A failed impeachment vote, a failed aid to Israel vote, and the even more spectacular failure of a supposedly bipartisan border security bill in less than 72 hours caps a week that will live in infamy.
Last year, I opined that the Republicans can’t count following the disastrous ousting of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy followed by their obviously inability to coalesce around a new leader until they finally settled on Mike Johnson, largely because he was inoffensive and unknown enough to both the more conservative and more establishment wings of the party. One might have hoped the geniuses that comprise the slim House majority would’ve learned a valuable lesson in politics, namely that you don’t vote on anything unless you are certain the outcome will be in your favor, but any hope in the current crop of Representatives – I had to work really hard not to type “clowns” instead – proved woeful misplaced after two disastrous votes that occurred within an hour earlier this week. (Yes, two, not one, and within an hour, not a month, a week, or even a day.) The incompetence on display, in the middle of an election year no less when the incumbent President of the opposing party has the worst approval rating in two decades and the favored candidate for Republicans is in the middle of mounting the greatest political comeback of all time, is hard to describe, so inexplicable some might feel it is intentional for reasons that no one can accurately explain. The first vote was to officially impeach the Director of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, the first cabinet official to suffer that fate in almost 150 years and only the second in history. Critics of the effort claimed the impeachment vote itself was purely political in the first place. As CNN’s Stephen Collinson put, the move “was already a questionable case for impeachment – more over policy disagreements than the constitutional standard of treason, bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors.” There is some truth to that – if you ignore that Secretary Mayorkas has repeatedly lied to Congress, perjury being a serious crime we are always told whenever there is a hint a Republican might have been involved, and done everything possible to thwart their Constitutionally designated oversight authority over a border that everyone admits is in crisis. Conservatives like myself have longed believed the Secretary was an optimal target, a chance to make a statement about how Congress cannot be so easily trifled with and establish the Republican Party as the defenders of the border, the protectors of our territorial integrity against the Democrats. The trial in the Senate would have allowed the American people to see first hand how President Biden cannot be trusted with our security, exposing the lengths his Administration has taken to open the border and create the current crisis without directly targeting the President himself with an impeachment that can easily be spun as political.
In the annals of political slam dunks, this should have been a prime Michael Jordan on wires in Space Jam, but somehow the GOP managed to trip over their own feet – in mid air – and slam into the backboard, covering themselves in broken glass, leaving them bleeding to death on the floor. The vote failed by a grand total two – two! This included four Republicans who came out against impeachment, and even more amazingly, one who was not even there in the first place. As if that weren’t enough, the one who was not there is in fact Majority Leader Steve Scalise, meaning they went to war without their top general. Perhaps even worse, the Republicans that voted against impeachment echoed the same tired Democrat talking points, making one wonder what side of the political aisle they occupy, straddling both while benefiting none. Representative Tom McClintock, a California Republican, claimed in advance that the articles “fail[ed] to identify an impeachable crime that Mayorkas has committed” and “stretch[ed] and distort[ed] the Constitution in order to hold the administration accountable for stretching and distorting the law.” Representative McClintock apparently slept through both of former President Trump’s impeachments, forget the fake investigations mounted by the FBI into Russian collusion, but at the same time, it’s unfair to blame him in particular when he stated his opposition in advance and the leadership decided to move ahead anyway – except without their key leader. Some are claiming the failure to launch this impeachment isn’t a total loss, because one Republican changed their vote from “yes” to “no” in a procedural move that would allow the House to vote again, presumably when Majority Leader Scalise is back, but what’s the old adage about first impressions? Even should the Republicans succeed and successfully pass the Articles of Impeachment at some indefinite point in the future, any impact will be forever blunted by their failure the first time – assuming they can survive the mockery in the interim. Even worse, the Republicans have also opened an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden himself, one which I and many others have called misguided at best, disastrous at worst for precisely the same reason. If you are going to impeach, you have to impeach. Any failure to do so will be seen as a colossal misstep, if not exonerating the target entirely. The Republicans couldn’t manage to properly impeach a lower level, not well-liked figure who has personally presided over what everyone agrees is a crisis. Why on Earth would anyone believe they can be successful against the President of the United States?
