Here’s a fact some of the survivors of this moment will want you to forget:
What’s happening in government right now is what every member of the majority wants to happen.
This is a very simple analysis. The courts are, by and large, doing their job, issuing decisions pointing out the very clear facts that the President’s gutting of executive agencies and impounding of funds is illegal. The President, for his part, is predictably taking the Jacksonian path of “now let them enforce it” and is continuing to do things he’s been ordered to stop doing. The first way for Congress to stop this would have been to decline to confirm toadies and bomb-throwers. The second way, which is still available, is to remove him from office. The majority in both chambers is slim; the number of Republicans who’d have to join with Democrats to get this done isn’t large. A small number of Republicans could do this whenever they felt like it.
This is all very obvious shit, very much the stuff of white liberal wish fulfillment, and the reasons it won’t happen are well known to everyone. I’m not here to suggest any hopes get pinned on this. But in thinking about politics—or any large-scale collective behavior I guess—we can allow our (correct) identification that a problem is immutable to make us forget it is the result of a choice. Republicans in Congress have chosen to allow the President to take their body’s power and reverse its decisions, all illegally. They could stop it; and if they didn’t want him to do what he’s doing, they would stop it.
This is, of course, dereliction of duty; Congress has been all in on that for a while. They will tell you, when this moment is over, that there was no other way it could be. They will be lying. We invested them with the power to stop this very thing from happening. They will not do it, because they want it to happen.
There are things to be said about Democrats too, obviously. But everyone else seems to be lining up to say them.
Currently reading: THE REVISIONARIES, by A. R. Moxon.