Passing laws vs. defying them: How Trump’s Republicans clarified the choice before voters
A few weeks after a House committee concluded its first series of hearings on Donald Trump’s culpability in the Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt, the question preoccupying much of the country was whether a Justice Department headed by a determinedly moderate institutionalist, Merrick Garland, would do something about it. Then it did something — apparently about something else.
Federal agents raided Trump’s Florida estate Monday as part of a reportedly separate case involving allegedly purloined classified documents. The surprise search demonstrated once again that while we could ask plenty of questions about an investigation of the former president, the first question is always the same: Which one?
In a stark illustration of the choice facing voters this fall, the heating up of the Trump investigations happened to coincide with an improbable breakthrough for Joe Biden’s long-frustrated effort to address planetary overheating. Senate Democrats’ approval of a revived and rebranded climate spending bill last weekend, with House Democrats expected to follow suit Friday, put Biden’s party on the brink of the biggest federal investment in addressing the crisis to date.
As if that weren’t enough of a legislative landmark, the so-called Inflation Reduction Act also allows the federal government to negotiate the price Medicare pays for certain prescription drugs, delivering on a proposal that Democrats and some Republicans, including Trump, pushed for years to no avail. And it funds the spending by the appropriate, responsible and enormously popular means of setting a minimum tax on large corporations, imposing a levy on their stock buybacks and going after wealthy tax evaders.
The spending measure leads a string of recent legislative successes for the Democrats’ narrow majority, including bills to aid service members sickened by toxic burn pits, the largest expansion of veterans’ health care in over three decades; enhance background checks in the wake of the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, the first major federal gun safety law in nearly as long; and boost domestic semiconductor chip manufacturing to help the United States compete with China.
So what were the lawmakers of Trump’s party doing while Democrats were, you know, doing stuff? Voting in unison against the measure to address climate change and lower drug costs while preventing a cap on insulin prices from extending beyond Medicare to private insurance; temporarily blocking the veterans’ health care bill in a fit of pique over the spending legislation, reversing course only under withering attack; and, despite a number of defections, overwhelmingly opposing the gun safety and manufacturing measures.
More important to them, they were rallying around the former president in the wake of the court-sanctioned search of his gaudy estate. The party, whose servile devotion to Trump had finally appeared to waver in recent months, seemed galvanized rather than dismayed by the reminder of his sprawling lawlessness.
And it wasn’t the only reminder. In a deposition two days later on yet another matter — New York’s investigation of whether he improperly overstated the value of his hotels, resorts and other assets — the former president repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself. And while I’m certainly an unabashed fan of that and other constitutional rights, Trump himself has described taking the Fifth as an effective admission of guilt fit for a mobster.
Nevertheless, undeterred by the absence of a single supporting fact, California’s own Kevin McCarthy and much of his caucus pretended to object to a partisan weaponization of the Justice Department. That’s an unsurprising conclusion from the GOP given that it’s what their guy has striven for since he and his supporters were preemptively vowing to lock up his opponent in 2016. Once in office, Trump wasn’t content to obsessively interfere with legitimate investigations and try to cook up phony ones in this country. He went so far as to try to politicize Ukraine’s justice system against the man who eventually beat him in 2020.
Garland, however, was unsuccessfully nominated to the Supreme Court and successfully as attorney general precisely because of his centrist credentials. The choice frustrated many on the left, as has the attorney general’s poky pursuit of the criminal allegations leveled in bracing detail by the Jan. 6 committee. If you believe the former federal appellate judge took this job so he could be the face of an unprecedented politicization of the Justice Department, the ex-president might have a fraudulently overvalued golf course to sell you.
The party that didn’t even bother to draft a platform for the last election is celebrating Trump’s cause because, as recent events in Congress demonstrated, it doesn’t have another one. The creed that now unites them is that they and their president can’t be held accountable to the Constitution and the law. The only principle they stand for is that they have no principles.