... no to big international finance ... no to the bureaucrats of Brussels!"

Donald Trump was probably overjoyed at the outcome of the Italian election. Not only did a candidate following his recipe for success win control of a major country, it probably held personal resonance for him. One of the members of Meloni's coalition was the party led by former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Though Berlusconi, an Italian media tycoon with no previous political experience, was driven out of office in disgrace after he was convicted of tax fraud and sex with underage girls, he is now returning to political influence as a junior member of Meloni’s governing coalition.

That sends a powerful message to Donald Trump. As someone who has managed through gutter tactics, street smarts and total ruthlessness to survive and prosper from blows that would have destroyed lesser mortals, Trump no doubt envies Berlusconi’s comeback and sees it as a role model for himself. It sends Trump the message that even if, God forbid, he’s not only indicted but actually convicted of any of the crimes he’s currently being investigated for, he could still have a shot at a political comeback.

And make no mistake about it: Trump’s re-election as President, especially if accompanied by a Republican Congress, will mean the end of America’s experiment in republican self-governance. It will lead to massive witchhunts against women, people of color and especially Queers. It will also hasten the extinction of the human race because it will mean an end to any meaningful attempt to stop or slow down the devastating, apocalyptic effects of human-caused climate change. Under a second Trump administration, the Department of Justice will become an instrument to reward Trump’s friends and especially to punish his enemies.

Donald Trump already bestrides the world like the proverbial Colossus. Even though he’s no longer President, he still dominates the news cycle day after day, while Joe Biden struggles to get a word in edgewise. It seems to take a super-major news story, like the death of Queen Elizabeth II after 70 years of rule (the longest-serving monarch in British history) or the landfall of Hurricane Ian on the Florida coast, to knock him off the main news slot. Like it or not, we all live in Donald Trump’s America, and he just lets us live in it – or not.

FBI Search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Home May Help Him Politically

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

It’s yet another indication into the topsy-turvy fun house American politics have become in the age of Donald Trump – and let’s face it, even if he no longer (at least for the moment) President we are still living, politically, in the Age of Trump – is that the FBI’s legal execution of a search warrant on Trump’s home and country club, Mar-a-Lago, in south Florida may actually boost his and the Republican Party’s chances of regaining power in the 2022 and 2024 elections.

On August 8, 2022 – 48 years to the day after former President Richard Nixon resigned rather than face near-certain impeachment and removal from office due to his role in the Watergate cover-up – agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) searched the home of another former President, Donald Trump. Their search warrant authorized them to look for records, including classified documents, created during Trump’s four-year stint as President of the United States and taken by him and his staff to Mar-a-Lago after the new President, Joe Biden, moved in.

Though the news of the Mar-a-Lago search was first broken by blogger Peter Schorsch on his site, Florida Politics, it was soono confirmed by Donald Trump himself. In a statement on his personal social-media outlet, Truth Social, Trump expertly framed the attack on him as a “raid” (a term I used myself in an earlier draft of his article) and accused the Biden administration and the Department of Justice of politicizing the administration of justice just to go after Trump personally.

“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump said in his statement. “Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before. After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate. It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024.”

Projection

Ironically, Trump’s self-pitying whine about being the victim of an overtly politicized Department of Justice out to destroy a political enemy is also what Trump complained during his Presidency that he was unable to do. In a November 2, 2017 interview with New York Right-wing talk-radio host Larry O’Connor (https://www.wmal.com/2017/11/03/listen-president-donald-trump-to-larry-oconnor-im-very-unhappy-the-justice-department-isnt-going-after-hillary-clinton/), Trump said, “[T]he saddest thing is, because I’m the President of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kinds of things I would love to be doing. And I am very frustrated by it. … [A]s a President, you are not supposed to be involved in that process. But hopefully they are doing something, and at some point maybe we’re going to all have it out.”

One month before the 2020 election, on October 7, Politico reported that Trump had demanded pre-election indictments of Biden, former President Barack Obama, and Trump’s 2016 general election opponent, Hillary Clinton (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/07/trump-demands-barr-arrest-foes-427389). In his first 24 hours since being released from Walter Reed Hospital where he’d been treated for COVID-19, Trump issued several dozen increasingly unhinged tweets. One of them read, “Where are all of the arrests? Can you imagine if the roles were reversed? Long term sentences would have started two years ago. Shameful!”

