Why didn’t anyone tell me that, some time during the past few months, Dallas Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy took over the Democratic National Committee? Here they are, right on the goal line, and the play calling suddenly goes to the zoo. From Tiger Beat on the Potomac:
But even as those lawmakers continue to doubt Trump’s eligibility for the presidency, they also say that if he wins at the polls, they don’t expect efforts to deny him his presidential electors on Jan. 6, 2025, when Congress meets to finalize the results. Democratic leaders are saying publicly and privately they want a drama-free transfer of power—even if it means setting aside some members’ views that Trump is ineligible to return to the presidency because of the Constitution’s bar on insurrectionist officeholders.
The 14th Amendment prohibits any federal officeholders who have “engaged in” insurrection from holding office again, and Democrats have long suggested Trump ran afoul of it when he inflamed the violent mob that attacked the Capitol four years ago. At the time, House Democrats overwhelmingly voted to impeach Trump for “incitement of insurrection.” Their leader, Hakeem Jeffries, has routinely called Trump the “insurrectionist-in-chief.” But there appears to be little appetite among Democrats to challenge results during the Jan. 6 joint session.
Will they never learn? Four days before the most important election since 1860, against a vulgar talking yam who’s gone full maniac in the closing stanza, and they volunteer to set aside a powerful weapon in the battle for political perception. Look, I am all for a peaceful transfer of power. But the other side isn’t and, more to the point, it is publicly proud that it is not. Every time the former president* and the oil slick with whom he’s running are asked whether they will honor this old American tradition, having dishonored it four years earlier, they answer with some variation of “assuming that the election is fair,” a caveat through which .you could sail the Nimitz. I devoutly hope we have one, and I am fairly certain that the Democratic party feels the same way. But why commit publicly to that course of action now?
And it’s not like the Democrats are refusing to raise a mob to sack the Capitol. They are now publicly committed to not pursuing all legal remedies at their disposal to prevent the installation of a dictator. And they’ve done it preemptively just as the polls look best for the Democratic ticket. Don’t run that damn fade route again, Coach.
This was how we got the sad spectacle of seeing not a single Democratic senator be willing to stand even symbolically with Rep. John Freaking Lewis to challenge the Florida Hijack of 2000, which was just about the lowest I’d ever felt about American politics in the pre-vulgar-talking-yam period. This is the institutional expression of what Yale professor Timothy Snyder calls the “anticipatory obedience” that is a prelude to an authoritarian regime. Is it that hard to just STFU for four damn days? Is that so much to ask?
