The Georgia Run-Off, The Electoral Certification, & Holding Our Collective Breath
Courtesy of TheEnglishBlog.com
The Denier-in-Chief said in Georgia yesterday that “he hoped Vice President Mike Pence ‘comes through for us,’ an allusion to Mr. Pence’s role presiding over Congress when it meets to certify Mr. Biden’s victory on Wednesday. ‘He’s a great guy,’ he said of Mr. Pence. ‘Of course, if he doesn’t come through, I won’t like him quite as much.’”
Are we on the middle school playground?
Besides, au contraire. Mr. Pence has done nothing in the past four years, or as governor of Indiana, to show us he’s a great guy. What he is, though, is a good “company” man. He does what he’s told. Period. He’s been doing what’s he’s been told since the Madman was elected.
But, as I have said before, Mr. Pence didn’t take an oath to his boss. He took an oath to uphold The Constitution. Whoopsy!
For that matter, so did Donald Trump and Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. Uh … not so much, huh? And what about the congresspersons who plan to challenge the certified election results tomorrow?
Paul Krugman posits in this morning’s New York Times that the Republican party has gone feral. Later in the piece, he names it “malevolent tribalism.” I’m not sure he has it quite right. Consider his words:
“‘[G]rass roots’ anger is actually being orchestrated from the top. If a large part of the Republican base believes, groundlessly, that the election was stolen, it’s because that’s what leading figures in the party have been saying. Now politicians are citing widespread skepticism about the election results as a reason to reject the outcome—but they themselves conjured that skepticism out of thin air.”
The question that raises for me is: why? What do they gain from this parthenogenetic, toxic skepticism?
Mr. Krugman asks the same question in another form. “And what’s striking if you look into the background of the politicians stoking resentment against elites is how privileged many of them are. Josh Hawley, the first senator to declare that he would object to certification of the election results, rails against elites but is himself a graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School. Cruz, now leading the effort, has degrees from Princeton and Harvard.
“The point isn’t that they’re hypocrites; it is that these aren’t people who have been mistreated by the system. So why are they so eager to bring the system down?”
Really. Because it’s the system that’s in place that is feeding their supposed power. Do they see something the rest of us don’t?
Neal K. Katyal and Sam Koppelman are the authors of Impeach: The Case Against Donald Trump. Their essay this morning is entitled “Why Congress Should Impeach Trump Again: And this time, he should be convicted. The country cannot risk his becoming president again.” Now this is a plausible argument for putting the country through impeachment again.
They write “Whether he acknowledges it or not, President Trump is leaving the White House on Jan. 20—but right now, there is nothing stopping him from running in 2024. That is a terrifying prospect, because the way he has conducted himself over the past two months, wielding the power of the presidency to try to steal another term in office, has threatened one of our republic’s most essential traditions: the peaceful transfer of power.”
Yes, and these congresspeople are in favor of this … why?
Ross Douthat was particularly self-effacing in his Op-Ed piece this morning. He writes, “This context [in which we are currently living] makes prediction a fool’s errand. You can’t use historical case studies to model pandemic-era runoff elections in which the president is making war on the officials of his own party and some of his fiercest online supporters are urging a boycott of the vote.”
“But Trump’s diminishment is definitely necessary if the American right is ever going to be a force for something other than deeper decadence, deeper gridlock, fantasy politics and partisan battles that have nothing to do with the challenges the country really faces. Or to distill the point: You don’t have to see Trump as a Caesar to recognize his behavior this month as Nero-esque, playing a QAnon-grade fiddle while the pandemic burns.” At least he made me laugh. That last sentence is brilliant!
“Senator Susan Collins of Maine famously explained her vote to acquit Donald Trump by saying she thought he had learned ‘a pretty big lesson.’” Uh, no, Senator Collins with all due respect. “Clearly, Mr. Trump learned a different lesson—that he was above the law.”
Is that what these congressional upstarts want? Immunity from the law? Sorry. No can do.
Even as Gabriel Sterling refuted each of the claims made in the presidential, telephonic harangue that masqueraded as a request and was instead the strongarm tactic of a regime in its death throes, the always-insightful Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni speculate on what Mr. Pence will do on Wednesday.
They write, “The fact that Mr. Pence’s role is almost entirely scripted by … parliamentarians is not expected to ease a rare moment of tension between himself and the president, who has come to believe Mr. Pence’s role will be akin to that of chief justice, an arbiter who plays a role in the outcome. In reality, it will be more akin to the presenter opening the Academy Award envelope and reading the name of the movie that won Best Picture, with no say in determining the winner.”
Why is that? Because the Academy has already voted. Um, rephrase … Why is that? Because the People have already voted.
Back to Katyal and Koppelman: “In 2008, a young member of the Judiciary Committee said, ‘The business of high crimes and misdemeanors goes to the question of whether or not the person serving as president of the United States put their own interests, their personal interests, ahead of public service.’ That congressman’s name was Mike Pence—and he was exactly right.”
Wait … what? That was Mike Pence?? Our Mike Pence?!
Karni and Haberman: “[T]he vice president’s political calculation has long been that being the unstintingly loyal No. 2 would give him the best shot at inheriting the Trump mantle. One person close to Mr. Pence described Wednesday’s duties as gut-wrenching, saying that he would need to balance the president’s misguided beliefs about government with his own years of preaching deference to the Constitution.”
The Constitution. Our Constitution?! Whoa.
“Members of the vice president’s circle expect that Mr. Pence will follow the rules while on the Senate floor and play his ceremonial role as scripted, aides said. But after that, he will have to compensate by showing his fealty to Mr. Trump.”
Fealty. Isn’t that for serfs, esnes, and peons? And didn’t that go out with the Middle Ages?
The always-fabulous Billy Porter, who plays Pray Tell in the series Pose on FX, quoted Our Lady of Poetic Gravitas Maya Angelou in his Seven Rules to Live By.” Rule #5 is: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Did Mr. Pence show us, in a rare burst of honest service, who he is in 2008? Wouldn’t that be a miracle? A man who knows what his sworn oath means. A man who follows the rule of law. A man who, when push comes to shove, does the right thing, despite the fact that “with just 16 days left in the administration, Mr. Pence is at risk of meeting the fate that he has successfully avoided for four years: being publicly attacked by the president.”
I have only one consolation to offer us all for today’s election runoff and tomorrow’s certification of the electoral vote. There is, indeed, a rule of law, Beloved. A Rule of Law so much bigger and better than the skepticism, the nihilism, and the narcissism we are seeing played out in our government that we can all rest easy—even if we’re worried about either of these outcomes. In the long run, that Law, the Law of the Cosmos, Divine Law, always prevails. Let us pray, and then the Law will tell.
Dr. Susan Corso is a spiritual teacher, the founder of iAmpersand, and the author of The Mex Mysteries, the Boots & Boas Books, and spiritual nonfiction. Her essays address the intersection between spirituality and culture. Find out more at www.susancorso.com