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A.B. Stoddard rejoins the show for the three-timer award, as well as to talk, well, politics of all things. What can we expect from Senate Republicans at the start of the new Biden administration. Especially with a vote on whether to convict Donald Trump in the pipeline? We also get some more chronicles in the saga of Mitch McConnell: Machiavellian, principled, or both? And what about the recent flurry of (largely) socially progressive executive orders from the Resolute Desk? Stoddard helps determine what of this recent political news is a signal, and what’s simply noise.
Show Notes:
-The Hawaii GOP expresses its support for QAnon
-Is Jim Jordan about to get more influential?
-“The One Where Jonah Calls Matt Gaetz a Steroidal Playmobil Figurine”
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Your political discussions with A.B. Stoddard are top notch.
On the impeachment vote, there was a major media failure. Politico, National Review, and other respectable institutions described a vote to discuss the stupid Turley defense (the Turley view of now, not the one of a lifetime until five minutes ago) as a vote to endorse it.
If this were a court trial, that sort of a claim would be made in the form of a motion to dismiss and would be argued before the trial; there are no witnesses or facts applicable to the question of law of whether a President can be impeached after leaving office in the same manner as other executive officers can be. The same thing was appropriate here. If the people who suggest that the answer is not as obviously affirmative as it seems won, there’d be no point in having a trial (like, you would still want an inquiry and to get everyone on oath, but it’d be more enlightening than the same questions being asked with the heat of an impeachment). If, as it seems obvious they would have, they lost on the motion, you wouldn’t have the question clogging up the rest of the trial.
So, although I sympathize with their frustration, I think that Romney, Toomey, and co. fell into a trap with Paul’s motion and that Portman and McConnell’s vote was wise. Indeed, it seems just as likely to have been Schumer’s trap; this claim seems to be the chief Trump defense and it is not appropriate to attempt to silence the defense when the outcome is in doubt. The point of trials in general is to elicit the best arguments on both sides. Just as importantly, the Paul motion was an incredibly weak argument, one that would be harder to sustain if debated properly on the senate floor with experts called in. The best way to shore it up was what Schumer did, refusing to allow the motion to be discussed, forcing it off the Senate floor and into the newsrooms of MSNBC and OANN. It wasn’t as powerful a move protecting Trump as Pelosi’s decision not to accept Republican help in persuading Republicans to impeach, but it’s probably more helpful than anything any of Trump’s supporters will achieve.
Worse still, because various media outlets have said that McConnell voted to call this unconstitutional, now if he does vote for it (or if Portman does, etc.), they will be on record as voting for things they think are unconstitutional. Just like the awful pundits who pretended that it did not make sense for Roberts to believe that the mandate met the constitutional but not the statutory definition of a tax, or who claimed that when McConnell said that a President couldn’t get a nominee through a Senate of the opposing party in an election year he was demonstrating himself hypocritical when he supported a nominee under other circumstances, National Review risks falsely describing principled politics as raw exercises of arbitrary rule. These opportunities to mislead about principled positions are the sorts of things that cause disaffection. They are how you get Q, how you radicalize people.
We are in a struggle for the soul of America. When we encourage good people to give up, encourage bellweathers to take the side of the nihilists, and add fervor to the lunatic cause, we do significant harm to the chances that the country pulls through.