Like the Bourbons of old, progressive Democrats have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
The New York Times thinks it’s important to tell you that “The Resistance to a New Trump Administration Has Already Started.” The importance to the Times of this message is underscored by its printing more than 2,800 words in the widely read Sunday edition, bylined to four senior national political reporters: Charlie Savage, Reid J. Epstein, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan. The article warns that “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 thinks 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.”
What would that look like? The IRS conducting politically weaponized audits and defying 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?
Next up:
While the Supreme Court on Thursday rejected 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 disregarding a law. 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.
Maybe the most unintentionally hilarious quote comes from Patrick Gaspard of the CAP Action Fund, “the political arm of the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress.” Gaspard warns: “We have to democracy-proof our actual institutions and the values that we share.”
Democracy-proof. Can’t have the voters spoil the party.
We’re told now that “in 2020, 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.
“The A.C.L.U. is preparing litigation that would challenge the Insurrection Act” — wait, suppressing insurrection is bad now?
There’s a warning here from a group called Democracy Forward against the “weaponization of government,” and ACLU director Anthony Romero vows, “We’re going to be the David to the government’s Goliath.” And yet these same forces have reveled in playing Goliath: prosecuting Trump in every available jurisdiction with abusively broad readings of law, jailing old pro-lifers who are praying outside clinics, hounding Jack Phillips to the ends of the earth even to this day, prosecuting whistleblowers, . . . the list goes on and on. Yet at every opportunity to tyrant-proof the executive branch by reducing the vast scope of its discretionary powers in domestic policy, they are bitterly opposed.
Finally, we get to the last refuge of the wholly insincere 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, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said one of their goals was to see 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.
I’m guessing that we will see a very abrupt decline in the number of articles written complaining about standing to sue. In the event that the FDA withdrew its approval of mifepristone, aides to outgoing Washington governor Jay Inslee say that the state “would argue that the F.D.A. lacked authority to restrict use of the existing stockpiles if the pills did not cross state lines.” Oh, there are limits to the commerce power now, you say? Why didn’t anyone think of this before?
And, of course, journalists are going on the official payroll now, as 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. But 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.