As was clear within a day of his inauguration, and has only come into sharper focus over time, President Trump and his allies are attempting, through a combination of norm-breaking and outright illegality, to transform the United States from a constitutional democracy to an authoritarian regime with power centralized in the president. If this were happening in any other country, we would correctly label it as an attempted coup — but for a variety of reasons, the reality that Trump and the Republican Party have embarked on destroying our democratic government is only imperfectly and occasionally articulated in public. Republican complicity means that a GOP-controlled Congress stands by as its powers are challenged and stripped away by the president; our news media’s fear of retribution means that while we get some insightful reporting, it is largely decontextualized, the big picture kept unexamined; and congressional Democrats remain mostly in a state of confusion, paralysis, and cowardice, with few levers of power at their disposal, and with a deep-seated reluctance to fully embrace confrontation by accusing Trump of a second, larger-scale insurrection.
But there is a point where a refusal to correctly call this attack on democracy what it is, and to use all available tools to oppose it, slides from bad politics to at least tacit complicity. This is the point that Brian Beutler makes in an important piece out this week that takes a look at the Democrats’ response to our present crisis. For as it turns out, congressional Democrats do have a powerful piece of leverage available in the coming weeks that could both force Trump to retreat while exposing the depths of our national nightmare. Republicans, with their razor-thin control of the House and fractious membership, will almost inevitably need Democratic votes to pass a continuing budget resolution and raise the debt ceiling in coming days. Without such a vote, the U.S. economy faces potentially disastrous consequences, not only in terms of a government shutdown, but through a potential default on our national debt that would call into question our government’s willingness to pay its bills. Beutler suggests that as the price for their support, Democrats require that Trump’s lawless actions stop, essentially using this crucial vote to veto the powers of an out-of-control president.
Beutler’s not the only one who has floated this hard-line budget/debt limit approach to rein in Trump, but he goes further than most by getting at what it would mean for the Democrats not to use all tools at their disposal to stop or slow down Trump’s destruction of our government. If Democrats were to provide crucial votes to fund the government and increase the debt limit, they would end up giving tacit endorsement to Trump’s actions, a signal of business-as-usual and that even an authoritarian spree was not important enough to make the Democrats break against their tradition of extreme, even self-defeating caution. As Beutler puts it, “If Democrats provide those votes before the rule of law has been restored, and without locking in any mechanism to maintain the rule of law going forward, they will have in essence assented to the wrecking of democracy.”
The possibility that such a strategy might fail is not a reason to reject it. Beutler sees a chance that, if stymied by a lack of votes, Trump may try “to seize dictatorial power more aggressively. He might order the Treasury Department to continue issuing new debt in defiance of the debt-limit statute; he might honor the debt limit statute, but try to deploy the government’s incoming revenue to bond holders and politically influential populations like Social Security recipients and members of the armed forces.” But Democrats shouldn’t assent to their own complicity in Trump’s lawlessness to prevent further speculative lawlessness; they shouldn’t give in just because they fear Trump’s escalation in response. Rather, they should not be afraid to dare him to escalate, and risk the repercussions of his actions, even if those repercussions are not at all known at this point.
If anything, though, I think Beutler lets the Democrats off a little easy. Because it’s not just that Democrats risk making themselves complicit in Trump’s power grab, as bad and self-destructive as that would be. I think it’s even more to the point to say that, in doing so, they would be actively betraying the millions of voters who put them in office and expect them to defend both their interests and American democracy against MAGA mayhem. They would be signaling that however outrageous individual Americans view Trump’s actions, they do not care to represent and embody that righteous faith that spits in the face of would-be authoritarians. They would be declaring that the dead dream of bipartisanship is more important than a living nation.
Beutler ends with a point that’s too little acknowledged when thinking about what the Democrats should do, faced as they are with those who would destroy our constitutional form of government. He writes, “But, corny as it sounds, they are also public officials—they take an oath to the Constitution just the same as Republicans do. And when those two imperatives come into tension with one another, as they do today, it’s the former that must give.” I don’t think this is a corny point at all — just a massively overlooked one. At this point, Democrats pondering how to secure election victories two years from now, rather than addressing the existential crossroads we are at right now, are failing to do their jobs. As much as some of the rules of American politics remain the same, it is unquestionable that we are at a point where Trump and the GOP are aiming to permanently alter the structures of American government in an anti-democratic direction that allows the GOP to maintain one-party rule indefinitely, at least at the federal level.
After all, ask yourself this: is Trump acting like someone who expects a Democratic president to wield the same vast powers he’s trying to assert? Is the GOP acting like a party that expects the shoe to be on the other foot any time soon, or ever? At a minimum, Trump’s ongoing destruction of bureaucracy would cripple a subsequent Democratic administration that wished to make the government work for the people. The pro-democratic majority is arguably in a non-violent war against an authoritarian takeover, and acting as if powerful non-violent tools are off the table isn’t just folly, it’s unspeakable betrayal. The Democratic Party needs leaders who grasp the stakes, and who see the continuation of American democracy as non-negotiable. And looking a few steps ahead, after Trump inevitably begins ignoring Court orders and confirms that he’s going to ignore budgets passed by Congress, we’re going to need Democratic politicians who will speak honestly to the American public, and remind us that a presidency acting beyond the law lacks the barest legitimacy.