PA burns

 

Why Mastriano’s candidacy presents a special danger to the nation

By George F. Will, Columnist

PHILADELPHIA – Pennsylvania is on fire. Since 1915, the Red Ash colliery has been burning beneath the hills near Wilkes-Barre, and dozens of other fires smolder in abandoned coal mines. This year, however, the important heat is on Pennsylvania’s surface, in the contest to become the state’s next governor, the 2022 election that poses the most risk to the nation. Risk assessment involves weighing the probability of an event against the event’s potential destructiveness. 

So:

Suppose voters pick the Republican candidate, Doug Mastriano. And suppose that late in the evening of Nov. 5, 2024, Gov. Mastriano thinks Pennsylvanians picked the wrong person to receive the state’s presidential electoral votes. Today, candidate Mastriano promises that, as governor, he will have the executive power, and a mandate, to intervene, thus plunging the nation into chaos.

A member of the House of Representatives is 1/435th of one half of one of the federal government’s three branches. A senator is 1 percent of the other half. There are limits to how much actual, as opposed to aesthetic, damage a rogue legislator can do to the nation. A governor, however, can do important things on his own, especially if, as in Pennsylvania, he appoints the secretary of state, who administers elections.

A plucky disregard for public opinion has its charms, but Mastriano perhaps too wholeheartedly embraces John Quincy Adams’s 1825 injunction that politicians should not be “palsied by the will of our constituents.” In this nation, Mastriano’s indifference to the parameters of the possible is apparent regarding abortion, which he wants to outlaw, with no exceptions for rape, incest or the mother’s life, a policy pleasing to (per a Pew Research Center poll) 8 percent of Americans. He opposes same-sex marriage, which (per Gallup) 71 percent support.

George F. Will: While Oz campaigns about campaigning, Fetterman sells a synthetic authenticity

Mastriano easily won (by 23 points) a nine-candidate Republican primary, receiving 43.8 percent of the vote. He is a human cafeteria dispensing ample portions of all the spicy fare that causes many Republicans to salivate, and gives most voters indigestion. He was at (but apparently not in) the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, having used campaign funds to rent buses to bring some supporters to the goings-on that President Donald Trump promised would be “wild.” Mastriano has raised money on a social media network frequented by antisemites, including the one who is accused of murdering 11 at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.

But what makes Mastriano more than an especially exotic political exhibit is his vow to appoint a secretary of state “who’s delegated from me the power to make the corrections to elections, the voting logs and everything. And I can decertify every [voting] machine in the state.” In the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, Pennsylvania was decided by 0.7 and 1.2 percentage points, respectively. In 2024, the state probably will again be closely contested, and its electoral votes could determine the national winner. So, imagine Mastriano, who has neither evidence nor doubts that Trump won the 2020 election, decreeing “corrections” to the election. His motives are frightening because they are pure: He has the scary sincerity of the unhinged whose delusions armor them against evidence.

His state senate Republican colleagues, weary of his hair-on-fire approach to advocating his monomania, removed him as chair of the pertinent committee. It would be more difficult to deal with him as governor while a nation on tenterhooks is a horrified spectator to his keeping his campaign promise to prevent a recurrence of the 2020 enormous Pennsylvania voting fraud that never happened.

Fortunately, Mastriano’s Democratic opponent is two-term Attorney General Josh Shapiro, 49, who when reelected in 2020 received about 3,000 more votes than Joe Biden drew in carrying the state. Although 24 percent of Pennsylvanians are Catholics, Shapiro says he encounters from them more gratitude than resentment for his tenacious assault on the church’s stonewalling about sexual abuses of children by priests. Speaking of religion, the author of Ecclesiastes 10:19 — “money answereth all things” — was a better writer than political scientist. Yes, social media provides inexpensive deliveries of messages, and there is a steeply declining utility of dollars spent on television ads after a saturation is reached. Nevertheless, money matters, and Shapiro will spend more than Mastriano.

From the first census (1790) until that of 1940, Pennsylvania was the second-most populous state. In 1960, it had as many electoral votes (32) as California, which today has 54 to Pennsylvania’s 19. This fall, however, the state will matter more than any other as its voters’ choice of governor will either imperil or reassure the nation that began here.

