The Damned Republican Party

Yesterday, two significant things happened in Washington: the Senate passed  Joe Biden's Covid rescue plan without any Republican votes. Kamala Harris passed the deciding vote. And Margorie Taylor Greene was supported by the overwhelming majority of House Republicans. There can no longer be any doubt about who and what the Republican Party is. Eugene Robinson writes:

Trump led the GOP's base deep into the wilderness. Republican leadership in Washington lacks the skills and the guts to lead the party back to reality — and back to constructive participation in addressing the massive challenges we face. Don't blame "both sides" for ruining the elegant, strategic, productive political competition we'd like to see. One party is trying to move the chess pieces. The other is trying to eat them.

And what is true of the federal Republican Party is also true at the state level:

At the state level, the Republican Party is, if anything, even less tethered to reality. The Arizona state GOP actually censured former senator Jeff Flake and Cindy McCain, widow of the late senator John McCain, for failing to blindly support Trump. A few Republican governors, such as Jim Justice of West Virginia, are doing well in the vaccination phase of the pandemic. Others, such as Ron DeSantis of Florida, continue to put politics over public health.

The Republicans will claim that Joe Biden's promise of bipartisanship is a lie. But Robinson correctly observes that "There are no productive deals to broker between objective reality and cynical fantasy, between truth and lies."

The Republican Party is damned.

Image: The Pepper Bough

The Assault On Mueller

Donald Trump's acolytes are waging a full court press on Robert Mueller. Randall Ellison writes:

Critics on the right charge that Mueller’s investigation is politically biased or worse. Some of the attacks are particularly vitriolic. Sean Hannity has called Mueller a “disgrace to the American justice system” and said his investigation is “corrupt” and abusive. Newt Gingrich, who effusively praised Mueller when he was appointed, now says Mueller’s probe is corrupt, dishonest and a “partisan hit.”

As Mueller closes in on Trump the Republicans are trying to deligitimatize Mueller -- who by all accounts is one of them. They do not understand -- or care -- how prosecuters work:

Such criticisms betray a profound misunderstanding of the way professional prosecutors and FBI agents do their jobs. Prosecutors and agents are human. They are allowed to have political views, belong to political parties and support political candidates. It is not a conflict of interest if a prosecutor who belongs to one political party is involved in an investigation of a politician from another party. We’ve never had a system where Republicans could be investigated only by partisan Republicans or vice versa.

In fact, trying to deligiimize their opponents is now standard Republican practise. On the day Barack Obama took office, Republicans doubled down on the lie that he was not born in the United States. Everything in the United States is now seen through a political lens:

We live in a hypercharged environment, where almost every move is seen through a partisan political lens. Many people don’t believe that a prosecutor such as Mueller could simply follow the facts and the law. But that’s exactly what happens. Prosecutors and agents set aside their personal politics when they work on investigations, and it’s essential that they do so. In this country, we don’t use criminal prosecutions to attack political enemies. That’s the stuff of despots and dictators, not the American justice system. For good prosecutors and agents, this principle is part of their DNA.

If the Republicans win this battle, the United States is doomed.

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