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!

I've just donated $25 each to the 13 candidates on this list, including nine who are rinning for the U.S. Senate, three who are running for state governor, and one who's running for a House seat in Texas. I'm giving you the lnks to their official candidates' Web sites so you can easily donate to them, too.

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

Stacey Abrams (Governor, Georgia). https://staceyabrams.com

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