By Derrick Crowe
June 30, 2018
Scott Keller is the solicitor general of the State of Texas. He went on the Texas Standard radio program today to praise retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Keller used the word “civility” repeatedly to describe the man whom he called the closest thing the Court has had to a libertarian justice.
Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion in Citizens United. He said:
“The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.”
Citizens United triggered a titanic increase in the influence of big donor money in U.S. politics. According to Open Secrets:
During the 2016 election cycle, the top 20 individual donors (whose contributions were disclosed) gave more than $500 million combined to political organizations. The 20 largest organizational donors also gave a total of more than $500 million, and more than $1 billion came from the top 40 donors.
Kennedy was wrong, to put it mildly. A 2016 Issue One-Ipsos poll found that: “93 percent of respondents believe that elected officials listen more to deep-pocketed donors than regular voters.”
The GOP set out to prove those respondents right. Fast forward to the 2017 battle over the GOP tax scam, quoted from the Brennan Center:
Take the case of Doug Deason. Seven years ago his father, Darwin, sold his company to Xerox for $6.4 billion. Doug is Darwin’s only child, and a major GOP donor. In June, Doug Deason announced the “Dallas piggy bank” is closed until there is progress on health care and taxes. Deason said he had already refused to host fundraisers for two House Republicans. “Get Obamacare repealed and replaced, get tax reform passed,” Deason demanded of the GOP. “You control the Senate. You control the House. You have the presidency. There’s no reason you can’t get this done. Get it done and we’ll open it [fundraising] back up.”
Earlier, the Koch Brothers’ network was crystal clear about the fallout if Congress failed to pass tax reform: “If they don’t make good on these promises [for tax reform] … there are going to be consequences, and quite frankly there should be,” said Sean Lansing, chief operating officer of the Koch network’s political arm, Americans For Prosperity.
Steven Law, president of the Senate Leadership Fund, a GOP Super Pac affiliated with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, was equally blunt. “Tax reform is a must-do for Republicans,” he told the New York Post. “[Donors] would be mortified if we didn’t live up to what we’ve committed to on tax reform.”
…Tax reform’s financial importance to the GOP was made obvious earlier this month when Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told an NBC News reporter “financial contributions will stop” if tax reform does not pass.
In the House, Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) related what he was hearing from his financial backers about tax reform: “My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again.”’ His colleague, Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.), forecast a bleak result for the GOP in the midterm elections if tax reform does not pass, “We don’t get taxes through, we’re all going home. Pack the bags.”
Yesterday, Justice Kennedy announced his retirement so that Trump and this very special class of Senate Republicans can pick his replacement — the first Supreme Court retirement since Republicans quite literally stole the Supreme Court seat President Obama had the right to fill at the end of his term.
Back then, according to The Washington Post:
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) instantly announced that he would not allow whomever Obama nominated — ultimately Judge Merrick Garland — to receive confirmation hearings and a vote. Much was made at the time that this could hurt Republican senators up for reelection.
A small group of Democratic campaign operatives proposed an aggressive $30 million campaign that would target five Senate Republicans running for reelection in states that Obama had won twice.
According to a 17-page PowerPoint proposal, which was recently provided to The Washington Post, the plan called for creating the “SCOTUS PAC,” essentially a super PAC that liberal groups and wealthy donors would contribute to and run several mini-campaigns pressuring the key Republicans.
“Research about the nomination process has been dominated by right-wing groups that stood up a response within hours [of Scalia’s death] and had a seven-figure paid media campaign active within days,” the proposal said.
The idea fell flat with West Wing advisers and other liberal strategists.
Instead, a bare-bones campaign was run out of consulting firms close to the White House and congressional leaders. They failed to applying pressure on those five Republicans.
Speaking of that blundered effort, Credo Action’s Heidi Hess told The Huffington Post that it was a mistake to even field a candidate like Garland in the first place:
“There were options to pick someone that the base would have been mobilized to support because of who they were and what they represented for the court…Garland felt like a pick to play chess with Republicans, and it didn’t work because they don’t play respectability and civility — ‘Obviously this man is qualified, so we’re not going to block him.’ That was never going to happen.”
When Trump picked Gorsuch to fill that stolen seat, conservatives outspent liberal groups 20-to-1 on television advertising. According to The Washington Post, from January 31 through the second week in March, “total ad spending was more than $3.3 million supporting Gorsuch, with just $181,000 from liberal groups opposing his confirmation, according to the GOP estimate.” Senate Democrats punted on fielding a similarly urgent advertising campaign, instead putting the onus grassroots organizers to push back.
