19 minute read
Democracy in Crisis
ONE YEAR TO THE DAY
that a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol with deadly consequences, our political roundtable examines the state of our democracy. Has enough been done to prevent a repeat? From the January 6, 2022, Week to Week program “January 6 and the Insurrection: A Week to Week Political Roundtable Special.” MELISSA CAEN, Political Analyst; Attorney FRANCIS FUKUYAMA, Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law; Director, Ford Dorsey Masters in International Policy, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University TIM MILLER, Founder, Light Fuse Communications; Contributor, The Bulwark; Communications Director, Jeb Bush 2016; Founder, America Rising JOHN ZIPPERER, Producer and Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable; Vice President of Media & Editorial, The Commonwealth Club—Host
DEMOCRACY IN DANGER
JOHN ZIPPERER: We’re gathered here— virtually—at the beginning of a new year, and the reason for this special program is because of something I suspect we’ll go on commemorating for years to come. I refer, of course, to the NFL playoffs, and as someone who grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, I was pleased yesterday when
I saw the term Green Bay Sweep trending on Twitter, because I was sure it referred to the Green Bay Packers sweeping the NFL playoffs. That could still happen. But it turns out the term refers to the plan by former Trump aide Peter Navarro to reverse the results of the presidential election.
I’m sure the Vikings would like to reverse the results of Sunday’s game against the Packers. That’s not going to happen, but today we’re going to talk about whether reversals in American elections and even democracy itself is possible or even probable.
In his speech this morning, President Joe Biden said that Donald Trump prepared for January 6 for months, building up the Big Lie about a stolen election. Tim, what do we know about what led up to January 6 in terms of planning or actions that were taken? TIM MILLER: A significant amount.
A lot of folks, particularly on the right, particularly my former colleagues in what used to be the establishment of the Republican Party, want to downplay this for obvious reasons. [They] want to kind of provide a cover story that this was a one-off, that this was a rally that got out of hand—you know, this was not a legitimate attempt to overturn our democracy, that we shouldn’t overreact. We shouldn’t be commemorating it in this way.
You’ve seen a lot of commentary to that effect today on the center-right. And that’s just not true. The events of January 6 were an inevitable consequence of a series of actions the thenpresident of the United States was taking, along with an entire media ecosystem that supported him. There was a Stop the Steal tour, that had members of Congress participate in it, that had an official podcast from the president’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon.
There were efforts within the state legislatures. Obviously, the president was lobbying various state legislatures to overturn elections in their states. Obviously, there were the works being done in the courts. We later learned in the
Department of Justice officials looking for ways to overturn the election [such as Acting U.S. Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division] Jeffrey Clark.
And as you pointed out, John, in the lead, I’m working for next week on an article for The Bulwark about Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro and their so-called Green Bay Sweep. They planned it out in the open. They admitted that they planned it out in the open, that their strategy was maybe kind of dumb, which I think is why some people want to minimize it today. It was not a plan that was very likely to work, given how much Joe Biden won the election by.
But it was a real plan, and they wanted to buy enough time to challenge the election results, send the results back to the states in the hopes that in some of these states there would be enough gridlock that it would throw the election to the House of Representatives, where Republicans had a majority of states.
The plan to overturn the election was multifaceted. In addition to the incitement and the riling up of millions of people to convince them that the election was being stolen from them, that they should show up on the Capitol that day to try to pressure the vice president, that was a concerted media and communications effort. So it was multi-pronged.
To be honest, despite what happened on January 6, all of that at varying levels is ongoing today, and there remain millions of people who believe that the election was stolen from them. Donald Trump continues to tell them that. We are certainly not out of the woods. This anniversary is not an end date to look back at something in the past. It’s a look at something that’s ongoing. ZIPPERER: Frank, you wrote in The New York Times this week, “the Republican Party, far from repudiating those who initiated and participated in the uprising, has sought to normalize it and purge from its own ranks those who are willing to tell the truth about the 2020 election as it looks ahead to 2024, when Mr. Trump might seek a restoration.” Could you talk a bit more about that and maybe give us a kind of report card on the health of this party and system in terms of dealing with this type of insurgency? FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Well, the report card for the Republican Party is an F. I don’t know if you can get a lower grade than an F, and that’s really the most discouraging thing.
