Back to “Normal” in 21? We should be so lucky.

There’s been a meme floating around for the past several years, pushed perhaps most assiduously by the New York Times’s Ross Douthat, and given another shove in his recent column “There Will Be No Trump Coup”, picturing that man in the White House as a “noisy weakling, not a budding autocrat”, an embarrassment rather than a danger, a bit of wishful thinking given an endorsement in the Washington Post by Dan Drezner, the notion being that Trump is like a fat-assed, drunken neighbor who’s forever threatening to shoot the next n*gger who runs across his yard—well, if he just could find his shotgun, and if he could remember to buy some shells, which he most certainly will do just as soon as he gets his license back and fixes that flat on his car. Sure he’s awful, but he’ll be gone soon, and no harm done. Says Ross

Three weeks from now, we will reach an end to speculation about what Donald Trump will do if he faces political defeat, whether he will leave power like a normal president or attempt some wild resistance. Reality will intrude, substantially if not definitively, into the argument over whether the president is a corrupt incompetent who postures as a strongman on Twitter or a threat to the Republic to whom words like “authoritarian” and even “autocrat” can be reasonably applied.

Dan also gets a chuckle out of the Donald’s lack of organizational skills:

The best supporting evidence [for Douthat’s argument] is watching the president’s shambolic campaign in recent months. Trump is also intent on forcing the federal government into generating policy victories for himself and scandals for his Democratic rivals — and it looks like he will flounder at delivering either. His entire reelection effort has the whiff of an undergraduate deciding to plagiarize to get a good grade and choosing a bad paper to crib from.

Well, yes, it’s unlikely that Trump will simply refuse to accept the results of the election if he’s defeated and maintain himself in the White House with a literal Praetorian Guard, but what if we get a “Florida II”-style fiasco, which could tie up the country for months, with endless conspiracy and counter-conspiracy theories, all likely to be decided by the Supreme Court, which these days isn’t looking quite as supreme as it used to? And what about the horror of horrors, another Trump electoral win, despite a fat plurality, or even a majority, for Biden nationwide?

And what if “our” dreams do come true, that Trump is soundly defeated, with no one thinking otherwise than Donald himself? I think both Ross and Dan are wanting to believe that once Trump is gone, we will be back to “normal”, at least pretty much, and we can pick up where we left off. For Reformicon Ross, that strikes me as a pathetic joke: the Republican Party is no longer the Republican Party. It is the Trump Party, and will be the Trump Party for at least another decade, if not more. All of Ross’s clever, pro-family ideas will get zero traction in that ragin’ maelstrom o’ racism that now constitutes the “soul” of the Republican Party. As for Dan, he has repeatedly noted the wreckage that Trump and his secretaries of state, the massively ineffectual Rex Tillerson, and the massively corrupt Mike Pompeo, have inflicted on the U.S. State Department. Is that just going to go away?

If we are lucky—a quality few would associate with life in the 21st century—we could get a reasonably placid eight- or twelve-year interlude under Biden/Harris, as a “reward” for all we have suffered in the past two decades. But I wouldn’t count on it. What if we get not a moderate but a “socialist” Democratic administration, one not driven by Trumpian self-dealing but passionate idealism and righteous rage? What future Democratic administration will take seriously anything Republicans say, when it is abundantly clear that the party is entirely without honor? Attempts at congressional oversight will be met with the same refusals as the Trump administration employed, and who will resolve the matter? The Supreme Court, aka “Trump’s Trained Seals”? Chief Justice Roberts already showed his lack of nerve in the ObamaCare case, when he cravenly failed to uphold the right of the Legislative Branch to, you know, legislate, handing down a split the baby decision that indeed split the baby, with the expectable results: a dead baby. What Donald Trump did to save himself a Democratic administration will proudly do to save the planet. Trump has “taught” us that you don’t have to play by the rules. It is not a lesson that is easy to forget.

Afterwords
We are very likely heading for a sort of plebiscitary democracy. George W. Bush liked to style himself “the Decider”, meaning that he set the course of the country for four years, with the role of Congress to be no more than to follow his commands. For decades, senators and representatives have become more and more fearful of casting “meaningful” votes and much prefer allowing the president and the courts to do the heavy lifting. The elaborate committee system in Congress has become more and more atrophied, first under the Reagan administration, which wanted to take control of government spending away from a perennially Democratic House of Representatives. In the first year of Reagan’s first term I was at a conference and a young woman, a staffer on the House Appropriations Committee, speaking of the dozen odd subcommittee chairs, said “they castrated those strong old men.” When the Republicans swept the House in 1994, Newt Gingrich abandoned the detailed budgetary process developed during the Reagan years, further reducing the role of committee and subcommittee chairs, and further reducing the number of “embarrassing” votes that members might have to take. Since 2010, Republicans have abandoned any policy role for the Congress regarding budget issues, voting against whatever Obama proposed and voting for everything that Trump wanted. Congress can only serve as an equal branch of government when its members see their power as coming from the institution itself. Today, congressional reps and senators see themselves as either the servant or the enemy of the president, and its once independent role has withered. The elaborate provisions for the legislative process set forth in the Constitution, which surely take up half the document, are now little more than a dead letter.

A recent article in Politico, “Your credibility … will die in this room” indicates the level of bitterness felt by Senate Democrats (who are, invariably, the moderate ones in the party) over Sen. McConnell’s handling of judicial appointments and suggests that if the current Supreme Court takes an aggressively negative approach to upcoming Democratic legislation, Democrats could become explicitly confrontational towards the Court, to the extent of defying its rulings. Some members of the Court—notably, I would say, Justices Thomas and Alioto—would not shy from the confrontation, but Roberts certainly would, and he would need only one ally. A Democratic Congress and President could easily, acting under powers explicitly granted in the Constitution, completely reshape the role of the judiciary in the U.S. These powers, most obviously the right of Congress to restrict the Court’s appellate jurisdiction, have never been used, but it is only “custom” that bars their use. And what is “custom” these days?