Amazingly, the Republicans were not yet finished with their display of incompetence. Before the body of the first disaster was even cold, figuratively to use the old phrase, they immediately launched into what should have been another slam dunk vote on stand-alone aid to Israel. The thinking behind voting on a stand-alone bill could not be simpler. Providing aid to Israel after the massacre of October 7 is more popular with the American people than continuing aid to Ukraine after two years of war with no end in sight, especially following a summer offensive that failed to gain any ground. In addition, President Biden had promised to veto any stand-alone bill, making it largely a strategic vote to put him officially on the record as denying aid to a key ally in their time of need. For reasons that remain unexplained, like everything else across these two debacles, Republicans chose to bypass the regular order of passing the bill through committee first and instead, went straight to a floor vote that requires two thirds of the House to pass, a near impossible bar in our polarized era, especially when the GOP was not even able to retain all of their members with 14 voting against it. They did manage to secure the votes of close to 50 Democrats, but the two thirds bar caused the measure to fail 250 to 180. Speaker Johnson attempted to turn this failure into a rhetorical victory of some strange kind, claiming the loss was “a disappointing rebuke to our closest ally in the Middle East at their time of great need.” “It is clear they are now committed to using Israel aid as leverage to force through other priorities that do not enjoy nearly the same degree of consensus,” he said in a statement. “Leveraging Israel aid as it fights for survival is wrong.” That may well be true, but a failed vote is a failed vote, and the same principle noted above applies here for different reasons: Even should they somehow manage to pass this in the future, their failure and the resulting chaos is in the present. As Mr. Collinson put it regarding the first and second bills, “Setting up a high-stakes, televised tour de force for the impeachment of a Cabinet official for only the second time in history was a daring act. But failing to actually pull it off by a couple of votes broke the cardinal rule of not putting a bill on the floor until the numbers are rock solid. The result was a debacle that made the House leadership a laughing stock…Moments after the Mayorkas impeachment failed, Johnson was also unable to pass a standalone bill containing billions of dollars in aid for Israel. It was another busted gambit to jam the Biden administration…the double failure on the House floor did more to highlight his own deficiencies than discomfort Biden.” It’s not often I agree with Mr. Collinson, but he could not be more right in this analysis.
At the same time, dysfunction bordering on obscenity in Congress is not unique to Republicans. The spectacular collapse of a proposed border security plus Ukraine and Israel aid bill in the Senate the very next day represents a case study in bipartisan failure, suggesting obscenity is an apt word to describe the whole laughingstock, satire being rewritten as tragedy in an inversion of the old Karl Marx maxim. Some have commented on how unusual or even ridiculous it was to combine three separate issues in this manner in the first place, but that’s actually the least of the overall problems upon a deeper analysis. Congress in the United States has a long history of forging compromises by combining separate bills that would not pass on their own, allowing both sides of the political spectrum to claim victory on their respective issues. The first such instance occurred when George Washington was in office, in fact, the Compromise of 1790. Known as the “Dinner Table Bargain,” legend has it that Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson invited Speaker of the House James Madison and Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton to dinner at his home in New York City on June 20, 1790 – after Jefferson bumped into Hamilton on the street and found him distraught. At the time, Hamilton was frustrated that his key treasury bill, which would enable the fledgling United States to assume debts from the Revolutionary War as well as set up a new Federal financial system, was being opposed in Congress by Madison and his supporters. Jefferson and Madison were equally frustrated that Hamilton and his supporters were blocking a bill that would locate the new capital city in Washington, DC. The three decided at dinner – supposedly, there is evidence the compromise was being forged both before and after – and agreed to drop their respective opposition. The Residence Act passed in July and the Funding Act passed the following month, creating a template for politicians to set aside their differences and come together for the common good, one that has been used to good effect throughout the centuries. Sadly, the recent spectacle had about as much in common with these statesmen as my aging coonhound has with George Washington himself. To begin with, the normal give-a-little, get-a-little process established by the Founders usually begins with separate bills, as it did in 1790 when they even continued separately after the compromise was forged, to establish a baseline of support for each initiative. Once it becomes clear the initiatives will not pass on their own, but the opposition to both is relatively narrow, a compromise that switches this narrow number of votes becomes possible. Putting this another way, the politicians involved have generally crafted the bill separately and know exactly what is needed to pass it. The compromise with another bill in the same position is based on the number of votes required on each side, but if those votes are not obtainable, there is no compromise to be had and both bills die. Because the compromise is not voted on without knowing how the vote will go in advance, both sides are also spared the embarrassment of losing yet again – and the potential rancor that results.
