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Control of Congress Key
Dan Mclaughlin has a lesson for NRO readers: At the New York Times “senior national political brain trust” thinks President Joe Biden will lose this November. Mclaughlin cautions readers to start preparing for the “wilderness,” with all the thematic and rhetorical shifts that come with being the party out of power. This, Mclaughlin warns, is a more important message to deliver, in June, than “happy talk about Biden’s prospects and Trump’s unpopularity.”
The article (2,800 words) is also chock-full of signs that the Resistance, like the Bourbons of old, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The whole piece exudes the legal and cultural left’s utter incapacity for self-awareness. Right up front, we’re told: “One group has hired a new auditor to withstand any attempt by a second Trump administration to unleash the Internal Revenue Service against them.”
The NYT political reporters – Charlie Savage, Reid J. Epstein, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan –warn of “the early timing, volume and scale of the planning underway to push back against a potential second Trump administration are without precedent. . . . “
Interviews with more than 30 officials and leaders of organizations about their plans revealed a combination of acute exhaustion and acute anxiety.” That should tell us something right away: The Times senior national political brain trust think Joe Biden is going to lose. It’s time to start preparing for the wilderness, with all the thematic and rhetorical shifts that come with being the party out of power. And this is a more important message to deliver, in June, than happy talk about Biden’s prospects and Trump’s unpopularity.
The article is also chock-full of signs that the Resistance, like the Bourbons of old, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. The whole piece exudes the legal and cultural left’s utter incapacity for self-awareness. Right up front, we’re told: “One group has hired a new auditor to withstand any attempt by a second Trump administration to unleash the Internal Revenue Service against them.”
Wondering what the eff is going on? The IRS is going to conduct politically weaponized audits to defy congressional oversight, as it did under Barack Obama to the Tea Party.
The IRS mailing out personalized campaign material for the president, as it did for Joe Biden in 2021? Leaks of the personal tax returns of political foes, as happened to Donald Trump and to which the Biden administration responded by embracing the outlets that published the illegal leaks?
Democracy-Proof
Rejected by the Supreme Court was an attempt to nullify federal approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. Liberals fear a new Trump administration could rescind the approval or use a 19th-century morality law to criminalize sending it across state lines. “To nullify” suggests to brazenly disregard a law, continues Mclaughlin.
The lawsuit against the FDA — which, by the time it reached the Supreme Court, no longer addressed the FDA’s approval of the pill but only more recent FDA deregulatory steps — simply sought to subject executive action to judicial review, which one might think the “Resistance” would favor, if this was at all a principled stance. But you may get whiplash when the authors rail against how a new administration could “use a 19th-century morality law.” That would be a federal statute that was passed by Congress, and which the current administration is — to use the apt word — nullifying by refusing to obey or enforce it. It’s really a remarkable accomplishment to denounce nullification of the law in the very same sentence that warns against ceasing to nullify the law.
Will Voters Spoil the Party
Now we are told, as racial justice protests sometimes descended into riots, Mr. Trump had an order drafted to invoke the Insurrection Act — a law that grants presidents emergency power to use federal troops on domestic soil to restore order — but never signed it.”
Oh, now it’s safe to admit that these were riots? At the time, a revolt among Times staffers got the paper’s op-ed editor fired for even allowing a U.S. senator to broach the topic of using troops to address the rioting, the theory being that there was nothing but peaceful protest going on.
Liberal Progressive Federalism
Lawyers working for Democratic state attorneys general have been quietly studying the playbooks of their Republican counterparts in Texas and Florida, whom they view as being most successful at attacking and obstructing the Biden administration. A person with knowledge of these conversations told Mr. Mclaughlin on the condition of anonymity, one of the goals is to observe what aspects of the red-state anti-Biden playbook could be appropriated to ensure that Democrats can play offense as well as defense against a potential Trump administration.
Journalists are going on the official payroll now. For example, the Brennan Center “hired the journalist Barton Gellman from The Atlantic to help with scenario planning and tabletop exercises focused on what could unfurl during a Trump presidency, with a report likely to be made public this summer.”
If we had two parties and two classes of activists, advocates, and public intellectuals who shared a common commitment to American constitutional and classical-liberal principles, there might and ought to be common ground when a bad, unprincipled man stands to gain the presidency. But with very few, tepid exceptions (such as belatedly and grudgingly accepting Electoral Count Act reform), Democrats and their public supporters have been unwilling to accept any sort of systemic reforms that would reduce their power in office, and they have instead treated Trump more as an opportunity than a threat — doing everything in their power to elevate Trump and his loyalists and imitators within the GOP in order to run against them in elections while seeking to blur the distinctions between Trump and others in the GOP.
… that strategy, however profitable for partisan gain, fails to contemplate the possibility of electoral failure. And now, that possibility stares them in the face — and they want the benefit of all the aspects of the system they’ve tried to tear down, and which Republicans and conservatives have sought to preserve (often without help or thanks from their own party leader) for the benefit of all and out of duty to posterity.