You know, these incidents of extremism have happened in the past. It’s not the first time that you’ve had kind of right-wing nationalists that have done crazy things. You had Joe McCarthy in the 1950s; you had Richard Nixon trying to abuse the system. But in both of those earlier [examples], the adults from the Republican Party eventually decided “Enough is enough, and we’re going to have to repudiate all those actions.” In Nixon’s case, they walked away such that he was forced to resign.
What’s happened is the opposite this time around. A number of Republicans — Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy—all condemned what had happened on the day itself, but then one by one, they all flipped in the coming days and months and started to minimize the attack or claim that it was actually inspired by Antifa. All these other ridiculous theories. The reason they were doing it was not that they actually believed any of this. They saw that the Republican base had been completely converted by Donald Trump into this belief in this false narrative about the stolen election.
I think the single biggest challenge that we face, which is an ongoing constitutional crisis, is the fact that Republican legislators in many states like Texas, Florida, Arizona and so forth are changing the laws in a couple of ways. They’re trying to restrict access to the vote, especially on the part of African Americans and other likely Democratic voters. And they’re trying to change the rules under which the electoral slates will be determined in the next presidential election. That would basically award themselves the ability to overturn a popular vote.
So in other words, they’re planning a repeat. Not only have they not repudiated January 6; they’re actually planning for a contingency where they may have to do it again in 2024—and this time they’re not going to fail, because they’ll have appointed all of the key election officials with loyalists. And that’s really the clear and present danger that the country is in right now. ZIPPERER: Melissa, I know you’ve been researching and delving further into the U.S. Constitution. What safeguards are there that might be used to prevent such a future thing? Or what built-in elements are exacerbating some of these problems, [such as] the issue of the states having so much responsibility and control over the elections for many reasons? Is there stuff that Congress can do without changing the Constitution? Or can they protect the votes of people who need to vote? Can they change the way states [choose] their electoral votes? MELISSA CAEN: Well, to some degree, yes, but they don’t have carte blanche to do that kind of thing. And I don’t want to
—TIM MILLER
put words in Dr. Fukuyama’s mouth about this, but I think in terms of a constitutional crisis, the issue is that the Constitution does not really provide guardrails. Just as the states will figure out the electors and let us know, in part, that was because, remember, the Constitution itself was basically sort of a power grab at the time from the states. So they couldn’t be too heavy handed with the states. They really gave the states a lot of leeway to determine how they come up with their Electoral College votes.
So however the states do it is kind of going to be left alone unless it runs into a particular right under various amendments to the Constitution. For example, we had certain voting rights laws that were in place to protect African Americans, because there was an equal protection problem, when basically the Congress had found that there was a violation of people’s federal rights under
certain state laws. So they were allowed to intervene there. But aside from demonstrated instances of disenfranchisement that violates equal protection laws or other kinds of rights under the Constitution, there really isn’t a lot of place for the federal government to step in now. They’ve tried to in the past, and they are trying right now with a bill that’s been held up—I think there’s going to be a renewed push for [its passage], but that will probably be challenged legally as well.
So the crisis may be the fact that there aren’t a lot of guardrails in the Constitution. The push may be to put some of that into the Constitution and maybe give the federal government a little more power when it comes to state rules around the nitty gritty of Election Day.
ZIPPERER: Recently, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown told The New York Times that San Francisco’s vaunted Democratic Party machine has no bench. It has lots of people with ideas, but none able to carry them out, I guess after the mayor; it’s kind of a weak bench. Tim, speaking nationally, is the Democratic Party up to the task of waging what could be a long-lasting battle for the heart and soul of America? MILLER: I’m concerned about that. I think that in some ways there’s kind of this parallel to what a lot of climate activists feel, that we’re in this existential crisis and that sometimes the Democratic politicians pay lip service to the fact that we’re in an existential crisis. But then their actions don’t sort of meet that. There’s a parallel here, too.
