From just a quick glance at its title — “Don’t Be So Quick to Expel Roy Moore From the Senate” — you might think this post from Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall is simply a contrarian or even pro-Moore argument. But in taking a deeper look at what is emerging as a major Republican discussion — that the Senate might move to expel Moore in the event of his election — Marshall highlights the assumptions and dangers of this possible plan of action.
He starts by pointing out that in all of U.S. history, only 15 senators have been expelled from the Senate — but 14 of those were senators who supported the Confederacy, and the other was a senator expelled in 1797 for conspiracy and treason. In other words, all 15 were expelled for treason against the U.S.
Marshall’s central argument is that expulsion is a powerful tool that risks setting an extremely dangerous precedent for the Senate to nullify the will of a state’s voters. He points out that while Moore’s behavior — not just his alleged behavior against several women, but in his time as a judge — is repugnant, he hasn’t actually been convicted of a crime. The overwhelming factor driving Republicans to consider the expulsion option is that Moore is a political liability to the GOP; and to open the Pandora’s box of Senatorial expulsion to salve their embarrassment is a dangerous bargain. If Republicans truly oppose Moore, Marshall says, there’s already a remedy — they can encourage voters to elect Moore’s opponent, Democrat Doug Jones (and as he goes on to say, the GOP has a good chance of re-taking the seat in 4 years anyway).
As it happens, I’d had the passing thought earlier today of whether it would be the worst thing in the world for Moore to be in the Senate if he were to defeat Jones, and have to admit I hadn’t thought too much about the downside of expulsion in itself. But after reading Marshall’s piece, I think I may actually be more on the anti-expulsion train than he is (Marshall says he’s not 100% sure expulsion would be the wrong course of action — it seems he’s convinced me, but not himself!), for both the most cynical and most idealistic of reasons.
Let me preface what follows by saying that the best outcome by far is for Doug Jones to win this race; that’s why I’d encourage any readers who can spare a little cash to make a donation to Jones today. But learning that the Senate has pretty much not expelled any senators except those who committed treason in the Civil War has grabbed my attention, bigly. This is a quite anti-democratic power, particularly when applied to a senator who has just been elected; it is clearly a reversal of democratic processes for the Senate to block the will of voters in the matter of who represents them. That it was previously used basically to defend our country against secession and the destruction of our democracy seems like the exception that proves the rule.
While the Senate does have the expulsion power under the Constitution, the fact that it’s a) only been used for acts of treason and b) is suddenly being considered by the increasingly anti-democratic GOP should be a big flashing warning sign that everyone needs to proceed with extreme caution and attention. Once dusted off and employed in this special case, who’s to say that a Republican majority couldn’t use it to reject Democratic senators in the future — for instance, if a senator faced allegations similar to those Moore faces? With Trump in the White House and the GOP continuing to enable his proto-authoritarian tendencies, such possibilities must be taken very seriously, even if just a few years ago it would have seemed paranoid to raise such questions.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that such an extreme and anti-democratic maneuver is being considered by the current leaders of the Republican Party. Some GOP members had already explored the possibility of delaying the Alabama vote, in order to provide more time for Republicans to replace Moore. It sounds like the state's governor has the discretion to do so with a special election, but as many have pointed out, canceling elections is a banana republic con, not standard operating procedure in the U.S. of A. And as The Hot Screen has pointed out too many times to count, the GOP’s increasingly anti-democratic tendencies are found in everything from racist voter suppression and gerrymandering to a Republican president who bashes our court system and seems not to care about defending our elections against Russian meddling.
So that’s the idealistic/patriotic argument against helping the GOP along its merry way to expelling Moore if, god forbid, he wins election (a decent number of Democrats would need to go along with an expulsion vote, as it requires a two-thirds majority). Now here’s the partisan one: getting stuck with Roy Moore in the Senate is just the fate the Republican Party deserves, and one that would bring great potential benefits to the Democratic Party. Moore is a monster of the GOP’s own making; he’s just a slightly more extreme version of the tendencies we already see throughout the party: the racism, the anti-Islam slurs, the hypocritical pseudo-Christian bullshit. Also, in the past few days, he’s gone from being a figure who wasn’t so well known, to a person of national infamy — and why? For being a pedophile and a sexual predator. If Alabama votes him in, then such is the will of the people. If the Democrats have to lose that race, then the consolation prize can be a new GOP senator who tars and feathers a hapless party that literally could not run a better candidate than a mendacious, absurdist holy roller whose basic attitude seems to have been, If it is not literally proscribed in the Ten Commandments monument that I erected at the Alabama state supreme court, then I can damned well do it to underage females. Moore in the Senate would, somewhat ironically, be a powerful argument for why it’s time to return the GOP to the minority.