At the end of the article, the WAPO article said that Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chris Van Hollen was “still hopeful” that they could stop Republicans from getting 60 votes for Gorsuch.
“As of right now, I think that they’re a long way from getting to that number,” Van Hollen said.
Gorsuch was confirmed. This past week, he participated in decisions that protected the ability of fake crisis pregnancy centers to get between a woman and her right to an abortion, upheld Trump’s Muslim ban, and gutted public sector unions’ ability to raise operating funds.
Then Gorsuch’s colleague, Justice Kennedy, who authored that horrific decision in Citizens United in such a civil way, announced he would retire this summer so that Trump and the Senate GOP could pick his successor. According to NARAL President Ilyse Hogue, “ We are now, without doubt, one Trump-nominated justice away from a Court that overturns Roe v. Wade.”
But hey, at least Kennedy had great manners.
Earlier this week, U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) riled up the oh-so-civil Washington dinner party circuit when she called for people to confront Trump administration Cabinet members. Here’s the statement from Waters:
“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere. We’ve got to get the children connected to their parents,” Waters said at the Wilshire Federal Building, according to video of the event.
“We don’t know what damage has been done to these children. All that we know is they’re in cages. They’re in prisons. They’re in jails. I don’t care what they call it, that’s where they are and Mr. President, we will see you every day, every hour of the day, everywhere that we are to let you know you cannot get away with this,” she added.
Waters was responding to the prior day’s incredible scene in which my Democratic socialist comrades in the D.C. Metro area confronted DHS Secretary Nielsen about the Trump administration’s proto-Nazi family separation policy at the border. Nielsen apparently just wanted to unironically have some Mexican people prepare her some food from their homeland while she and her president and their lackeys held children hostage so their parents would give up their asylum claims and their unbelievable anguish could be used to scare other adults into not fleeing violence in their home countries.
The video of that confrontation went viral and the Trump administration temporarily lost control of the narrative. Administration officials started backtracking, not because Congress got its act together, but because the people have had enough of watching their values and their livelihoods be violated.
When Waters called for repeats of the Metro D.C. DSA action, she was engaged in classic movement building and calling for effective, real, broad-based resistance. It fits into the prior framework for interacting with Trump’s proto-fascism, much like when she and civil rights icon John Lewis boycotted Trump’s State of the Union. It’s what nonviolent resistance theorists like Dr. Gene Sharp called “social and economic noncooperation.” These actions strike at the heart of political power: obedience. Waters, Lewis, and the folks in the Metro DC DSA chapter know that, as Sharp wrote in “Waging Nonviolent Struggle,” when you undermine the psychological identification of the population with the ruler and you build people’s self-confidence to disobey, you are striking at the heart of the oppressive system’s power.
Unfortunately, that broader rubric of the effective exercise of popular power and the utility of people knowing their own power to influence the world without waiting for politicians to catch up is not, apparently, shared by the top leaders of the Democrats in Congress.
Within hours of Waters’ statement, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, my old boss, tweeted a not-so-veiled slap at her:
In the crucial months ahead, we must strive to make America beautiful again. Trump’s daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable. As we go forward, we must conduct elections in a way that achieves unity from sea to shining sea. https://t.co/vlpqOBLK4R
— Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) June 25, 2018
There’s that word again: civility.
Appeals to civility and decorum let House Republicans shut down U.S. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) when he took to the House floor to play the audio obtained from an immigration detention facility of children separated for their parents. When he did so, Rep. Karen Handel (R-Ga.), presiding over House proceedings at the time, banged the gavel to silence him, saying, “The gentleman is in breach of decorum.”
Lieu ignored her and proceeded with what he understood to be a powerful political moment that dramatized the conflict between the working class and the cruelty class. When the proprietors and staff of a Red Hen restaurant declined to serve Trump Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders due to her enabling of this disgusting child separation policy, he did not condemn them for a lack of civility. Instead, he mocked her.
Last night at a restaurant in Torrance, CA strangers thanked me for telling the truth. I politely said thank you. Their actions say far more about our nation than about me. This also happens to me at the mall, airports & coffee shops. This is what happens when you tell the truth.
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) June 24, 2018
Last year, Lieu just happened to join Waters at the LAX protests the first time Trump tried to implement the Muslim travel ban.
At #laxprotest with @MaxineWaters at CBP office trying to get access to detainees and to get them lawyers. pic.twitter.com/uZHQtVi1aI
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) January 29, 2017
Less than a month later, House Democrats, the group led by Pelosi, tweeted:
Let’s be clear: @HouseDemocrats will #resist any attempt to repeal America’s values. We will always be a nation of immigrants. #JointAddress
— House Democrats (@HouseDemocrats) March 1, 2017
Now, either Pelosi doesn’t understand what Waters, Lieu, and theorists like Gene Sharp understand about what it means to #resist, or she doesn’t want it done.
