It may help to register
the lies they tell you as the calculated insults to your intelligence and to
your citizenship and to your country that they are. Fully witnessing and
registering insults and degradation is more painful than sneering that you
aren’t surprised.
It’s
Not Hypocrisy
Mitch McConnell’s
machinations are something far more degrading.
SEPT 21, 20205:45 AM
I was watching the president of the
United States suggest to a mostly maskless crowd that a Democratic congresswoman had married her
brother when the news broke that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had
died. The shock of her death sledgehammered a country teetering on an ugly and
desperate edge. It came in waves. It wasn’t merely the loss to the country, or
the sadness that a champion of equal rights had died. Nor was it the fact that
an increasingly corrupt Republican Party is very close to forcing through the
judicial supermajority it needs in order to lock in minority rule and overturn
American women’s right to reproductive choice. (You will no doubt hear often in
the coming weeks that, of the five conservative Supreme Court justices, four
were nominated by presidents who had lost the popular vote.) There was a
flashback to the contempt and grief Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing
aroused in so many appalled onlookers. And then there was the dread of
realizing that a citizenry breaking—financially, politically, even cognitively—under five different kinds of instability was going to have
to endure more. We have been in a bad way for a long time, but this is the
hurricane on top of the wildfire that follows the earthquake.
What’s enraging is that we shouldn’t
be here. We have institutions and norms and precedents, so what should happen
next is almost absurdly plain. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made his
thinking on the subject quite clear back in 2016, when Supreme Court Justice
Antonin Scalia died in February, nine months before the election. “The American
people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,”
he said. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new
president.” There shouldn’t have been any mystery about what Mitch McConnell—of
all people—would do when a Supreme Court vacancy opened up six weeks (rather
than nine months) before Election Day of 2020.
And there wasn’t. Shortly after
Ginsburg’s death was announced, McConnell declared his intentions: Trump’s
nominee would receive a vote in the Senate, and though he left
the timing slightly unclear, he has no intention of letting the will of the
American people (who have already started voting) determine what should happen.
He made quick work of the optimists on Twitter suggesting that he surely
wouldn’t be so hellbent on total power that he’d risk destroying the country by
breaking the precedent he himself had articulated. Wrong. He would.
And anyone who took him at his word when he rejected Merrick Garland’s
nomination was made a fool when he reversed himself on the question of whether
(to quote the man himself) “the American people should have a voice in the
selection of their next Supreme Court Justice.”
I want to pause here to note,
humbly, that it is wounding to watch a public servant reduce those who take him
at his word to fools. I mention that not because it “matters” in any sense
McConnell would recognize but because it is simply true that this nation’s
decline accelerates when the conventional wisdom becomes that believing what
the Senate Majority Leader says is self-evidently foolish. The
chestnut that politicians always lie is overstated—a society depends on some
degree of mutual trust. One party has embraced nihilism, pilloried trust, and
turned good faith into a sucker’s failing in a sucker’s game.
Many of us are coping with that
lacerating redefinition by knowingly rolling our eyes. Ginsburg’s death hurts,
but more than one strain of political grief is operative. This is why so many
political reactions at present seem to orbit around the question of whether an
unwanted outcome was unexpected. “And you’re surprised?” is a
frequent response to some new instance of Trumpian corruption. This brand of
cynicism has spread, quite understandably: It’s an outlook that provides some
cognitive shelter in a situation that—having historically been at least
somewhat rule-bound—has one side shredding the rules and cheering at how much
they’re winning. Folks who at one point gave Republican declarations of
principle the benefit of the doubt (I include myself) feel like chumps now.
Conversely, the cynical prognosticators who used to seem crabbed and paranoid
just keep getting proven right. Whatever the worst thing you imagine McConnell
doing might be, he can usually trump it.
Just by way of example: A former
White House official told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer for a piece in April that McConnell reassured donors
that he would install a Supreme Court justice for Trump
regardless of how close to the election Ginsburg’s death might be. He
apparently referred to the prospect of replacing Ginsburg in the event of her
death as “our October surprise.” In 2019, McConnell gleefully tweeted a photo of
some tombstones, one of which had Merrick Garland’s name on it—hours after a
mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, in which 23 people died. He has said that
stopping Garland’s nomination is the proudest moment of his career. It’s
uniquely painful that this is the person architecting
Ginsburg’s replacement in violation of his own contemptible theories.