I think a lot of us who are deeply concerned about democracy in this country feel that we are facing right now a very dangerous moment, looking ahead to the 2024 election and 2028 elections; and that Democrats in Washington and a lot of cases are going along with it as business as usual, you know?
I feel like this moment calls for a party that is both extremely aggressive in pushing back against the authoritarian threat, and welcoming and broad to people that are part of a pro-democracy coalition and willing to maybe sacrifice some of your typical interestgroup D.C. politics in service of maintaining a broad popularity so that they can keep out Donald Trump.
You look at Hungary, for example, this election coming this year. I defer to Dr. Fukuyama on this as the expert; but you have this coalition of literally like quasifascists and socialists and free marketers and moderates who are pushing back against [Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán. I would like to see that here, and it doesn’t feel like the Democratic Party is trending that direction.
The other thing is just to speak to what Melissa is bringing up, which is that there are some narrow things on vote counting that the Democrats could do. There was an 1876 election that got thrown into the House [of Representatives]. After that, they wrote this really convoluted Electoral Count Act that helps people figure out how we go about counting the votes. This doesn’t address some of what Dr. Fukuyama is talking about, about voting rights, but it does address maybe our more pressing, urgent threat, which is that there is a repeat of 2020 in 2024 and the Republicans try to monkey with the count. I think not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good and making some changes and adding whatever safeguards we can within the scope of the power that Democrats have right now, I think would be smart, because the clock is ticking on that. We’re about 11 months away from very likely the Democrats not being able to do anything about this. FUKUYAMA: Actually, if I could interject; as a political scientist, it seems to me pretty clear that the single biggest political threat we face in America right now is the attempt to corrupt the integrity of future elections, and that really ought to be the overriding objective of the Democrats and then of any of the Republicans that are actually still on board with protecting American democracy. The problem they face, though, is that what may be clear to an activist or to a political scientist is just not clear to a lot of Americans.
This is not at the top of anybody’s list of things that need to be done. They’re worried about crime, they’re worried about inflation, they’re worried about the border. They’re worried about a lot of other issues. The coming midterm elections and the 2024 election [are] not going to be won by a kind of resounding support for future electoral integrity. That’s just not what’s going to win the Democrats elections. So in a sense, the stakes could never have been higher as to how these elections are going to turn out. But the grounds on which they’re going to be contested are going to be sort of politics as usual, because that’s really how ordinary voters are thinking about things. And so it’s a very difficult kind of tactical question for the Democrats to negotiate as to how much emphasis they want to give this issue—which objectively is important, but as a practical political matter, may not be their path to power. ZIPPERER: Let’s talk about the House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack. Here at The Commonwealth Club, we’ve had programs in the past year separately with committee members Liz Cheney and Zoe Lofgren, and we heard about the committee’s goals and processes. There were complaints toward the end of 2021 about, “Are they doing anything?” “They need to be more aggressive!” And then near the end of the year, we started getting a slew of subpoenas and talk of criminal contempt and such.
I’d like to hear from each of you and starting with you, Melissa, what do you think of the work of the committee so far? And then kind of what do you think we can expect in this next? CAEN: There’s been some criticism that the indictments—these are indictments by the DOJ, not the committee—there have been
a lot of indictments against the sort of folks who were there and stormed the Capitol, . . . but that the people who called for it, the people who sort of arranged for the people who planted those seeds and incited it have yet to be really called out or charged with anything for their involvement.
So one of the things the committee has done is really uncover a lot of that involvement. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen, because every day something is bananas—I don’t know about y’all, but I did not see those text messages coming. [The committee released text messages from GOP members of Congress and Fox News stars to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows unsuccessfully imploring him to get the president to stop the attack on the Capitol.— Ed.] That was crazy.