As the day wore on, Trump’s tweets became even more insane. In one he wrote in all capital letters, Trump said, “DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN – GOT CAUGHT!!!” Later, he wrote, again in all caps, “NOW THAT THE RADICAL LEFT DEMOCRATS GOT COUGHT [sic] COLD IN THE (NON) FRIENDLY TRANSFER OF GOVERNMENT, IN FACT, THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN AND WENT FOR A COUP, WE ARE ENTITLED TO ASK THE VOTERS FOR FOUR MORE YEARS. PLEASE REMEMBER THIS WHEN YOU VOTE!”

Though Trump’s distaste for Attorney General Bill Barr reached a boiling point after the election, when Barr gave a press conference announcing that he had investigated Trump’s claims of “massive voter fraud” in the election and found them all bogus, Trump had already started to lose trust in Barr when he refused to issue the politically charged indictments against Biden, Obama and Hillary Clinton before the election. The spectacular reaction Trump had to Barr’s press conference – according to former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before the House Select Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, he literally threw his lunch plate against the White House wall – just added to Trump’s determination to get rid of Barr and install a more complaisant acting Attorney General.

Donald Trump is the sort of crook who believes the rest of the world is just as corrupt as he is – if not more so. That’s the explanation for his extraordinary act of projection: calling the Biden Justice Department unfair to him for doing exactly what he wanted to use his own Justice Department to go after Hillary Clinton over her use of a private e-mail server to conduct government business. Throughout his life, Trump has been able to avoid the consequences that would befall other humans – even other rich, privileged humans – who openly flouted law, custom and reason the way he does routinely. Over and over again, the world has told Donald Trump he doesn’t have to play by the rules everyone else does.

Unsealing the Affidavit: Trump Wins Again!

And Trump got fresh confirmation of that message on Thursday,August 18, 10 days after the FBI search of his home, when Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart – the same judge who signed the search warrant in the first place – signaled his intent to grant Trump’s legal team’s motion to unseal the affidavits the government submitted to him to justify the search (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/judge-orders-portions-mar-lago-search-affidavit-unsealed-rcna43688). Previously the Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland had agreed not to oppose the release of the actual warrant and the list of items FBI agents removed from Mar-a-Lago. But both Trump’s lawyers and attorneys for the media – whom Trump has called “enemies of the people” – asked for the actual affidavits.

The Department of Justice opposed the request. Attorney Jay Bratt, representing the department, told Judge Reinhart that the “very detailed and lengthy" document needed to be kept secret because it contains “substantial grand jury” information in a "unique" case with "national security overtones." He also said the government is "very concerned about the safety of the witnesses” in the case whose identities could become compromised if the affidavit is unsealed. Bratt noted that Trump supporters have denounced the FBI and called for defunding it, and last week a Trump supporter and January 6, 2021 participant armed with an assault rifle and a nail gun attacked a Cincinnati FBI building. Bratt called the case “a volatile situation with respect to this particular search, across the political spectrum, but certainly on one side in particular."

But Judge Reinhart said in open court, "I find that on the present record the Government has not met its burden of showing that the entire affidavit should remain sealed. … On my initial careful review ... there are portions of it that can be unsealed.” The judge said he would "give the government a full and fair opportunity” to make cuts – so-called “redactions” – to the document, and ordered them to turn in the cut version next week, along with a legal memo justifying the proposed redactions. He said he would then review the document and either order its release if he agrees with the redactions or hold a closed-door hearing with the government if he disagrees. The judge added that if they can't agree, "obviously I'd win."

Once again, Donald Trump has been told he doesn’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else. His all too typical self-pitying whine in his initial confirmation of the search, in which he complained that the FBI “even broke into my safe!” as if that were something unusual instead of the normal treatment law-enforcement officials mete out to suspected criminals, is just one more indication of the sense of entitlement Trump has carried with him throughout his life – along with an equal sense of victimization that the world has been totally unfair to him.

When MS-NBC announced Judge Reinhart’s decision on air, the shock among their various panelists – including a defense attorney who’s represented people accused of leaking classified information and a former government prosecutor – that the judge was even considering allowing the release of the affidavits was palpable. The defense attorney said he would love to have that information about the government’s case against one of his clients – and that’s why he’s never received it in any of his cases. But once again, there are the rules everyone else has to abide by – and the special rules for Donald Trump that absolve him of any obligation to law, society or common decency.

