This Is An Anti-Democracy Coup In Slow Motion
A couple days ago, Chris Murphy (D-CT), a likely Democratic presidential candidate, gave Jon Favreau an an unsettling explanation for why some Democrats may be pulling their punches and not fighting the fascist onslaught as hard as they could be, Watch this wake-up call. “My office,” he said, “as received phone calls and threats that are different from anything we had prior to the pardoning of the January 6 protestors… I assume other offices are getting those calls… And whether of not that reaches the level of consciousness, I don’t know but when your family is threatened with harm, of course it may, at the very least, subconsciously depress your interest in fighting as hard as you can. Given the fact that Elon Musk can rouse those people with one or two or three tweets, it probably also has to do with why there hasn’t been a concentrated effort to take him on personally; because folks don’t want to end up, as I have been and many others on the receiving end of sort of his social media storms. Because what comes with that is an implicit threat of violence.
It hasn’t shut Murphy up. He spoke with Favreau about modeling “a kind of vigorous, organic, authentic anger at what is happening, to, hopefully, inspire others to join.” That’s needed— more like Murphy. More like Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, Ted Lieu, Jamie Raskin… others and fewer who have been cowed into muting their voices and letting their fear silence them. A few days ago Murphy was on MSNBC with Nicolle Wallace, where he demonstrated this “modeling” he mentioned to Favreau. Give it a listen:
“Donald Trump,” he warned her and her audience, “is seizing power. He is seizing power. And what an autocrat does is put himself— and only himself— in charge of doling out money so that he can give that money to his friends and to his loyalists and so he can deny that money to people that are not loyal to him. And that is what Donald Trump is preparing to do. Tonight he didn’t get away with it for more than a handful of hours but it doesn’t mean that those recipients of dollars, those schools, those hospitals, those Head Start centers won’t wake up tomorrow morning still in chaos, not knowing whether they are going to by the end of next week still be able to employ people and provide those services. He’s not doing it to make government more efficient. He is doing it to be able to perpetuate a fundamental corruption— Donald Trump rewarding his friends and his billionaire friends’ companies and punishing Democrats and states that don’t line up and pledge loyalty to him.”
Over the weekend, Seth Masket was also wondering why the Democrats aren’t doing more… the way the Republicans did to slow down Obama and Biden. He wrote that on Friday “private citizen Elon Musk and his former Twitter employees occupied the Office of Personnel Management and the Treasury Department and prevented federal employees from doing their jobs; Trump vowed to fire Department of Justice employees for the sole reason that they investigated the January 6th insurrection, and Trump pressured federal agencies to remove vital data pertaining to trans people from their websites. I believe these actions constitute a significant attack on democracy and the rule of law.” He didn’t write— since it hadn’t happened yet— that “The CDC has instructed its scientists to retract or pause the publication of any research manuscript being considered by any medical or scientific journal, not merely its own internal periodicals, Inside Medicine has learned. The move aims to ensure that no forbidden terms appear in the work. The policy includes manuscripts that are in the revision stages at journal (but not officially accepted) and those already accepted for publication but not yet live. In the order, CDC researchers were instructed to remove references to or mentions of a list of forbidden terms: ‘Gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female,’ according to an email sent to CDC employees.” You want to talk about censorship?
Masket continued that the Democrats— with just a very few exceptions— are “under-reacting… taking a very blasé attitude toward all this, complaining about the price of avocados and sending fundraising e-mails.” He offered some suggestions for what they should be doing.
Publicity Stunts: These are not frivolous things— they can draw media and public attention to important events that are not currently getting much publicity. Have a bunch of members of Congress stand outside the Department of Justice refusing to let officials be forced out, or to vow to support and advocate for those who were. Stand in front of the Office of Personnel Management with employees who are being denied access to their computers by Musk’s team. Organize a sit-in in the Capitol. Encourage a strike by FBI agents and offer to pay their salary if it’s threatened.
Lawsuits: I’m no lawyer, but a private citizen asserting control over a federal office and gaining access to people’s personal financial data strikes me as a pretty serious crime, whether he’s a friend of the President’s or not. This seems like something law enforcement might be interested in (DC Metro Police surely have jurisdiction when a crime is being committed in the District). But beyond that, where are the Democratic officials and lawyers filing lawsuits and requests for injunctions? This is an ongoing potentially criminal situation.
Congressional delays: Democrats have complained for decades about Republicans abusing traditions and arcane rules in Congress to slow legislation down, posture on top issues, and extract concessions from the majority party. Good lord, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), no Daniel Webster, figured out that he could hold a bunch of four-star military promotions up for 10 months to draw attention to military support for reproductive care. Surely Democrats have picked up a trick or two by now.
… [T]here are other delays available to minority party senators, including refusing unanimous consent requests. That is, a lot of Senate business operates on this assumption of unanimous consent, and individual senators do not have to provide it:
The Senate has a whole set of rules that senators do not use and most don’t even know…. Instead, the Senate standard operating procedure is a set of workarounds, many of which require unanimous consent. That includes everything from establishing the debate procedure for a major bill, to a Senator standing up and talking about the news of the day when they’re supposed to be talking about the bill that’s on the floor. So if Democrats just started actually enforcing the rules of the Senate, they could really bring the place to a standstill. Literally, nobody would know how to act.
The point here is not that the opposition party would win, but they could make Trump’s actions far costlier to the majority party in Congress. They could limit the amount of damage. They could draw greater public attention to actions that almost certainly would be seen as unpopular.
The opposition party, by definition, will lose on a lot. But the Democrats are currently leaving a lot of very useful tools on the table.
There’s a name for what’s happening right now: authoritarian consolidation. Trump and his enablers are testing the limits of resistance, pushing through brazen acts of corruption and political control to see how much they can get away with. And the Democratic response? For the most part, tepid press releases, the occasional indignant tweet, and fundraising emails that read like a bad parody of urgency. Sorry, that’s not opposition— it’s acquiescence.
First of all, we all have to understand that this is not normal politics. It’s a live stress test of democracy, and so far, the Democratic Party is failing. Where is the disruption? Where is the fury? Where is the willingness to make Trump’s sabotage of government his crisis instead of just another thing for Americans to “vote harder” against in November? The Republicans spent years weaponizing every procedural trick in the book to hamstring Democrats. Now, with actual democracy on the line, Democrats are bringing a dull knife to a gunfight.
If they don’t fight back with everything they’ve got, the lesson will be clear: Trump and his allies can do whatever they want, and no one will stop them. And once that lesson is learned, the next phase of their agenda won’t just be about consolidating power— it will be about making opposition impossible.