So it seems like every time we peel, something comes out that is just wow. But I think a lot of people are watching to see what the committee can do to inform charges against or expose people who were not there necessarily in the Capitol, but people who are sort of behind this effort. I think that’s what people are sort of looking to this committee to help with. FUKUYAMA: Well, there is a poll—I forget, by Pew or [another] organization—in the past week about whether people were actually following the committee’s work and whether they have been persuaded by any of the evidence that had come out that there was actually an active conspiracy; it was very discouraging because there didn’t seem to be much movement on that front. That if you believe the election was stolen or you’re a Trump supporter, almost nothing that the committee had put forward had really changed your mind. So this is part of this phenomenon of motivated reasoning that’s been plaguing our politics, that you want to believe something and you can’t be deterred by any amount of empirical evidence away from that.
That’s today. I do think, however, that there may be such an accumulation of further facts that will come out that it will penetrate to some extent. You’re obviously not going to get the hardcore MAGA supporters, but you know, there are a lot of people that are not heavily committed in that direction that may still be approachable by evidence. So that would be the hope, and I think the committee probably could do a lot more to get some of this stuff out there. I mean, they’ve been talking about holding the hearings in prime time, and that might work. MILLER: I want to give the committee some leeway to do their job.
—MELISSA CAEN
I thought that Congress made a mistake by not rushing through the second impeachment. There might have been a window where they could have gotten more Republican votes, before all the Republican senators realized that their voters wanted them to stand with Trump or whatever. You know, you saw this change with the Lindsey Grahams of the world over the course of the week. It was so clear what happened on January 6; you didn’t need to do investigation and possibly could have rushed through impeachment.
Once that window was missed, now I think the January 6 committee has to actually do their job and get all the facts that they can get. I was encouraged by the subpoenas. You know, some of this is going to take longer than people want. [Steve] Bannon obviously stands in contempt of court, for one example. That trial is not I think until July. So you have to be patient with some of the stuff.
What I’ve heard is that they’ve gotten better cooperation than you might think out of some people from within the White House. And I think their main job now is to detail for the public just how unconscionable the former president’s actions were on that day, because I think there’s a lot we don’t know still about what President Trump was doing between his speech on the Mall and that very, very late video that came out, half praising the rioters, half telling them to go home. So I think their job is to hold as many of the organizers as they can accountable to this point and focus on them to reveal as much as they can about Trump’s actions that day and to publicize that and use that as a cudgel against all of those who have been enabling them. That’s this committee’s job over the next 10 months. If they do that well, then I think we can look back and think this is a worthwhile endeavor. If we’re in the same place in October that we are today, I think we’ll feel like it didn’t do its purpose. ZIPPERER: Melissa, talk about the Justice Department’s role in this. As was mentioned, there’s stuff the committee can do and can recommend, but they’re, of course, not prosecuting people. The Justice Department is prosecuting more than 700 defendants, said to be the largest prosecution in its history. Do you think just literally the prosecution of the 700 people will have some deterrent effect, at least from the folks who are kind of in the Johnny Tremain cosplay wing of the country? Or does it matter that they’re not going after the ringleaders and the planners and financiers, etc.? CAEN: Well, all that is going to help, but even just for the people on the ground, one of the things that’s really kind of startling about a lot of these charges is that some —defacing federal property and attempting to, with criminal intent, impede federal proceedings and official proceedings—these are charges that carry 10 to 20 years in prison as punishment. So they have a pretty big stick to wield to get folks to plead out or to negotiate a deal. Then what you’ve seen, because these penalties are pretty dramatic, potentially, is that people have really groveled, frankly, in front of federal judges, saying, “I’d lost my mind.” “I was following Donald Trump.” That’s been a big defense, as I was doing what my president told me to do, so how can it possibly be an interference with federal proceedings? And that’s been an interesting one as well.
But [these proceedings have been] really forcing them to very publicly state that they were wrong and that they were mistaken and it did not have the desired effect, etc. It can’t hurt to have the people who were that fired up be forced to at least make the arguments, whether it’s genuine or not, that they suffered from some kind of temporary insanity.
So you got to believe that didn’t hurt. It might not have helped as much as people would have liked. But I think at least going after the rank and file, for starters, is something that I know people watching— people like me, who are totally horrified by what happened—are like, “Good, I’m glad to see that people are being dealt with who were actually the ones breaking and defiling our Capitol.”
