The Price of Cowardice

Three years later.

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In this screenshot taken from a congress.gov webcast, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell responds after the Senate voted 57-43 to acquit Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial on February 13, 2021. (Photo by congress.gov via Getty Images)

My colleague John McCormack has a valuable piece on the site today marking the third anniversary of Donald Trump’s January 6 acquittal by the Senate that contains a bizarre bit of political trivia I’d forgotten.

The same conservative scholar who provided legal cover for Senate Republicans to save Trump at the time has since become the most strident proponent for disqualifying him from office under the 14th Amendment.

That would be former judge J. Michael Luttig, who declared in an op-ed published on January 12, 2021, that Trump couldn’t constitutionally be tried for the impeachment charges once he left office on January 20. The Senate ignored that and held a trial in early February anyway, but Luttig’s reasoning was the fig leaf that gave cowardly Republicans the pretext they needed to justify voting to acquit.

Three years later, Luttig spends his days howling into the void that Trump can’t serve again as president due to his insurrectionist past. He’s going to lose that argument in court. Badly.

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  1. Linda Houston

    Excellent overview of facts which must be reported so voters will be informed about the greatest con artist our nation has ever elected as President. Trump continues to sell snake oil and some continue to buy it. The silent majority of Republican Senators began bottling the snake oil in 2021 just in time for Trump to peddle it. Shame on them.

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    Ben Connelly

    The speculation about Luttig seems unfair and unlikely. Talk to your colleague Sarah Isgur, who knows him, about what his thoughts might have been at the time.

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  3. Brendan Bossard

    I may be repeating a point already made, but it is worth repeating if it has been made.
    The behavior of the Republicans since 2020 reminds me of typical group behavior at some mass shootings. Someone walks into a dance club or house of worship and starts shooting and what do most people do? Run for cover, thus enabling the shooter to reload and shoot at will as he roams. "Heroism for thee, but not for me!" The shooter would have little chance if the intended targets instantly were to attack en masse at twenty or hundred-to-one odds. If those who apparently privately spoke what Cheney and Kinzinger publicly spoke stood alongside them, they would have had little to fear. Instead, craven sycophants like McCarthy get used and dumped by Brownshirts like Gaetz and Greene. One by one, those who thought they could make deals with the Devil are being consumed by same. But Catoggio is correct: voters who continue to vote evil--yes, evil--people into office ultimately bear the blame. I do not care what the motivation is. The Devil always gets his due.

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  4. Philip.R.M.Hunt

    Exactly Nick - mainstream, Reaganite conservatives will have to so shoot the hostage to escape the tyranny of the populists.. This means that the democrats will take full control of both branches of Congress and the presidency for a few elections cycles. They will run rampant to some extent and wipe out large parts of the Reagan revolution. However the crowning achievement of the Reaganite Republicans is the remaking of the Federal judiciary and reversal of the worst excesses of the Warren court. The democrats are very unlikely to undo that quickly and probably not ever. The judiciary will keep the democrats somewhat in check. Also the more the democrats overreach, the quicker the comeback of the Reaganite conservatives. The Republican Party needs to die as soon as possible so that it can rise Phoenix like from the ashes.

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    1. Jfan

      For decades I have wondered how to evaluate Franklin Roosevelt. Specifically, would I, with perfect hindsight and my Reaganite - W political views, have voted for him in 1932, knowing that Hoover and his successors might not have confronted the fascists in 1941? My answer has always been that I would take the package deal: Accept the New Deal and the damage to our Constitution and civic structure as the price of winning World War II. Our country and the world could survive and rebound from the New Deal; they could not survive the loss of the war.

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        Ben Connelly

        Why wouldn’t Hoover have stood up to the fascists? The American left was pretty pro-fascist in the 20s and early 30s. If I was a voter in 1932 and I wanted to vote for the opposite of fascism I probably would have voted Republican.

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        1. Jfan

          As a general matter, changing anything in history could have unforeseen consequences. When playing the game of "Whom would I have voted for," I am tempted, for instance, to think I wish Nixon had won the 1960 election, but given how close we came to disaster in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the risks of pursuing any different course would be too great.