Republicans Rally Behind Trump

When MS-NBC’s hosts announced the initial news of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago August 8, they expressed the forlorn hope that this, at last, might be the event that would break Trump’s seemingly impregnable hold on the Republican Party and its leaders. It didn’t take long for that hope to be disappointed once again. Instead, Republican leaders in Congress and elsewhere raced each other at near-warp speed to plant their tongues firmly up Trump’s bunghole. “I’ve seen enough,” House of Representatives minority leader Kevin McCarthy tweeted just hours after Trump confirmed the search. McCarthy said that after the search of Trump’s home, “the Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization.” Threatening to investigate the Justice Department if Republicans retake the House in the 2022 midterm elections, McCarthy warned Attorney General Garland to “preserve your documents and clear your calendar.”

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Indiana) said, “Hunter Biden skates free while DOJ executes a political plot to destroy lives of political opponents.” Even more explicitly than McCarthy did, Banks threatened a retributory investigation if the Republicans regain a House majority in the midterms. “This is un-American and [a] Jim_Jordan led Judiciary Committee hearings in January can’t come soon enough!,” Banks said. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) tweeted that he wanted to scrutinize the “viability” of federal law enforcement going forward.

Congressmember Bob Good (R-VA) wrote on Twitter: “The continued weaponization of the federal government against its citizens and political opponents continues under the Biden/Garland march toward a police state.”

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado) said, “If you’re a Republican with any kind of voice, and you’re not speaking up for President Trump tonight, don’t expect any of us to speak up for you when your time comes.”

Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Michigan) said, “Last night’s execution of an FBI search warrant at Mar-a-Lago raises grave questions of propriety and politicization.” Meijer’s turnaround is particularly interesting because he was one of 10 Republican Coingressmembers who voted to impeach Trump over the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, and he’s already lost his re-election bid when GOP voters in his district nominated a Trump-backed challenger in a primary.

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) blamed President Biden personally. His tweet read, “Biden is playing with fire by using a document dispute to get the @TheJusticeDept to persecute a likely future election opponent Because one day what goes around is going to come around And then we become Nicaragua under Ortega.”

Matt Rinaldi, chair of the Texas Republican Party, said on Twitter, “Abolish the FBI.” A tweet from the Texas GOP compared the U.S. to a banana republic: “Biden has crossed the Rubicon. If there was any doubt remaining, we are now living in a post-Constitutional America where the Justice Department has been weaponized against political threats to the regime, as it would in a banana republic. It won’t stop with Trump. You are next.”

Biden the Biggest Political Loser

Already President Joe Biden has become the biggest political loser from the FBI’s search of Trump’s home. August was supposed to be the month where Biden could boast that he and his often fractious Democratic Party had actually delivered for the American people big-time. Biden and U.S. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer had finally cut a deal with DINO (Democrats-in-name-only) Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginla and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona to pass the newly rebranded “Inflation Reduction Act,” a massive investment in combating climate change, improving Americans’ access to health care and ensuring that corporations and individuals making over $1 billion a year pay their faie share in taxes.

The Inflation Reduction Act was the capstone of a month of good Congressional news for Biden and the Democrats. They also passed the CHIPS Act to stimulate American production and manufacture of semiconductor chips, and a bill to give veterans access to health care for illnesses suffered from exposure to toxic “burn pits” and other chemicals in and around military bases. The “burn pits” bill passed despite a last-minute Republican attempt to block it out of spite that Democrats had reached a deal to pass the Inflation Reduction Act.

And earlier in the summer Congress had come together to pass a reasonable gun-safety bill. Yes, it was decades too late and too watered-down to do much of anything to stop the gun violence and mass-shooting deaths that have become all too routine in the U.S. But any crack in the armor the National Rifle Association and fellow members of the “Gun Lobby” had put up against any sensible legislation to make it even infinitesimally harder for Americans to kill each other with guns is good.

With the Democrats holding razor-thin majorities in both houses of Congress and the usual rule that the party holding the White House almost always loses in the midterms. And with Biden’s poll numbers sinking below Trump’s at this point in his term – according to current polls, only 40 percent approve of Biden’s performance and 55 percent disapprove – Democrats were hoping for a big boost from these four big legislative achievements to persuade American voters to keep them in control of both houses of Congress and re-elect Biden in 2024.

