Senate Democrats Ritually Debase Themselves

Schumer hands his lunch money to the fascists. Again.

portrait of a quisling motherfucker

As of this writing, it appears that Senate Democrats are planning to once again remove their spines and genuflect gelatinously before the person and demands of Trump, Musk and fascism. This after House Democrats got their act together and voted virtuously unanimously against Elon Musk’s bullshit continuing resolution. Talking Points Memo has the gruesome details.

Senate Democrats gave up their sole point of leverage Thursday, as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced that he would help Republicans pass a continuing resolution that slashes domestic spending and specifically targets Washington D.C. with massive, punitive cuts.

While the CR is bad, Schumer said from the Senate floor, a shutdown would be “much, much worse.”

He pledged to keep fighting President Trump and Elon Musk, a fairly empty promise as Republicans won’t need Democratic help to fund the government for a year, and can pass their reconciliation bills alone.

The vicious betrayal of Washington DC, which has no Congressional representation and is overwhelmingly Black and Democratic, is particularly cruel and particularly unforgivable. The Democrats are coldly stabbing in the back those who have supported them most and are the most vulnerable.

And what is this betrayal in the name of? For what principle are Democrats fighting? Trump is already crashing the economy, destroying government department after government department, rushing to spread disease and to destroy the environment, pushing for war with Canada, raising prices and loping towards a genocide of immigrants and trans people. For whom would a shutdown be “worse”?

The suspicion is that Democrats feel it would be worse for them. Their approach in the Trump era has been to do nothing that might irritate MAGA voters in the hopes that Trump and Musk will delegitimize themselves and allow Democrats to seize control of Congress. At which point the plan will be to do nothing until 2028 when they can seize the presidency, and then maybe pick up the scattered pieces of the country and stumble back towards the status quo of 2024, albeit with no global allies, no functioning federal bureaucracy, and a bankrupt country? Presuming that Trump hasn’t effectively ended free and fair elections by then?

The strategy seems misguided, to say the least. It is in line, however, with the strategy of the Joe Biden administration from 2020 on.

Biden spoke a lot about the need to fight authoritarianism, restore democracy, and protect the Constitution. But when it came to actually doing any of those things, he was not exactly a picture of urgency. Biden appointed centrist squish Merrick Garland as Attorney General, and Garland did his squishy thing, refusing to expedite the prosecution of Trump and his cronies for their numerous felonies until it was much too late. Biden refused to consider rebalancing the Supreme Court, and even avoided directly criticizing the justices for blatant corruption. When the Court infamously declared the president above the law, Biden rushed to insist he would not use his new powers by, for example, declaring a state of emergency and arresting everyone involved in the January 6 insurrection (including Supreme Court justices). No, Biden, wanted to make sure everyone knew that the new powers of the presidency were only for Republicans—only for Donald Trump, dictator in chief. Democrats would never.

Democratic spinelessness is structural and ideological, as I’ve discussed before. But it also has a core (or perhaps a veneer) of idealism. Democrats have spent every day since January 6, 2021, rushing to shore up norms and to return to normality. They did not prosecute Trump because prosecuting your political opponents looks bad, Biden did not use his new extra-legal powers to purge the House and Senate and Supreme Court because that would look bad.

The constant goal, the constant dream, is to avoid a constitutional crisis. Democrats believe that if they just keep following the rules, if they just keep doing what they’ve always done, the Republicans and the American people will eventually realize that they too love the old boring constitutional order, and will stop trying to shred it.

The problem is that, at least since January 6, we have been in a constitutional crisis. The Republicans do not want a democracy; they want a dictator. They have no respect for the constitution, which they mostly see as a barrier to murdering marginalized people and stripping people of rights.

Avoiding a constitutional crisis is no longer an option, and hasn’t been for at least four years, and arguably for decades. The options are

1. Fight for multi-racial democracy using every power you can grab and every dirty trick you know, or

2. Surrender.

Democrats have, over and over, chosen to surrender. They claim they are surrendering in the name of high ideals, in the name of adherence to the Constitution, in the name of the will of the American people, in the name of bipartisan amity, in the name of choosing the least bad option.

But at some point (and that point has long passed) surrender to authoritarian fascism is just surrender to authoritarian fascism. Biden said he was abiding by the Constitution when he betrayed his oath and handed the most powerful military in the history of the world over to an insurrectionist in defiance of the Constitution. Senate Democrats say they are avoiding worse outcomes by giving Trump and Musk carte blanche to do literally whatever they want until the next time Democrats get a chance to cave in.

“Democracy is a fight,” Adam Serwer wrote in 2018, “and the Democratic Party’s leadership has yet to show that it can even wrap its hands.” I’d go further, and say that the Democratic leaders’ sole tactic, to which it returns with unremitting optimism, is to tie their hands behind their back and bleat about how harmless they are in the hope that the Republicans won’t shoot them in the face.

This is not a great way of dealing with bullies, and it has not worked so far. I would like the Democrats to change their approach before Chuck Schumer and his caucus are tossed in the camps. One is forced to wonder if they’d resist even then.

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