It’s possible Joe Biden’s honeymoon would be happier if Bernie Sanders were serving up eggs over easy in a cozy Airbnb in Vermont. But it’s fine as it is with the ornery socialist gone as warm and fuzzy on the inside as his inaugural mittens on the outside, agreeing with Biden on the amounts in his signature bill to relieve the massive suffering in the country.
So too Biden’s left flank in the House. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, author of the Green New Deal, could have ripped out Biden’s heart for not curbing methane emissions from cows right out of the box. But she’s gone quiet, except to tell her harrowing tale of sheltering in place during the Capitol riots and to gush over Biden’s executive orders on the environment.
It’s been three months since Biden won the election and so far the left hasn’t broken with him, either on the merits or just for the fun of it—to the dismay of Republicans who were counting on it. There were reasonable worries over installing another military man atop the Pentagon but Gen. Lloyd Austin sailed through confirmation.
The relief of having adults in charge is giving establishment incrementalists a pass with climate change activists. The progressive caucus wants to keep the minimum wage bill attached to the relief bill but isn’t threatening to go home if they don’t get their way. Minor resistance to the $1.9 trillion price tag came from the ivory tower where former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers resides but didn’t slow it down. Sen. Joe Manchin is legitimately concerned over households qualifying for COVID checks who don’t need them. Joe of Scranton knows Joe of West Virginia. They’re likely to work it out.
So much for Biden’s left, or right, wing having him for lunch before he unpacked his bags. That’s not to say there isn’t a civil war, it’s just raging on the other side, divided over impeachment and legislation. On the latter, the GOP is so split it’s curbed Biden’s habit of excessive bipartisanship.
Who’s to negotiate with? The party that would have stripped Liz Cheney of her leadership position if the vote weren’t secret but protected QAnon sympathizer Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom Mitch McConnell calls a “cancer” on his party; the one that humored a strongman insisting the election was stolen from him for six weeks (McConnell) and to this moment (fist-pumping Josh Hawley)? How about the majority of House Republicans who voted against certifying the election after the Capitol had been sacked by a marauding band of zealots?
Which of these poor excuses for a political party should Biden, with a 61 percent approval rating, work with? How about none of them?
The war in the House has already been won by forces that saw their way clear to tolerate killing to overturn an election. Only for the briefest of moments did Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy flirt with the idea that smashing Officer Brian Sicknick’s head with a fire extinguisher wasn’t tolerable before heaving himself to Mar-a-Lago to beg forgiveness for ever thinking such a thing.
In the Senate, Republicans know Antietam is coming and in a world without a roll call vote, there might well be 17 of them who would choose not to shed another drop of blood for Trump. But cowards abound and, counting liberally, I can get to 10 who might stand up.
All of them, however, would like to hide behind the Constitution to avoid the forced watching of Visigoths inflamed by Trump breaking into the Capitol to hunt down the Speaker, and not to discuss how a bill becomes a law. The chance of Article II, Section 4 (the impeachment language) protecting Republicans from owning up to the crimes committed in Trump’s name took another blow this week when two highly respected legal scholars on the Republican side joined other experts casting doubt on the argument.
The First Amendment defense is also flawed. That’s for Nazis getting a permit to parade, not cover for a government official who sympathizes with the Proud Boys who wreak havoc on his behalf. On the bright side, the forces for impeachment added one more Republican, Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, who joined the previous five Republicans who were willing to acknowledge the reality that Trump crossed an obvious line on Jan. 6.
If anyone could bring more Republicans around, it will be lead impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin, of a razor-sharp mind and a wounded heart, whose opening argument will be read a hundred years from now.
On the eve of the trial, Trump’s lawyers, who have the same regard for the truth their client does, added a new element to his defense: Trump couldn’t have possibly meant for his followers to take up arms to overturn the election because when he saw they had, he was “terrified” and took steps to quell it. Really? Who kept the National Guard away? Who watched with excitement—according to Washington Post interviews with aides and confidants—at the sight of his patriots “fighting like hell” to take back their country and did nothing to quell it?
That same day, Trump’s lead apologist, Sen. Lindsey Graham, before he had a chance to make up excuses, conceded that Trump did nothing: “It took him a while to appreciate the gravity of the situation. The president saw these people as allies in his journey and sympathetic to the idea that the election was stolen.”
Of course Trump did, and of course Trump did nothing to stop the invasion he’d been stoking his followers to undertake from Nov. 3 to Jan 6. Afterwards he expressed his love for them. Those arrested cite Trump’s call to action to explain their mayhem. Impeaching the president for all this wouldn’t end the party. It would save it.
It takes two parties to run a country but Republicans are now one that makes serial bargains with the devil to stay in power. As for Democrats, they know honeymoons don’t last. The dishes get dirty, the lawn grows weedy, there are diapers to be changed. But the marriage looks very stable and is likely to endure, based as it is on shared values. The GOP can only dream of such a thing.