Instead, they watched helplessly as Donald Trump sucked all the political oxygen out from under them. The cable news channels during the last week and a half – even on MS-NBC,the supposedly “liberal” cable channel – have been all about Trump, all the time. On August 15, virtually all MS-NBC’s coverage was about Trump and the Mar-a-Lago search; the only mention of the Inflation Reduction Act came in a paid commercial put on by the Democratic National Committee.

An August 11 post on the Right-wing Townhall Daily Web site (https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2022/08/11/poll-americans-are-more-motivated-to-vote-in-midterms-after-fbi-raid-on-trump-n2611610) cites two polls, one from Politico and Morning Consult and the other from Trafalgar in association with the Convention of States Action, to suggest that the search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate is gonig to motivate voters in the midterms. While at least one of these polls should be read with a grain of salt – the Convention of States Action is a radical-Right group seeking to force the U.S. to hold a new Constitutional convention and write their agenda into our founding document permanently – the message for Democrats is that the Mar-a-Lago search has reinforced the perception of many Republicans and Right-leaning independents that Trump is the victim of ongoing persecution by a sinister “deep state.”

The Midpoint

The news of the Mar-a-Lago search came at the midpoint of a summer largely devoted to speculation about whether Biden’s Attorney General, Merrick Garland, would dare to prosecute Trump. Garland’s clear reticence at taking on the former President over his allegedly illegal activities and conduct since he was voted out of office on November 3, 2020, including his increasingly desperate efforts to reverse the outcome and cling to power despite having lost both the popular and the electoral vote.

During June and July 2022, the nine-member House Select Committee on January 6, 2021 held eight nationally televised public hearings on the riot that took place at the U.S. Capitol on that date and led to a successful delay in the certification of Biden’s victory over Trump. Watching the House Select Committee hearings has been a weird nostalgia trip forme because I can remember the similar hearings nearly 50 years ago before what was officially called the “Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities” but became universally known as the Senate Watergate Committee.

At the time the Senate Watergate Committee hearings started in May 1973, I was 19 years old and was in the process of moving out of my mother’s place into my father’s, mainly because she was dating a man I couldn’t stand, and I remember watching the hearings in my dad’s guest house while sampling some of the Spanish wines he had there. This time I’m 68 years old and once again I’m not working, this time not because I hadn’t had a job yet but because a health crisis brought on by heart disease forced me to retire at 68, at least two years before I wanted to.

It’s been 44 years since I’ve consumed alcohol, and both the country and I are considerably more jaded now. I’ve lived through both Republican and Democratic Presidencies and watched as the country’s governance slowly sank from the level of Richard Nixon – who for all his flaws was genuinely interested in making the country a better place, including signing major legislation to protect the environment and proposing a guaranteed annual income and national health insurance – to Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump.

In 1973 the United States was a considerably more innocent place – “innocent” in the sense of “naïve.” Back then it was still shocking to think that a President could lie with impunity (even though it had been during the rule of Nixon’s immediate predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, that the phrase “credibility gap” took hold as a euphemism for “the President ls lying”) and could green-light a campaign to rig the 1972 election to ensure his continued rule. Today just about any amount of duplicity coming from the Oval Office is considered just business as usual, par for the course.

The Republican Party in particular has become an authoritarian cult. They’re aware that their policies don’t have the support of a majority of Americans – in the last eight Presidential elections, Republicans have won the popular vote exactly once (in 2004) – but they’re also aware that they don’t have to. Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) said the quiet part out loud at the recent Coinservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) during a discussion about whether the Republican Party should invoke Article V of the Constitution and hold a new Constitutional Convention – which only takes the voters of 34 state legislatures, 19 of which have already passed resolutions calling for just such a convention. According to a leaked recording of Santorum’s speech published by Business Inisider (https://www.businessinsider.com/constitutional-convention-conservatives-republicans-constitution-supreme-court-2022-7), the Right would have a huge political advantage at such a convention because the votes would be by states, not by population. As America has become more urbanized, the compromises in the original Constitution and the rules of governance that have evolved have become more and more anti-democratic.

Santorum said at CPAC that because the state-by-state rule gives small states more power than large ones, "we have the opportunity … to have a supermajority, even though … we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who we agree with." The ultra-Right faction that dominates today’s Republican Party regards democracy as a troublesome impediment to fulfilling their political agenda – as they proved when CPAC invited Viktor Orban, dictatorial prime minister of Hungary, to speak at their convention and offer them a road map for destroying democracy.