This week’s debacle didn’t begin this way, far from it. Instead, the geniuses in the Democrat and Republican establishments decided in advance that these three disparate issues should be combined for purely political reasons. Democrats wanted to provide cover for the progressive wing of the party, which largely supports Ukraine but opposes Israel. Republicans wanted to provide cover for the conservative wing of the party which generally supports border security and Israel while opposing additional aid to Ukraine, meaning the entire tripartite bill was a political scheme from the very beginning, which quite naturally made people skeptical. Even worse, the Ukraine and Israel portions of the bill, which were wildly disproportionate at $61 billion for Ukraine (on top of well over a hundred billion already spent) compared to $14 billion for Israel, were at least known in advance and might have had the opportunity to form a compromise. (In fact, that approach was advanced in the Senate just yesterday.) The border security portion, however, was developed entirely in secret by a small group of lawmakers led by Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema and Republican Senators Mitch McConnell (Minority Leader) and Jim Lankford, who were not working in concert with their counterparts in the House of Representatives or their broader colleagues in the Senate. Washington, DC being Washington, DC, the provisions they were considering rapidly appeared in the media, prompting other Senators, the House of Representatives, and leading Republican primary contender for President Donald Trump to voice their opposition before the bill was even released. Speaker Johnson declared it a non-starter and given he has the power to control the agenda in the House, that was a pretty clear indication it was doomed to failure. Senators McConnell, Lankford, and Sinema responded by claiming the reports weren’t accurate and urging people to wait on the final text of the bill. Simultaneously, President Joe Biden got involved and began insisting that the bill was absolutely necessary because he needed the “power” to secure the border, which was suddenly a “crisis” in his opinion after several years of denying that it wasn’t. Other Democrats and the mainstream media likewise jumped on board, insisting that any opposition to the border measures was purely opposition to the President in America’s hour of need and suggesting Republicans were politicizing a national security crisis, despite that Democrats had done the same since former President Trump was in office. In fact, they were playing politics solely at Trump’s request and there was no other reason to oppose the bill except because he said so.
Almost magically, the border security provisions became the “most conservative” security measures in a generation and the Ukraine and Israel portions of the bill were promptly forgotten, as if they didn’t exist and this were in fact a standalone bill. Late last Sunday evening, the full text was finally released and not only does it appear Senators Lankford, McConnell, and Sinema lied about the leaks, many said the final bill was even worse than they’d previously thought. The purported border security measures codified into law the entry of almost 2,000,000 illegal aliens on an annual basis, up to almost 4,000,000 in some cases. The insistence that the border would be “closed” if entries exceeded 5,000 per day was belied by the fact that this provision only applied to illegal crossings, not legal points of entry. In other words, tens of thousands could wait in line at a lawful point of entry and be admitted. On top of that, the 5,000 count only applied to migrants of Canadian and Mexican origin, tens of thousands could stream in from South America and other parts of the world and be granted entry. Many of these “migrants” would receive free legal services and other benefits. There were even provisions to expedite their entry in some cases. Conservatives, some even more establishment minded than I am, immediately referred to it as a “border amnesty bill.” As Jazz Shaw, writing for HotAir.com, described it, accurately, “It happened almost exactly as predicted. Behind closed doors, a group of Republicans led by Mitch McConnell and James Lankford worked on a supposed ‘border security’ bill with Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden. They sat on it for weeks on end, not allowing the members to read it, no doubt aware of the outrage it would cause in conservative circles. Then they dumped it out late on a Sunday night, calling for a procedural vote on it only three days later. The bill wasn’t as bad as we expected. It was worse. This isn’t a border security bill. It’s a border amnesty bill. The only arguments seemed to be over how many thousands of illegal migrants we would be letting into the country on a daily basis.” Not surprisingly, the bill went down in a conflagration of disapproval less than 72 hours later, not even clearing the initial vote to be debated on the floor of the Senate. How is it possible that our so-called leaders spent months working on a proposal that crashed and burned on the launch pad like a failed Tesla rocket? One wonders if it’s intentional as I mentioned earlier, or an update to the old William F. Buckley, Jr quote, “I would rather be governed by the first 1,000 people listed in the phone book than by the faculty members from an Ivy League University.” Either way, this week will go down in infamy and even worse, things are not likely to get better anytime soon.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 