Why The Gaetz Defeat Really Matters
The first step of defiance is the hardest. Senate Republicans just took
it.
and
Nov 22, 2024
Earlier this week,
we reported on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s 2020 dalliance with the “plandemic”
conspiracy theory. Turns out that dalliance goes, uh, deeper than we previously
knew. The social media account Patriot Takes unearthed an
old clip of Kennedy seemingly bragging about producing and funding the Plandemic documentary:
We also have a film platform. We have a film division at Children’s
Health Defense. We’ve produced two films. One of them is VAX 2, which was, you
know, a huge success. And then Plandemic, which we financed, which is now by
some metrics the most successful documentary in history. I think it’s had 25
million views. Even though they threw us off all the social media, we were able
to still get a lot of people to see that film.
Did Kennedy’s organization actually finance the documentary, or was he
just randomly claiming they did? We don’t know, and a spokesperson for Kennedy
declined to respond. Either way, not great! Happy Friday.
Gaetz Overboard
by William Kristol
It was heartening to learn yesterday afternoon that Matt Gaetz had
withdrawn as the nominee for attorney general. For a brief, shining moment in
the era of Donald Trump, one felt that the arc of the moral universe bent
toward justice.
The news was particularly cheering because it was a forced withdrawal.
Gaetz is gone because Trump told him to be gone. As Marc Caputo reported in The
Bulwark, Trump phoned Gaetz Thursday morning to tell him, “You don’t have
the votes.”
“Gaetz had repeatedly told others he would stay in the hunt for the
nomination unless Trump signaled it had become a distraction,” Marc wrote.
“That signal came Thursday.”
Trump didn’t exactly toss Gaetz overboard. But he instructed Gaetz to
jump. And Gaetz did.
Why did Trump tell him to jump? The New York Times reported that
four Republican senators were hard Nos on Gaetz—Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan
Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and incoming Utah Sen. John
Curtis—and that others were ready to join them.
In other words, it was Republican senators who forced Trump to dump
Gaetz.
Let us pause on that simple statement: Republican senators discovered
they have agency! They can stand up to Trump! They can resist! They can
prevail!
Amazing. Will wonders never cease? Have they suddenly begun reading
fortifying poetry like W.E. Henley’s Invictus, which
I’ve quoted before in Morning Shots?
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
Whether or not it was Invictus that did the trick, the
good thing is, when you’ve decided to become captain of your soul once, you can
do it again. Gaetz is gone. Others can be made to go, too. Why shouldn’t
deplorable and dangerous nominees like Pete Hegseth for Defense and Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services be next? Couldn’t Trump be forced to
toss them overboard as well? He could, if senators take a stand and stand their
ground.
Perhaps we could even get some serious reflection on whether Trump’s
choice to replace Gaetz, former Florida attorney general and Qatar lobbyist Pam
Bondi, should be approved. Might not some Republican senators have reservations
about voting to confirm our first ever election-denying, Big Lie-promoting
attorney general? It was important four years ago that the leaders of the
Justice Department were not willing to further Trump’s coup effort. Would Bondi
resist next time?
And what of Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pro-Assad, pro-Putin,
anti-American-intelligence-community pick for director of national
intelligence?
As Andrew Desiderio reports this
morning in Punchbowl News, there is resistance:
Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee . . . are already
indicating they’ll be interested in probing Gabbard’s controversial and often
outright hostile posture toward the very intelligence apparatus she’d run if
confirmed. . . . Republican senators have privately discussed their
interest in viewing Gabbard’s FBI file.
Desiderio also reports this comment from Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), an
Intelligence Committee member: “I start out saying, OK, this is an individual
the president wants on his team. But now let’s talk about information that
maybe the president didn’t have, or information that comes up, and at that
stage do we advise the president to look elsewhere or do we offer our consent?”
Other Republican members of the Intelligence Committee like Collins and John
Cornyn of Texas also sound doubtful.
Gaetz’s forced withdrawal is encouraging. But it needs to be the
beginning, not the end, of the story. That should be a story of recovery by
some Republicans of a sense of political agency and constitutional
responsibility. To do this, Republican senators don’t really need to read
Victorian poetry—though it never hurts! They simply need to take seriously
their oath, that they “will support and defend the Constitution of the United
States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” That would be, in the age of
Trump, real progress.
Paper Tiger?
by Andrew Egger
I join in Bill’s cheer over the pleasant sight of Matt Gaetz’s
attorney-general ambitions blowing up on the launch pad. To his thoughts, I’d
just add one brief point.