The current authoritarian streak of the Republican Party long predates Donald Trump. Indeed, Karl Rove, principal strategic advisor to the last Republican President before Trump, George W. Bush, said his goal was to achieve “full-spectrum dominance” so the Republican Party would be the only one that mattered. But one of the things Trump did that endeared him to the Republican base was to express openly the contempt for democracy they had nursed privately for decades. During the 2016 Presidential campaign Trump openly urged supporters to beat up people in the audience who dared to heckle him, and pledged to fund their legal defense if they were arrested for doing so.

Once he became President, he started his administration with a flurry of executive orders, all encased in snazzy brown folders and signed with a flourish of his Sharpie, in what Trump advisor Steve Bannon (pardoned by Trump after he ran a scam that fleeced money from Trump supporters, ostensibly to build the border wall with Mexico but really to line Bannon’s pockets) called the “new sheriff in town” strategy. When then-FBI director James Comey – whose handling of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal had done much to get Trump elected – refused Trump’s demand for a pledge of “loyalty” to Trump personally, reminiscent of the “Führer oath” Adolf Hitler similarly demanded of his people, Trump fired him. The next day, in the Oval Office, he boasted to Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, that by canning Comey he had put an end to the Justice Department’s investigation of whether Trump had received illegal help from Russia to get elected.

Throughout the Trump administration, he was forever demanding similar pledges of “loyalty” – not to the Constitution or the rule of law, but to Trump personally. He also revived the practice Hitler and the Nazis called Gleichschaltung, meaning appointing people to run key agencies who didn’t believe in what those agencies were supposed to do. (For more information, please visit my July 2020 post on Trhum’s Cleichschaltung, see https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2020/07/trumps-gleichschaltung-kills-people.html.)

In a special report aired on Friday, July 29 – 11 days before the searh at Mar-a-Lago – MS-NBC legal correspondent Ari Melber laid out in detail Trump’s eight-part plan to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election and remain in power despite having lost the popular and the electoral votes. Some were legal, like filing lawsuits in court – even though Trump lost all but one of the lawsuits, and many of the judges threw them out of court because there were lots of conjectures in the pleadings but no real facts or evidence, Some were dubiously legal, like naming alternative slates of “Trump electors” in states Biden won – which would have been O.K. if they were presented as electors who would have voted if the court challenges reversed the outcome.

Other parts of the Trump schemes were frankly illegal. He wanted to get either the Department of Defense or the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines, ostensibly to study the software that ran them for evidence of electronic “fraud” that had allegedly taken votes away from Trump and given them to Biden. His supporters organized the fake “electors” to cast votes for President and Vice-President in the state capitols, just like the real Biden electors were doing. He sent his roving attorney Rudolph Giuliani, and others to speak before state legislators to get them to reverse the election results and award their votes to Trump, not Biden.

And Trump’s campaign went farther than that. He and his legal consultant, John Eastman, tried to persuade Vice-President Mike Pence that he had the constitutional authority to refuse to allow certain states’ electors to be counted. Pence consulted with various authorities, including former federal judge Muchael Luttig and Dan Quayle, George H. W. Bush’s vice-president and the last Republican who had had to certify a Democrat’s win in a Presidential election to succeed him, who told him the Constitution had no such power.

When all else failed – when Trump was unable to get the military, the Justice Department, state legislators, Congress or Mike Pence to steal the election for him – Trump sent out the now-infamous tweet on December 19, 2020 urging his supporters to come to the Ellipse on Washington, D.C for a rally, which he promised “will be Wild!” When he got to the Ellipse he found that many of his supporters were being turned away because they were carrying guns, including assault rifles. Trump found out about this and issued an order to the Secret Service to “take the fucking mags away” – “mags” being short for “magnetometers,” the metai detectors used to search people for weapons.

It’s standard practice for the Secret Service to not let people with guns in the vicinity of the President. That’s what their “protection details” are supposed to be about. But Trump would have none of it. He told the skeptical people in charge of his Secret Service detail to let people with guns into his event because “they’re not there to hurt me.” At the Ellipse speech he issued a seemingly spontaneous but really carefully planned call for a march on the Capitol, and added, “I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness.”