If it’s the former, she better study up, because a pathological devotion to civility and decorum is decimating the working class and the ability of progressives to fight back against Trump’s proto-fascist oligarchy agenda. And she better learn the lesson quick, because it just cost her a member of her leadership team.
Last year, that same House Democrats account tweeted this statement from Democratic Caucus Chairman Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.):
.@RepJoeCrowley: I promise you we will fight back — we will resist. We will #resist on behalf of what is American. #DemAddress pic.twitter.com/sU04FLzTh8
— House Democrats (@HouseDemocrats) February 11, 2017
Apparently, Crowley’s constituents got tired of waiting for his brand of #resisting to materialize, or they got tired of it meaning whipping for bank-friendly bankruptcy legislation and taking money from immigrant detention center profiteers, because they just gave him the boot in favor of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a fiery, dynamic candidate in her late twenties who ran on an unapologetic, democratic socialist platform. She understands what Crowley and Pelosi do not. Here she is, directly confronting border officers for human rights abuses.
The child detention camps are here – I confronted the border officers myself.
Using their names, I told them exactly what they are responsible for.
One of them made eye contact with me.
I spoke directly to him.
I saw his sense of guilt.
We can dismantle this.#AbolishICE pic.twitter.com/QLyc9MAnkt— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) June 24, 2018
Pelosi has now repeatedly said that Ocasio-Cortez’s stunning upset of Crowley does not signal a rising tide of democratic socialism in the Democratic base, and that brings me to the other possibility about her view of resisting: that people in privileged positions inside our current power arrangements don’t want it done. Not really.
Instead, they want to constrain people’s imaginations along the contours that brought them to and have kept them in power. It’s why they back the new candidates they back. It’s why they support or don’t support policies in Congress.
Regarding the rising democratic socialist tide in the electorate, Pelosi is, blessedly, flat wrong. It’s not just present in deep blue districts like hers or Ocasio-Cortez’s. In February of this year, the Texas Observer found at least 17 democratic socialists running for office in Texas, myself included. I should note that she even went out of her way to tell people in my district not to vote for the “wrong candidate.” That would be me. And the day after Ocasio-Cortez won, DSA’s national office reported their largest ever single-day spike in membership.
The civility caucus, like wobbly wannabe environmentalists who want to make room for fracking and incidentally lucrative fracking in their “big tent” plans, is operating from 30 years in the past. Republicans are not pining for the same bipartisan utopia that Democratic leaders miss. Why should they? By jettisoning concerns about decorum and getting in bed with the least civil public figure in American life, they have dealt major blows to the separation of church and state, to their nemesis in the labor movement, and they are on the cusp of overturning Roe v. Wade. By violating even their own norms in the culture wars, they are about to win the culture wars. Combine that with the GOP tax scam that will redirect huge flows of money to the richest Americans while setting the stage for the shredding of the social safety net, and you get what is arguably the most effective two years of governance on behalf of Republican values in the last half-century. Why would they agree to return to an era of civility?
Relationships where one side says “ma’am” and “sir” and the other side gets slapped around are not “civil.” They are abusive. And telling the abused party to not get carried away is not helping the relationship get back to normal. It’s taking the side of the abuser.
We have lost serious, generational battles in the last years and are on the precipice of losing more because at key moments, Democratic leadership failed to show up for a confrontation with Republicans willing to use naked power plays to fight for their political masters. The left would not be “losing its cool,” as Politico put it, if our putative champions had shown up for combat with the Kochs and the Mercers instead of begging everyone not to ruin cocktail hour.
The truth is, we need a political revolution and the civility caucus can’t wage it. People with guts like Maxine Waters, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Metro D.C. DSA chapter are the future of the fight on the left. We know the difference between a #resistance and the real exercise of power on behalf of the people who lack lobbyists and infinite cash.
Meanwhile, less than 48 hours after Justice Kennedy voted to gut public sector unions and then announced his retirement, Pelosi spoke of the man whose Citizens United opinion arguably killed forever her misty-eyed hopes for a return to a bygone, civil era by putting handing dominance of our politics over to people who can spent untold millions of dollars on incendiary advertising. She said that, as a Californian, she was proud of Kennedy’s service.
Looking forward to what she hopes is a blue wave, Pelosi said, “We must be bipartisan when we win.”
How very civil of her.
Derrick Crowe is a democratic socialist and former congressional candidate. Support his content by becoming a patron at https://patreon.com/derrickcrowe.