Before I start digging into this week’s pile of Republican lies and hypocrisy, not to mention their ultimate fealty to no one other than the rich donors who tell them exactly how high to jump (they don’t even wait to be asked), let us begin with one more fist-pump for Doug Jones and his victory over the slavery-saluting, “Jew”-attorney hiring, prancing pedophile, Roy Moore. That upset win—powered by both a huge black turnout and a significant shift toward the Democratic candidate compared to just a year ago among wealthy, well-educated whites—has to be the most electrifying, shocking, humiliatory (that may not be a word, but I’m on a Roll Tide Roll), election result in a long, long time, especially in the Deep South. Additionally, I want to praise Alabama’s other Senator, Republican Richard Shelby, whose announcement that he would write in another Republican, but not vote for Moore, also helped put Jones over the top. We wonder when Republicans will put principle over partisanship, so when it does happen it’s important to give proper credit.
The point of winning an election, however, is to gain a seat at the table where policy is made, and that brings us to the question of when, actually, Doug Jones will gain that seat from Republican Luther Strange, who no longer has a mandate to hold it. According to Alabama law, the certification of Jones’s victory could come as early as December 22, or as late as January 3. The Senate can swear him in immediately afterwards. The operative word there is “can”, as it really is up to Mitch McConnell.
Senator Harris and her fellow Democrats have demanded that McConnell should, in Chuck Schumer’s words, “hit pause” on negotiations over the Trump (family) tax cut plan until Jones takes his seat. With Jones, there would be 49 members of the Democratic caucus, and an even slimmer margin for the tax plan.
The precedent for such a pause is clear, and right on point. During the debate over the Affordable Care Act, Massachusetts (at the time, at least) Republican Scott Brown defeated Democrat Martha Coakley in a January 2010 special election to the U.S. Senate, an incredibly impactful result because it cost Democrats their 60th vote and the ability to overcome a filibuster.
Leading Republicans—including Mitch McConnell and John McCain—demanded that Democrats and President Obama hit pause in their push to pass health care reform until Brown took his seat. Change the word “Massachusetts” to “Alabama” and McConnell’s words from 2010 apply just as much in 2017: “Let’s honor the wishes of the people of Massachusetts.” And that’s exactly what Senate Democrats did. Here’s then-Majority Leader Harry Reid’s statement: "We’re going to wait until the new senator arrives until we do anything more on health care." Incredibly, three years later Brown claimed that Democrats had pushed back seating him and had “rammed [health care reform] through before I got there.” The Fox News host on whose show he told that story said: “I remember.” Whatever she remembered, that did not happen. Politifact found Brown’s claim: “False.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of watching Democrats respect the democratic process rather than push their advantage, while Republicans take every advantage that isn’t explicitly ruled out by the Constitution. I hope the American people care enough about the democratic process to vote for the candidates who protect it, and to punish those who trash it.
This business about the tax bill and seating Doug Jones isn’t even the only example of the Republican double standard we’ve seen this past week. Republicans have been going after Special Counsel Robert Mueller because a member of his team expressed harshly unfavorable opinions about the prospect of a Trump presidency. Never mind that Mueller removed that team member last July. Judd Legum at Think Progress argued that conservatives are engaged in a “highly coordinated effort to prepare the Republican base for Mueller’s firing and the firestorm of criticism that would follow if Trump went down that path.”
Fire Mueller? Let me ask, does anybody here remember Ken Starr? He wasn’t a staffer who was removed from an investigation of a sitting president, he was the guy leading the investigation of President Bill Clinton. Starr was also an active player in conservative politics before being appointed independent counsel in what started out as the Whitewater investigation. He had co-chaired a Republican congressional campaign and considered throwing his hat in the ring as a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Virginia. You may also remember that this Republican politician got the job after a three-judge panel voted 2-1 to remove Robert Fiske from that role and give it to him. The judge in charge of the panel, David Sentelle, had lunched with Republican Senator Lauch Faircloth—who spearheaded the push to remove Fiske in the first place—during the time the panel was making its decision to install Starr. Now that’s partisan bias in an investigation of a president.
On double standards, let’s go back to the tax bill itself. In two sentences, Ryan Sit of Newsweek nailed the GOP:
Republicans have spent years complaining about how Congress spent less than a year reviewing Obamacare before voting to overhaul one-sixth of the American economy.
But that's a lifetime compared to how long the GOP waited over the weekend before passing a tax bill that could overhaul the entire economy: About eight hours.
Sit was talking specifically about the Senate’s passage of its version of the tax bill, but his comparison works for the process as a whole. And how about the hypocrisy of Trump spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who last week accused CNN, without any evidence mind you, of “purposely putting out information that you know to be false.” This came from someone whose boss has told so many lies it’s getting hard to count—but the New York Times counted the times he told “demonstrably and substantially false statements” anyway. Their analysis found that the number of such statements from Trump in his first ten months in office was six times the number from Barack Obama over his eight years as president.
This billionaire’s tax cut would be an absolute disaster for our country. It is the wrong kind of tax plan because it provides little to no economic benefit at great cost—a cost Republicans will no doubt seek to recoup at the expense of the most vulnerable Americans. Additionally, it will further exacerbate our already too-wide economic inequality by sending money up the economic ladder, and it comes at the wrong time in our economic cycle—when our economy is already operating at or close to capacity and should not be borrowing to prime the pump any further, at least not to give a tax cut to the wealthiest among us.
Republicans are desperate for a victory, and seating Doug Jones could cost them that victory if Bob Corker sticks with his initial ‘no’ vote (UPDATE: oh well, Corker went over to the dark side) and one other Republican does the right thing for the American people by joining him. Mitch McConnell, however, will never allow such a minor thing as his own words from seven years earlier to stand in the way of achieving that victory.
As anyone familiar with what happened to 2016 Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland surely knows, McConnell has demonstrated time and again that there is no principle on which he will not do a 180 if it suits his party and the economic elites on whose behalf it wages class warfare. In fact, there is only one good way to put the word “principles” and the name “Mitch McConnell” in the same sentence. Here it is: Mitch McConnell has no principles.
Ian Reifowitz is the author of Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity (Potomac Books).