Trump didn’t make it to the Capitol that day, and until the January 6 committee hearings I had assumed that he never planned to: that this was just another bit of Trump bravado, making himself seem more courageous than he really is. When the hearings took place, we heard that Trump very much wanted to go to the Capitol that day. He even, according to Cassidy Hutchinson (who admitted she did not personally witness this but had heard about it from someone who’d been there), tried to wrestle the steering wheel of his car away from the Secret Service agent who refused to drive him to the Capitol on the grounds that he wouldn’t be safe there.

The moment I heard Cassidy Hutchinson tell that story, my immediate thought was, “March on Rome.” The March on Rome occurred on October 29, 1922 and was Benito Mussolini’s successful coup d’état to end Italy’s government as a British-style constitutional monarchy and establish himself as dictator. It really does seem as if Trump relished the spectacle of himself at the head of an armed mob, holding guns at the heads of Senators and Representatives and demanding to be made dictator of the U.S. And while Mussolini’s coup was bloodless, if Trump had had to get Congress to declare him President for life over the dead bodies of Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, he wouldn’t have minded at all. When Trump heard the mob he had summoned to Washington, D.C. was chanting “Hang Mike Pence!,” he told at least one advisor in the White House dining room that because Pence had refused to go along with Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 election result, maybe he should be hanged.

On his special report, Ari Melber quoted historian and blogger Doug Porter as saying, “If Trump’s coup attempt goes unpunished, it will become a training exercise.” We have already seen inthe hysterical overreaction on the part of the American Right to a legal and routine search of Donald Trump’s home looking for documents he wasn’t supposed to have – including classified documents whose disclosure could threaten the national security – just how deep the authoritarian streak in this country is.

And we have seen the bizarre loyalty to Trump many otherwise thoughtful Americans have adopted – including the 11 relatives of retiring Congressmember Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) who wrote him in the name of their shared “Christian values” that his opposition to Trump was literally opposition to God – and the death threats officials ranging fron FBI agents and judges to election workers have faced simply for doing their jobs and saying no to the Trump juggernaut. The United States has been a republic for quite a long time – almost 250 years – but it will take a lot of struggle both within and outside the electoral system for us to remain one.

What Ted Cruz Actually Said to Liz Wheeler on Same-Sex Marriage July 16

On Saturday, July 16 – ironically, the same day as San Diego's 2022 Pride Parade – Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas_ gave an interview to podcast host Liz Wheeler which was reported on Queerty.com, https://www.queerty.com/ted-cruz-says-supreme-court-clearly-wrong-sex-marriage-ruling-20220718. as Cruz saying the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision on Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the Court found a constitutionally protected right to same-sex marriage, was wrong and should be overturned.

The post was accompanied by a 17-second clip from the full interview, and some commentators pointed out that Cruz's statements had been considerably more nuanced. In the full clip – or at least the six-minute excerpt posted by the Queerty commentator – Cruz tied hmiself into verbal knots trying at once to reassure his political base that he thinks Obergefell was wrong from the get-go while also trying to assure Queer people and their allies that the Court probably won't overturn it any time soon. It's somehow dawned even on Cruz's notoriously think skull that telling hondreds of thousands of Americans involved in same-sex marriages (including yours truly) that their marriages are no longer valid could lead to social chaos. Cruz also said that same-sex marriage is a less "divisive" issue than abortion and therefore the Court may just decide to leave it alone.

I'm not at all convinced by Cruz's reasoning. In his concurringi opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Center, the Court opinion overruling Roe v. Wade, Justice Clarence Thomas said that if the Court no longer reads the Constitution as guaranteeing an individual's right to personal privacy, there are a number of other cases the Court should look at and reverse, including Griswold v. Connecticut, which allowed married straight couples to use birth control; Lawrence v. Texas, which established a right for pconseltuing adults of the sane gemder to have sex; and Obergefell. Thomas's concurrence has raised the spectre of a future in which government establishes itself as the ultimate arbiter of what people can do in their bedrooms and how they can deal with the consequences – desirable and not – therefrom.

Cruz's attempt to reassure us that the current radical-Right revolutionary majority in the U.S. Supreme Court (which by no means should be called "conservative") likely as not won't rule that states have the option to make same-sex marriage legal or illegal, as they see fit, is especially not reassuring in light of the statement Thomas and fellow Justice Samuel Alito made in October 2020 that thel felt Obergefell violated the Costitutional right to "free exercise" of the religious beliefs of people who belong to religions opposed to same-sex marriage. (This itself begs the question of how and why members of churches who believe in marriage equality should have fewer rights than members of churches that don't.) It's clear that a broad array of individual rights and freedoms are on the current Supreme Court's chopping block.

