Republic in Crisis

The House Judiciary Committee voted to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress. Chair Jerrold Nadler:

The ongoing clash between congressional Democrats and [Fuckface von Clownstick] over the Mueller report has turned into a full-blown constitutional crisis.

Paul Blumenthal lists nine areas where the administration is resisting oversight.

The [Barr] confrontation is just one example of [Dear Leader's] unprecedented blanket obstruction of congressional investigations. The president’s declaration that he will fight “all the subpoenas” has caused his administration to disobey laws requiring the transmission of executive branch information to Congress. And the president has personally sued to prevent third parties from giving documents to Congress.

Igor Bobic notes that Speaker Pelosi agreed with Nadler's characterization.

But as much as Pelosi and other top Democrats ratchet up the rhetoric ― railing against the unprecedented nature of a president bent on ignoring just about every means of congressional oversight ― they remain hesitant about actually opening impeachment proceedings, the most powerful tool at their disposal.

And Dahlia Lithwick consults several experts on whether "constitutional crisis" is the appropriate terminology. She quotes Carolyn Shapiro:

Sadly, I think we have several interrelated constitutional and democratic crises. First, we have aggressive partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, and lame duck lawmaking designed to remove power from incoming officials (as in Wisconsin and North Carolina after recent GOP losses in statewide elections), all of which undermine representative democracy. Second, we know that a foreign adversary has tried and intends to try again to disrupt our elections, but Republican leaders appear unconcerned at best. And third, we have [Fuckface's] myriad misdeeds, which—at a minimum—demand a thorough and public investigation if not impeachment. I see these all as related because they all involve contempt for representative democracy, an unwillingness to tolerate the possibility of losing or sharing power with one’s political rivals, and an utter disdain for the Constitution.

Update (May 15):  Andrew O'Hehir figures "if you have to keep asking [whether we're in a constitutional crisis or not] — and parsing the term ever more finely — it may already be too late" to do anything about it. He sees the "injuries to democracy" as a global phenomenon.

[Democracy] isn’t failing because [Fuckface von Clownstick] is a sadistic moron who praised the Charlottesville Nazis. It’s failing because large numbers of people believe it’s a cynical sham that doesn’t represent them or benefit them. That’s a bigger, deeper systemic problem that no one election and no single candidate can fix.

Update (May 26):  Paul Rosenberg says Democrats need to exercise their power.

[T]he American people deserve a full and vigorous investigation by the House, so that the full extent of this president's lawlessness can be driven home, and the norms he's so gleefully violating can be forcefully reaffirmed and restored.

Democrats control the House. It's their stage for the show of their own choosing, which then forces everyone else to react.

Should it be grounded in facts? Absolutely! Grounded in expertise? Absolutely! Informative and dramatic? Absolutely once again! Should it be scripted in fear of how [Fuckface], [MAGA] voters or some other bogeyman might react? Absolutely not!

But Andrew O'Hehir thinks impeachment plays only a small part in our need to rebuild democracy.

So much of our so-called democracy has become a pro forma exercise, sound and fury signifying nothing, a hallowed ritual performed by doddering, drunken priests who have long since forgotten the meaning of the ancient texts they mumble.

[I]f impeachment becomes a magical process devoted to erasing or negating one malign individual, or a liberal-inflected version of the crusade to make America great again, it will accomplish nothing. The ... administration’s sustained assault on damn near everything — democracy, press freedom, the constitutional separation of powers and, for that matter, the basic precepts of truth and knowledge on which those things depend — demand exposure, consideration and as much deep historical reflection as we can manage.

Update (May 27):  John Grant urges Congress to fight back in defense of the U.S. Constitution.

Whether or not the Senate convicts, if the House doesn’t step up to its constitutional responsibility to impeach a president like this, his punking of that institution will continue, and increase with success, to the point, by 2020, the institution would be a living joke.

Yet Cody Fenwick thinks Democrats may have waited too long to effectively use impeachment powers. Fenwick argues it would have been "much easier to make a case that the president should be impeached for committing criminal obstruction of justice, based on the evidence laid out in the Mueller report, than it would be to say that defying congressional subpoenas is an impeachable offense".

[T]he release of the Mueller report provided the perfect moment for Democrats to start rallying the base and making the arguments in favor of impeachment.

Democrats may be able to seize another moment if they leverage hearings and their investigations correctly. But every day they wait, the case gets harder to make. I don’t buy the argument that the 2020 election can take the place of an impeachment process, but the hearings will inevitably take time, and the case for just waiting for Election Day gets stronger with each passing week.

Update (July 11):  Aaron Belkin says Republicans are effectively out to destroy democracy.

[I]f Democrats fail to take dramatic action in 2021, it will not matter if they occasionally win elections, because Republicans will continue to control the country, even when they are not in power:

1. Thanks to gerrymandering, dark money and voter suppression, it will remain very difficult for Democrats to capture the levers of power. They will require wave elections to do so;

2. Thanks to the GOP’s unprecedented willingness to obstruct, it will remain almost impossible for Democrats to pass laws, even when they win elections;

3. Thanks to the theft of the Supreme Court, Justice Roberts and his colleagues will shred or sharply curtail the few laws that Democrats manage to pass. When a party has a tough time winning elections, even when it captures (far) more than 50% of the vote; when that party is not allowed to govern even when it wins at the ballot box; and when that party’s laws are shredded by stolen courts even when it manages to govern, that’s not democracy. That’s single-party rule.

If corrective action is not taken soon, white minority rule could endure for decades, if not longer. Even though Republicans may lose elections from time to time, democracy effectively will be dead. Under this scenario, the country could even experience a real or manufactured crisis, prompting lawless GOP leaders to suspend the Constitution. At that point, all bets will be off.

Update (July 21):  It's not a study about Congress, but it still doesn't bode well for representative democracy. Author Ethan Porter:

[W]hen we randomly provided some state legislators across the country information about their constituents' policy preferences, we found those legislators largely unwilling to access that information, and among those who did access the information, we found them unaffected by it, in the sense that that information did not make them have more accurate perceptions of their constituents' preferences.

Update (September 2):  Though the consequences seem "unimaginable", that doesn't mean events heading in that direction aren't happening. Andrew O'Hehir makes the effort to "to marshal the evidence that what is happening right now in the United States is a slow-motion coup — an attempt to abolish democracy not all at once but little by little and step by step, until we barely notice it is gone".

[Fuckface von Clownstick] has become the central totem of the American push toward fascism or authoritarianism, and the Republican Party has emerged from its chrysalis of self-torment reborn and reinvigorated as a far-right white nationalist party. But I remain agnostic about how much [Orangeman] is leading this movement, how much he is surfing a tide of toxic white resentment and racist populism, and how much he is being driven by others toward consolidating a caste system that in fact already exists.

Those are questions we should think about far more deeply than we’re doing right now. I get why they may not seem urgent or particularly meaningful: For many Americans, likely a large majority, the priority is to get [Dear Leader] out of office and replace him with almost anyone who has a vaguely normative understanding of democracy. But unless and until we grapple with the fact that [Fuckface] did not personally create the conditions for his ascent to power; that the decay of democracy is nothing new, and has been aided and abetted by both political parties and numerous other factors; and that the racial, economic and cultural caste system of America is in many ways the material basis of our democracy, then our nation is unlikely to escape this crisis in anything resembling its current form.

Update (November 10):  Bob Cesca sees an increasing threat from the fabrications coming out of the White House.

We’re far beyond partisanship now. The existential debate of our time isn’t about right versus left. We’ve found ourselves locked in a fight to defend the very fabric of reality itself.