          I wrote that "Hoover and his successors might not have confronted the fascists in 1941." Given how prevalent isolationism was in the country, it was a miracle that we happened to have a president who confronted the danger, and prepared for it long before Pearl Harbor. If I could change history and make Hoover win in 1932, I wouldn't, knowing the risk of something going wrong was too great. Actually I have a suspicion that the real reason Roosevelt opposed Hitler so viscerally and early was personal pique. I suspect that Roosevelt was enraged that Hitler withdrew Germany from the League of Nations because FDR had worked for Wilson and felt the abandonment of the League to be an insult to his boss's legacy.

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            Ben Connelly

            Yeah that’s fair. It’s hard to say how any change would have played out. Hoover changed his positions a lot after the presidency, so I don’t know that he wouldn’t have confronted fascism. I assume he would have responded the same to Pearl Harbor.

            But Hoover would have been out of office, unless he pulled an FDR and became president for life.

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    Mandy B.

    'GOP is an autocracy run by a belligerent narcissistic halfwit'

    Oh I think that's far too kind. It's run by ignorant bullies who think that America owes them something because they suffer injustice as we all do. And they have made Biff their champion, even unto the Kool-Aid.

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    Mandy B.

    'No one imagined how deplorably Republican primary voters would behave'

    Hilary's 'basket of deplorables' is here invoked. I can't stand the Clintons, but in this she was at least partly right.

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    1. PROMETHEUS

      They were "deplorable" in 2016.

      Today they are "despicable".

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    John N.

    Jesus this is a good piece. Well articulated.

    "America needs civic leadership desperately. And it won’t get any from the elected Republican “leadership” class."

    Excellently articulated, in fact.

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  8. Jeffbrady1985

    Excellently depressing. Hear hear.

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    Karmol

    "Even so, I’m loath to place most of the blame for Trump’s ongoing political viability on Mitch McConnell and the Senate snivelers who refused to convict him. To do so is to exculpate the GOP base, however indirectly."

    I think blaming the base exculpates the Conservative Elite from their cynical use of the base for short-term electoral and policy gains.

    I particularly think of the Koch network - there's an article I found a couple months ago while making a similar point about a koch backed astroturf group handing out Obama birther signs at a Virginia rally, in order to promote deregulation. The same with McCain going with Palin instead of Lieberman. The same with pretty much everything Rove did during the Bush years.

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    1. DALE Nathan SWITZER

      Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind. Not McConnell so much as, beginning with Ronaldus Maximus, there was a cynical attempt to manipulate the fundamentalist feeling that the culture was going against them. Newt Gingrich was even more cynical with it, and by the time you got to Ted Cruz, there wasn't even an attempt to hide it. That these men were then swept out of power by the illiberal forces that they instigated and that Donald Trump now uses.

      As one of the manipulated, I do blame the insider Republican manipulators. Jonah and his family, particularly his mother with her cynical use of Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky, cannot escape blame. They are like the arson firefighters who hoped to be heroes when they put out the fire that they started, but that got out of their control.

      It's too bad that Jonah won't write an article doing a mea culpa. At least Paul Weyrich and a few others have admitted their sociopathic past.

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      1. Philip.R.M.Hunt

        I was a staunch Reaganite Republican but quit identifying as such with the rise of Gingrich. For the next 30 years I told my Republican friends and relatives that they were creating a monster in the populist movement that would eventually turn on them. They laughed it off.

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  10. Dnels

    The fatal flaw the GOP had was failing to see that whenever you deal with Trump there is always a price to pay because everything he touches dies, sometimes slowly other times all at once. The time to pay the price was 2015 by denying him the ability to run in the primary.

    Priebus was afraid he would run independent and wanted him in the tent pissing out, rather than taking his supporters and pissing into the tent. The cowards didn't trust that running against the bases boogey woman would make them hold their nose and vote for Rubio or Cruz. I think it would have and probably would have killed Trumps desire to run again, if the cheap bastard would have ponied up for an independent run in the first place.

    With Trump, once you blink the cost keeps going up and up each time they punt on the opportunity to eat the crap sandwich and get it over with. Now their party has lost its principles and purpose and they have lost their party to all the mouthbreathing conspiracy kooks that Trump and his coterie have brought into the base. The damnable part is that they so deserve this, but the country and the free world don't.

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