– Mark Gabrish Conlan, July 20, 2022

The show’s host, Liz Wheeler, asked Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), “If you were an advocate and Obergefell was before the Supreme Court again, what would be the argument against this case or the argument for overturning it?”

Cruz replied, “So look, O)bergefell, like Roe v. Wade, ignored two centuries of our nation’s history. Marriage was always an issue that was left to the states. We saw states before Obergefell that were moving to allow Gay marriages, moving to allow civil partnerships. There were different standards that were evolving. And had the Court not ruled on Obergefell, the democratic process would have continued to operate,

“So if you think that [same-sex] marriage was a good idea, what you have to do to advance that position is to engage your fellow citizens. If you succeeded in convincing your fellow citizens, your state would change its laws to reflect those views. In Obergefell, the Court said we know better than you guys do, and so as of now every state must sanction and perform – and permit – Gay marriage.

“I think that decision was clearly wrong when it was decided. It was the Court overreaching. Whether or not the Court will reverse it, I will say, so in Dobbs what the Supreme Court said was Roe is different because it’s the only one of the cases that involves the taking of a human life, and that’s qualitatively different. I agree with that proposition. That is fundamentally different.

“I will say on Obergefell that it is also, when a Court is considering overturning a precedent, one of the factors that the Court looks into is reliance interest. Have people relied on the previous precedent, and have they acted accordingly? And in the context of marriage, look, you’ve got a ton of people who have entered into Gay marriages and it would be more than a little chaotic for the court to do something that somehow disrupted those marriages that have been entered into in accordance with the law.

“I think that would be a factor that would, would counsel restraint, that the court would be concerned about. But to be honest, I don't think this Court has any appetite for overturning any of these decisions. I think Justice Thomas was being a purist in terms of what the Constitution means, but I don’t think there are other Justices interested in going down that road.”

Wheeler said, “No, it doesn’t seem like that, just given the sheer number of times Alito reiterated in his majority opinion that this did not have any bearing on Griswold, Lawrence or Obergefell. So let me ask you: I think that your take is correct. It’s pretty clear that Obergefell is an invented ‘right’ – I say that in quotes, because it is invented by the Court – but how does a Court determine when an issue that could be left to the states, because we embrace this idea of democracy, the states can be a laboratory for democracy, and if they vote one way and you don’t like it, you can move to another state that’s voted another way?

“How do they determine when an issue is so enormous that it needs to be decided at a federal level, and Gay marriage might actually be one of those? Some folks argue that, well, if you got married in California but you weren’t married in Texas because California recognized a Gay marriage but Texas didn’t, there has to be some clarity at the federal level here. What is, or what should be, the standards for determining whether an issue should be left to the states, or whether it requires a national policy?”

Cruz replied, “Well, the standard should be where the Constitution puts the authority. And with respect to marriage, the Constitution gave the authority to the states. And then that’s – that’s what I think the Court should have done. I think Obergefell was wrongly decided.

“At the same time, the standard for overturning a decision – and this is something the court in Dobbs talks about at great length – involves a number of factors, One, if it was egregiously wrong from the start. But two, whether the precedent has proven unworkable; whether it has essentially created more problems. And what the Dobbs majority said is that Roe continued to be unworkable and had enormous problems.

“I have not seen anyone marshal arguments that Obergefell has had the same sort of unworkability problems that Roe did. And you haven’t seen the massive ongoing resistance to Obergefell that you saw to Roe. I mean, in Roe – Roe spawned the pro-life movement. It spawned 50 years of deep political division because the people lacked the ability to defend life through the political process.

“Gay marriage – there had been a vibrant political movement to protect marriage, to defend traditional marriage as the union of one man and one woman. That was on the ballot many places in the country. It was on the ballot in California, Proposition 8, where a majority of the citizens in California – bright blue, Left-leaning California – voted against Gay marriage when Gay marriage was on the ballot, when they were given the chance to vote on it.

“That being said, since Obergefell, there is not a massive political movement seeking to unwind it, in the way there was with Roe; That it hasn’t produced anywhere near the same level of division, which may be one of the reasons why the majority opinion in Dobbs didn’t show any interest in even – “ [Post runs out at this point.]