I am not saying anything new here.
But what I am interested in, because I think it must be
understood, and because the stakes of it have never been higher, is what
McConnellizing does, affectively, to so many American citizens. What it feels
like, in other words. We are overdue for a real reckoning with what it means to
be degraded by our own leadership. And make no mistake: It is degrading when
people lie to you openly and obviously. Leaving the polity aside for a moment,
it’s the kind of emotion we humans aren’t great at coping with. Sometimes we
react by snorting at anyone who expects any better (that is again the “you’re
surprised?” cynicism). But if you can’t cover it with cynicism, it simply
hurts.
Shall we experience being degraded
together? Here is the justification McConnell offered shortly after Ginsburg died for violating his own
rule:
In the last midterm election before Justice
Scalia’s death in 2016, Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because
we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president’s second
term. We kept our promise. Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an
opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election
year.
This last sentence—which you will
recognize as the heart of McConnell’s argument—is a lie. But before I supply
the dull fact proving that it is a lie, I’d like us to pause and notice the
extent to which whatever I am about to say will not factor
into how you feel reading the above. Whatever I say, it will
not provide you relief for me to demonstrate that this tortured
reasoning McConnell supplied is horseshit. You are already meant to understand
it as horseshit. That’s the insult. That’s where one part of what I guess we
could call patriotic pain comes from.
OK, now for the dull facts: What
McConnell says in that statement is not true. In 1988 (an election year!), the
Democratically controlled Senate confirmed Anthony Kennedy—President Ronald
Reagan’s nominee to the Supreme Court. McConnell tried to circumvent this
reality by crafting his new rule to exclude any vacancy “that arose”
in an election year (Lewis Powell retired in late 1987).
Does an exercise like this leave us
anywhere? I think it might. I think we have a habit of misnaming political
experiences in ways that help us metabolize loss. I think, for example, that we
have a bad habit of calling McConnell’s double standard—which will be
devastating to a country already struggling through various legitimacy
crises—“hypocrisy.” And sure, step onto Twitter after Lindsey Graham also
unabashedly went back on his own word and you’ll see many a person rolling their eyes at
anyone pointing out that Republicans are hypocrites, as if it
matters. One can sympathize with the eye-rollers—of course hypocrisy doesn’t
matter. But that’s mostly because hypocrisy isn’t the word for what this is.
Hypocrisy is a mild failing. It applies to parents smoking when they advise
their kids not to for their own good; it does not apply to parents lighting the
family home on fire for the insurance money while high-fiving each other over
how stupid their fleeing children were for thinking anything they told them was
true.
When Ginsburg died, those whose
rights she championed were caught in a cruel double bind. Raging against the
indecent replacement effort feels wrong, because raging before it happens can
feel like implicitly conceding. Treating the matter dispassionately, on the
other hand, sensibly pointing out that McConnell has stated clearly what should
happen, means granting him a good-faith reading he does not deserve. Thanks to
the swiftness with which he declared his intentions, we are no longer under any
obligation to attempt the latter. All that remains is to let honest anger do
what it must.
It will not help to call
the leadership we have right now hypocrites; they will not care, and I doubt
the charge will motivate the people who need to be motivated much. But insofar
as our own reactions are concerned—and while we think about how to counter an
obvious and ugly attempt to steal the Supreme Court seat of a feminist champion
of equal rights even as Americans have already started voting—it may help to
register the lies they tell you as the calculated insults to your intelligence
and to your citizenship and to your country that they are. Fully witnessing and
registering insults and degradation is more painful than sneering that you
aren’t surprised. But I’ll be blunt: People are more willing to fight people
who insult and degrade them than they are to fight mere “hypocrites.”
We deserve better than this. I
confess I had no personal feelings about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg’s passing; my admiration and gratitude were purely professional and
civic. But I found this quote—a response to Irin Carmon asking her how she’d like to be
remembered—deeply moving: “Someone who used whatever talent she had to do her
work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society,
to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has.”