The end of the Republican Party

Heather Cox Richardson (from the August 16 edition of Letters from an American) reports:

… Trump’s hold on the Republican Party is strong enough that his chosen candidate defeated Representative Liz Cheney in today’s Wyoming primary by about 34 points. Cheney voted with Trump more than 90% of the time during his term, but she took a stand against him after his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. In a concession speech tonight, she told her supporters that two years ago she won the primary with 73% of the vote, and “could easily have done the same again. The path was clear. But it would have required that I go along with President Trump’s lie about the 2020 election. It would have required that I enable his ongoing efforts to unravel a democratic system and attack the foundations of our Republic. That was a path I could not and would not take.”

She vowed to “do whatever it takes to ensure Donald Trump is never again anywhere near the Oval Office.”

Observers noted that the defeat of Cheney marks the passage of another establishment name from the ranks of Republican Party lawmakers. The Lincoln Project tweeted, “Tonight, the nation marks the end of the Republican Party. What remains shares the name and branding of the traditional GOP, but is in fact an authoritarian nationalist cult dedicated only to Donald Trump."

Liz’s Closing Argument

Even in the face of what seems like imminent defeat, she’s not blinking. “If the cost of standing up for the Constitution is losing the House seat, then that’s a price I’m willing to pay,” Cheney told the NYT’s Jonathan Martin earlier this month.

From The Bulwark Here’s Liz Cheney’s final campaign ad for Wyoming voters:

ironies - from this morning's Bulwark

The MAGA Crowd May Venerate 1776 But They Idolize a Would-Be Monarch

Jeffrey Isaac writes in this morning’s _Bulwark_:

The MAGA adherents who bedeck themselves in the symbols of the Revolution imagine themselves to be zealous patriots, modern-day Sons of Liberty and Minutemen at Lexington and Concord, standing against tyranny. The MAGA fanatic who died in a shootout last week after he attacked the FBI field office in Cincinnati said as much, referring to “patriots” in his postings to Trump’s Truth Social website and replying to MAGA superstar Marjorie Taylor Greene that “the next step is the one we used in 1775.”

The irony here is that the real-life American revolutionaries were avowed enemies of monarchy, while today’s wannabe revolutionaries have as their leader and hero Donald Trump, the most arrogant, monarchical president in U.S. history, a man who truly imagines himself to be beyond the law that applies to everyone else.

LOST, NOT STOLEN

The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election July, 2022

The authors are:
Senator John Danforth
Benjamin Ginsberg
The Honorable Thomas B. Griffith David Hoppe
The Honorable J. Michael Luttig
The Honorable Michael W. McConnell
The Honorable Theodore B. Olson
Senator Gordon H. Smith

Below are introductory comments and a preview of the substantive claims and conclusions discovered by the authors and summarized by the Sky Island Scriber.

We are political conservatives who have spent most of our adult lives working to support the Constitution and the conservative principles upon which it is based: limited government, liberty, equality of opportunity, freedom of religion, a strong national defense, and the rule of law.

We have become deeply troubled by efforts to overturn or discredit the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. There is no principle of our Republic more fundamental than the right of the People to elect our leaders and for their votes to be counted accurately. Efforts to thwart the People’s choice are deeply undemocratic and unpatriotic. Claims that an election was stolen, or that the outcome resulted from fraud, are deadly serious and should be made only on the basis of real and powerful evidence. If the American people lose trust that our elections are free and fair, we will lose our democracy. …

We therefore have undertaken an examination of every claim of fraud and miscount put forward by former President Trump and his advocates, and now put the results of those investigations before the American people,and especially before fellow conservatives who may be uncertain about what and whom to believe. Our conclusion is unequivocal: Joe Biden was the choice of a majority of the Electors, who themselves were the choice of the majority of voters in their states. Biden’s victory is easily explained by a political landscape that was much different in 2020 than it was when President Trump narrowly won the presidency in 2016. President Trump waged his campaign for re-election during a devastating worldwide pandemic that caused a severe downturn in the global economy. This, coupled with an electorate that included a small but statistically significant number willing to vote for other Republican candidates on the ballot but not for President Trump, are the reasons his campaign fell short, not a fraudulent election.

… there is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct. It is wrong, and bad for our country, for people to propagate baseless claims that President Biden’s election was not legitimate.

Please do read the entire report!

The hero America needed - Mike Pence

Mike Pence Is an American Hero. Democrats should honor the Republican who’s trying to end Trumpism.

Jonathan V. Last is the editor of The Bulwark.

Following are most of JVL’s observations.