That serious lawmakers would blanch at confirming him was obvious from
the minute his name was announced, but Donald Trump honestly seemed to think he
could simply bludgeon the Senate into submission. (And who could blame him,
given their track record of acquiescence?) And he sure acted like he was
gearing up to bludgeon them. Yesterday morning, before Gaetz pulled out, a
senior Trump adviser told ABC News’s
Jonathan Karl the message they were hitting in their
conversations with GOP Senate recalcitrants:
If you are on the wrong side of the vote, you’re buying yourself a
primary. That’s all. And there’s a guy named Elon Musk who is going to finance
it . . . the president gets to decide his cabinet, no one else.
That’s a posture of maximum conflict and pain. It telegraphs an
unshakable resolve to grind even a doomed Gaetz nomination through to the point
of revelation.
To this message, a small but critical mass of Republicans responded with
some version of: Well, I’m sorry you feel that way, but my mind’s made
up. And then: Poof! Trump calls Gaetz to give him the bad news. No moment
of reckoning. No future-killing vote. Just a pulling of the plug.
Now look. Obviously the takeaway here is not that Trump is losing his
perch as by far the most powerful and influential voice in the Republican
party. He can still snap his fingers and summon primary challengers for any who
displease him, and likely turn them into dangerous candidates by that action
alone. Even moderates like Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, and even
personal enemies like Sen. Mitch McConnell, have incentives to try and avoid
Trump’s crosshairs.
But what this episode did demonstrate—for now—were the
limits of Trump’s ability to impose his absolute will on such
senators. After all, there’s only one true nuclear-option pressure point Trump
can reach for in such a circumstance: Cross me here and your career is
over.1 But as soon as he’s deployed
that once, it loses almost all of its utility. Would a senator crossing him on
Gaetz and Gabbard result in them being primaried twice as
hard? Even Trump appeared to realize it would be imprudent to exhaust his most
potent weapon just to help Gaetz, of all people. He talked a big game, he still
didn’t have the votes, and he dropped it.
It will be interesting to see what comes of this. GOP senators would do
well to realize that the hardest step to take is the first.
Quick Hits
WILL THE HOUSE BAR GAETZ?: With Matt Gaetz out of the running as
attorney general, an interesting question arises: Can he sail back into
Congress as though nothing has changed? After all, Gaetz made the highly
unusual move, after his nomination was announced, of resigning his seat
immediately—an apparent stratagem to short-circuit a looming Ethics Committee
report into his alleged misconduct. He also announced in advance his *intent* not
to be sworn in as a member of the new Congress in January.
There’s an argument to be made that House rules would block Gaetz from
reneging on that pre-resignation, as some procedure experts2 have argued. But it’s a gray
area, and as Marc Caputo notes,
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has not yet called a special election for the seat.
Should Gaetz limp back into Congress, the Ethics Committee report may be there
waiting for him—though questions remain about whether a report from one
Congress can be dragged into in the next one.
THE HOUSE BATHROOM FIGHT: In the wake of House Speaker Mike
Johnson’s announcement yesterday restricting House bathrooms to members of
their “biological sex”—a policy aimed squarely at transgender Rep.-elect Sarah
McBride—Democrats were curiously muted in their response. A handful of LGBT
lawmakers denounced the move, with Congressional Equality
Caucus Chair Mark Pocan calling it a “holier-than-thou decree” that was “cruel
and unnecessary.” And Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused Johnson and Rep.
Nancy Mace of “endangering all women and girls.”
For the most part, though, Democrats have remained quiet. That goes for
McBride too, who said in a statement:
“I’m not here to fight about bathrooms. I’m here to fight for Delawareans and
to bring down costs facing families. Like all members, I will follow the rules
as outlined by Speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them.”
This statement drew heat from some trans activists: “How are you supposed
to fight for your constituents when you won’t even stand up for
yourself?” posted attorney
Alejandra Caraballo on BlueSky.
We see this posture as a bit odd: Putting constituent work over personal
slights and irritations arguably speaks well of McBride as a representative.
But it’s even odder that more other Democrats aren’t coming to
McBride’s defense. The widely shared sentiment that Republicans effectively
wielded the trans issue against Democrats in this year’s election likely has
something to do with it; Democrats are more apprehensive about engaging than
they otherwise would be.
But that apprehension may misread the room. To the extent trans activism
has hurt Democrats, it’s been in areas where they’ve been perceived by voters
to support truly radical positions: taxpayer-funded sex-change surgeries for
prisoners, or operations on minors, or male participation in girls’ sports.
When Republicans are the ones perceived to be the obsessive
busybodies about trans issues—for instance, when they’re getting really intense
about policing the behavior of adults who are just trying to pee at work in
peace—it’s far less clear the public is on their side.
