It may or may not matter as time passes and we gain greater perspective; but the Democrats’ revolving resolve to call a witness to the impeachment trial and then to simply accept a written affidavit felt to many like an unnecessary backing down from a position of strength. It wasn’t the prospect of getting Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler on video describing what she’d heard Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy say about Donald Trump’s refusal to send help to the besieged Capitol, but of a larger initiative to gather damning witness statements, that very temporarily energized so many Democrats. Of course nothing was going to change enough GOP senatorial minds to result in conviction; but as many (including myself) have argued, the single most important purpose of the impeachment process was to educate and energize Americans as to what happened on January 6, and to make it clear that the GOP is complicit in the former president’s insurrectionism. As Ronald Brownstein wrote on Saturday, “this trial was Ds biggest chance to show public how far Trump has moved GOP toward anti democratic means & acceptance of white nationalist extremism. Taking time to fill out that case day by day, especially w/witnesses, would have filled in picture much more for US.”
So, yes, it was unnerving to see Democrats appear to embrace and just as quickly back down from this opportunity, as it suggests they don’t fully grasp either the authoritarian nature of their GOP opposition or the Democrats’ responsibility in the fight ahead to defend American democracy. But this may be an overly bleak reading of events. It sounds like there was conflict among Democrats about how to proceed, and even a bad decision by leadership is not fatal to the Democrats’ chances. But the events of this weekend only reinforce my sense that the Democrats absolutely must abandon their mindset that they are in any sort of “normal” democratic competition with the GOP for votes and power. The decision of an overwhelming majority of Republican senators to retroactively green light the president’s violent attempt to overthrow the U.S. government — an attempt that may well have resulted in the deaths of some of those very same senators — needs to be seen as the crossing of the Rubicon that it is. In casting their votes to acquit, 43 Republican senators joined the cause of insurrection.
Though the impeachment is over, the Democrats must do everything they can to communicate to the public the terrible import of the January 6 attack and the decision of Republican senators to acquit the president. Remember — the primary GOP response to President Trump’s loss, and subsequent coup attempt, has not been to re-examine the party’s decision to overwhelmingly back an authoritarian psychopath over the last four years. Instead, it’s been to turn their attention to undermining state voting systems with the aim of preventing likely Democratic voters from being able to cast their votes or have their votes fairly counted, all rooted in the Big Lie that the Democrats cheated their way to power in November. Their response, in other words, has been to continue Donald Trump’s insurrection by other means. America’s existential political challenge is not Donald Trump; it is the Republican Party. The assault on the Capitol, and the vote to acquit Trump, are cudgels to use against the GOP for years into the future.
The Democrats must also drive home a related sin committed by the GOP in the impeachment acquittal: by signaling that the attempt at violent insurrection was no big thing, they’ve also sent a powerful message to the domestic extremist groups that took part in the Capitol attack that the GOP has their back; that the GOP and the terrorists are on the same side; that these groups should, as Trump himself notoriously put it, “stand back and stand by.” A party that provides comfort to violent extremists deserves the support of no American voter.
There’s renewed coverage today of a conflict in the GOP between those who continue to support Trump and those who want the party to distance itself from him. As an example of the latter group, this article in The Washington Post points to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who gave a speech denouncing Trump — yet McConnell only did so after voting to acquit the former president. McConnell’s reasoning for opposing conviction is textbook McConnellian flimflam, and as coverage is rightly pointing out, leaves out his own role in refusing to recognize Biden’s victory for weeks upon weeks (not to mention his years-long abetting of Trump’s immoral and authoritarian presidency). Already, state parties are mobilizing for retribution against the paltry handful of GOP senators who broke ranks and voted to convict; there’s no reason to think that this renewed “civil war” will end any less decisively in favor of Trumpist forces than it did when declared finished a few weeks ago. And at any rate, as I’ve argued repeatedly, there’s a clear continuum between “normal” Republicans who simply want to restrict Democratic-likely voting by any legal means necessary, and those Trumpist politicians who now look kindly on violent intimidation to achieve their political goals. The entire party has been corrupted by an anti-democratic animus, and the Democrats would not be well served by acting as if some Republicans are reliable partners, while others are compromised by their associations with Trump. Democrats need to make sure this entire disastrous political party is known as the enablers of Trumpism and violence.
The struggle we are in can feel daunting, particularly after a day like yesterday when a Democratic fighting spirit seemed to self-extinguish in a matter of hours. But at worst, this only means that voters need to continue to impress on their elected officials the need to defend American democracy, and to vote out those Democrats who won’t stand up for us. It’s also well worth reminding ourselves that GOP authoritarianism is supported by a minority of Americans. Indeed, looking at the impeachment vote in the Senate, it turns out that senators who backed conviction represented 202 million Americans, or 61.6% of the population, as opposed to those senators who voted for acquittal, who represented only 125 million Americans, or 38.2% of the population. We should take heart that, when we put aside the anti-democratic distortions of Senate representation, the vote to convict Trump represented an even larger repudiation of his lawlessness.