At the January 6 Committee hearings this week, there is likely to be evidence of gross misbehavior—bordering on sedition—from President Donald Trump and his confederates. The object of the hearings is to hold these bad actors to account and propose systemic reforms to prevent another insurrection.

Here is another idea the committee might consider: Take a moment to praise Mike Pence. Congress can name a building in his honor. The House and Senate could propose nonpartisan resolutions recognizing Pence for his service to democracy. And then Joe Biden could give Pence the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Because while Pence may not be the hero you or I might have wanted, he was the hero America needed.

Pence has long been caricatured as a comically loyal stooge standing behind the president with befuddlement on his face and a fly on his head. Yet Pence did more to protect democracy—both on January 6 and since—than any other person inside the Trump administration. Or any Republican not named Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger.

Recall that Trump had demanded that Pence refuse to count the Electoral College votes and certify the election at the Joint Session of Congress that was to formalize the outcome of the 2020 election. When Pence informed him that this was not legally permissible, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported, the president told him, “You can do this. I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.”

Pence knew what the president’s mafioso talk meant. Maggie Haberman writes that on January 5, Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, called the Secret Service to inform them that “the president was going to turn publicly against the vice president, and there could be a security risk to Mr. Pence because of it.”

Which is exactly what happened. At Trump’s January 6 rally on the Mall, the president told his audience, “You’re never going to take back our country with weakness,” and said he hoped Pence would “do the right thing” by not certifying the election. After the mob stormed the Capitol, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”

Around this same time, some of Trump’s supporters erected a gallows—an actual hanging station—outside the Capitol building. Other Trump supporters attacked police, breached the building, and roamed the halls chanting, “Hang Mike Pence.”

Whether Pence knew these details at the time remains unclear—he was being hustled out of harm’s way by the Secret Service. Pence was probably unaware that one mile away, as Trump was watching the scene on television, the president said, two witnesses reportedly told the Committee, “something to the effect of, maybe Mr. Pence should be hung.”

Per Haberman’s reporting, the Secret Service wanted to evacuate Pence from the Capitol, but the vice president refused to leave, because he judged that doing so would weaken our democracy and give Trump and his violent followers a victory. So he stayed in an underground loading dock until it was safe for him to return to the Joint Session and formalize Joe Biden’s victory.

This extraordinary series of events added up to a constitutional crisis. The crisis was set in motion by President Trump and then abetted by Republicans in the House and Senate who voted to reject electors. Had Pence done what the president of the United States and his party’s members in Congress demanded he do, it’s not clear what would have happened next.

Pence single-handedly averted the next catastrophe, and then tried to restore some sense of normal functioning to our democracy. On January 20, Pence returned to the Capitol. The trumpets played a fanfare; he and his wife, Karen, were announced, and they walked down the red carpet together, holding hands. The people assembled to witness the inauguration of Joe Biden clapped politely. When Kamala Harris made her entrance, Pence applauded her in turn.

…

Pence’s attempt to salvage the Republican Party won’t succeed. It will fail not because of any intrinsic problem with the party itself—political parties are merely vessels for the will of the people—but because the problem with the Republican Party is Republican voters. They’re the ones who wanted Trump. They’re the ones who approve of January 6. They’re the ones who insist that Trump actually won in 2020. They’re the ones who are clamoring to nominate him again in 2024.

…

… political parties are not monoliths. About one-third of Republican voters have a relatively clear-eyed view of what happened on January 6. About one-fifth of Republican voters know that Joe Biden won a sacred landslide victory over Trump in 2020. About one in 20 Republican voters prefers Pence to Trump for 2024.

Democrats ought to be trying to pry these voters away from the Republican Party in the event that Trump runs again. By making it clear that the Democratic Party appreciates Mike Pence as a hero of democracy—and that GOP lawmakers do not—they might just persuade a small but crucial percentage of these Pence Republicans to cross over in 2024.

Liz Cheney - a woman of steel and defender of our democracy

Frank Bruni, in the NY Times, explains how Liz Cheney Will Not Tolerate Trump’s Lies.

When it comes to defense of our democracy, Liz Cheney is a woman of steel - and is the star of the prime-time television hearings on the Jan. 6 riot.

With thanks to our Editor-at-Large, Sherry. Following is the full text of the Bruni essay.

BEGIN QUOTE

I keep waiting for Liz Cheney to flinch.

I keep looking for some sign that her nerve is faltering, that the attacks are getting to her and that the loneliness of her situation — unconditionally contemptuous of Donald Trump, emphatically committed to a Republican Party beyond him — has become unbearable.

