GOPs (ab)use power to wreck US democracy, and House Dems can't wait on November to fix it

For your weekend reading, I wanted to highlight a blog by historian Patrick Wyman that's titled "Don't Quote Laws to Men with Swords." In this blog post, Wyman mentions that over the last 20 years, we have seen one group of elites be allowed to play by (and bend) one set of rules, while everyday citizens try to play fair under the rules that they think are in place, and find themselves continually steamrolled by the forces in power.

For the past two decades, the American political system has taken blow after blow, slow cut after slow cut. In hindsight, it’s a miracle that Bush v. Gore didn’t turn into a major constitutional crisis back in 2000. Immediately after that came 9/11, the massive expansion of the security state, and the beginnings of the War on Terror. Then came the push to invade Iraq and the associated outright lies, half-truths, and delusions of imperial grandeur. The Great Recession, the unfulfilled promise of the Obama presidency, Sandy Hook, the Tea Party, Ferguson, Donald Trump, and the last four chaotic years have all reinforced the same basic message: The political system is creaking, clattering, and it has failed time after time.

These incidents and processes, not the prosperous 1990s, much less the Reagan era, Watergate, Vietnam, or the turbulence of the 1960s, are what have fundamentally shaped younger Americans’ expectations and understandings of their political system. No thriving middle class is waiting to welcome the indebted, under-employed, overeducated Millennials and emerging Zoomers through the doors of an affordable single-family home; instead, the winners take all, and those winners seem increasingly predetermined. There is a history to the past two decades, a history of slow-burning disasters both political and economic, and very little about it inspires confidence in the system’s ability to accommodate necessary, broadly supported changes and move forward. Why would someone in their early 30s, facing the second major economic disruption of their adult life and watching their friends and acquaintances get tear-gassed by police at peaceful protests, feel much investment in the system that produces those outcomes?

That’s a legitimacy crisis. If systems don’t live up to their values, if they can’t deliver on their promises of prosperity, peace, and justice, then the participants lose faith. As norms break down and the understanding of the possible shifts, so too do the actions of those participants. In differing ways and to differing degrees, wide swathes of the American public have lost faith in what the political system has to offer. Tax revolts, armed protests, the refusal to follow simple public health instructions, and protests against police violence all share that lack of faith in common.

And this is what brings us all the way back around to the end of the Roman Republic. “Stop quoting laws to men with swords,” a young Pompey said. Soldiers ruled, not the niceties of the legal system or the institutional traditions of the Roman state, and the young men molded by the first round of conflict - like Pompey and Caesar - carried its lessons with them forever .....

For entire generations of younger, but not young, Americans, their formative political experiences now include rows of police in riot gear, protesters armed with long guns at state capitols, and the nation’s paper of record broadcasting calls for military intervention in American cities. That’s the culmination of a decades-long crisis, and the beginning of another. At the heart of those crises are basic questions about what the system has to offer, for whom, and whether it’s capable of delivering on its promises. Those are questions of legitimacy, of whether we have to do what we’re asked and why. If there are no good answers to be found, there’s no guarantee that the system will survive unscathed.

And when you recognize the depths that the people clinging to power will sink to, it makes this statement by the alleged political opposition all the more infuriating.

Nadler adds Barr “deserves impeachment”

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) June 21, 2020

Hey Jerry, I DON'T CARE WHAT THE CROOKED GOP SENATE MIGHT DO, and neither should you. It is your job to hold Barr and the rest of this amoral crew accountable, and if you do nothing about it, they'll recognize that as a green light to do even more bad things. And they don't care about what is proper and they don't have an ability to feel a sense of shame about what they are doing to American democracy.

Besides, it's good politics. If you step up, drag Barr, and impeach him for his abuses of power and clear disregard for the rule of law, it makes GOP Senators look horrible if they acquit. Especially since a whole lot of them are facing the voters in a few months in what is already looking like a big pro-Dem year. The one way you blow this is by NOT impeaching the rule-breakers, which makes casual voters ask "Why did we put these guys in charge if they aren't going to do anything about Trump/GOP?"

2020 politics is not a debating society, Rep. Nadler. It's how you choose to use the power the voters have given to you. And I don't think they put Dems in power in the House just so they can pass the buck and try to wait out more abuses of power that'll come over the next 4 1/2 months.