But no. She’s all in and she’s all steel. It could well be the political death of her. Or it could give her a kind of immortality more meaningful than any office.

Cheney, who represents Wyoming in the House, is front and center this week, with a starring role as the vice chair of the House committee whose investigation into the Jan. 6 riot has reached a dramatic culmination in prime-time television hearings. She’s one of just two Republicans on the nine-member panel.

But while the other, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, isn’t running for re-election, Cheney is in the middle of a furiously contested primary battle against a prominent Wyoming Republican official who has welded herself to Trump. Just two weeks ago, Trump traveled to the deep red state, which he won by more than 40 percentage points in 2020, to command his supporters to oust Cheney when they vote on Aug. 16. He said that she had “thrown in her lot with the radical left.”

That statement, like so much of his blather, was ludicrous. And it didn’t cow Cheney in the least.

In a subsequent interview with Robert Costa of CBS News, she called Republicans’ subservience to Trump “a cult of personality.” She said that the committee’s investigation had cemented her horror over the events of Jan. 6, which reflected a coordinated movement. “It’s extremely broad,” she said. “It’s extremely well organized. It’s really chilling.”

And when asked to analyze the obsequious comportment of the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, she said that it’s driven by “craven political calculation.” And she let him have it.

“He is embracing those in our party who are antisemitic,” she said. “He is embracing those in our party who are white nationalists. He is lying about what happened on Jan. 6. And he’s turned his back on the Constitution.” There wasn’t a wobble or a waver in those words. Not a lie, either.

That’s what makes Cheney so important. Whatever you think of her father, her past or the rest of her ideology, she has, for the past year and a half, been an unstinting, unflagging and — frankly — inspiring model of principle above partisanship, of truth over tribalism. While nearly all the other Republicans in Congress keep changing their tunes to harmonize with Trump, she refuses to sing along.

It’s certainly possible that she relishes all the attention — and, from some quarters, applause — that her rebellion attracts. There may be moral vanity in the mix of her motives. And she’s no doubt playing a long game, with its own wager: that somewhere downfield, Republicans will rediscover a semblance of sanity, and she’ll be rewarded for not having lost her marbles.

Don’t take it from me. Take it from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the wackadoodle Georgia Republican. “Let me remind everyone, while Democrats are being fooled by Liz Cheney right now, they should remember that she is not a Democrat,” Greene said in January on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. “As a matter of fact, she has a very conservative voting record — more conservative than some of my Republican colleagues.”

Greene was prompted by reports that Democrats in Wyoming might cross over into the Republican primary to back Cheney, and she added: “Democrats, while you think it’s fun because Liz Cheney is totally dishing on Trump and trying to do everything she can to destroy us and Trump and Ivanka now and all these people, you’re getting tricked. So while you’re going to go vote for her in the Republican primary in Wyoming, you’re voting for a snake that’s going to bite you, too.”

Such venom! And such bunk, inasmuch as Cheney openly disagrees with Democrats about sweeping voting reforms, disagrees with Democrats about the size of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, disagrees with Democrats about abortion. She has made only limited cause with them. She’s clear about that — and about her passion for that cause, which is to hold Trump accountable once and for all.

I’d say she’s a woman without a country, except she has this country — our country — foremost in her thoughts. She knows what makes it special, and she recognizes what her Republican colleagues in Congress choose to ignore, which is that the “sacred obligation to defend the peaceful transfer of power has been honored by every American president — except one,” as she observed when she received a 2022 Profile in Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston in April.

“The question for every one of us is, in this time of testing, will we do our duty?” she said, articulating the stakes in a precise and irrefutable manner that will surely stand the test of time. “Or will we look away from danger, ignore the threat, embrace the lies?”

END QUOTE

Just so we are clear about your Scriber’s positions. I know that Cheney is an ardent conservative: As Bruni put it “Whatever you think of her father, her past or the rest of her ideology, she has, for the past year and a half, been an unstinting, unflagging and — frankly — inspiring model of principle above partisanship, of truth over tribalism. While nearly all the other Republicans in Congress keep changing their tunes to harmonize with Trump, she refuses to sing along.”

Most if not all positions puts her at odds with my progressive positions.

“But her stands against Trumpism and for our constitution and rule of law attracts my admiration. Again, from Bruni: ”She’s all in and she’s all steel. It could well be the political death of her. Or it could give her a kind of immortality more meaningful than any office."