What Category Hurricane Is Our Country Forcing Itself To Contend With Now?

It's Not Just Arizona

A friend of mine has arthritis and told me she needs to live someplace warm and dry. I suggested Arizona and she reacted very badly. She had just read how the state legislature— dominated by the Republicans— are in the process of passing a law written by MAGAty freshman Rep. Justin Heap (R-Mesa) making it legal to kill a migrant on your property. But Heap is far from the only sociopath trying to pass horrible legislation in Arizona. 

Remember Alexander Kolodin? Last December, he was admonished by the State Bar and placed on probation for his role in lawsuits challenging the 2020 election, including the infamous “kraken” lawsuit that made implausible and evidence-free claims of massive election fraud, and for representing two Republican legislators (Mark Finchem and Anthony Kern) and crackpot Congressman Paul Gosar in a defamation lawsuit filed against Democratic House Leader Charlene Femandez that was tossed out of court after a judge ruled it was “primarily for purposes of harassment.” In dismissing the case the judge found that the suit was not made in good faith and that a significant portion of Kolodin and his clients’ complaints “were written for an audience other than the assigned trial court judge.” Kern, Finchem and Gosar were ordered to pay $75,000 to cover Fernandez’s legal fees. 

Kolodin, unfortunately, didn’t go off and crawl under a rock. Widely considered severely mentally ill, he was elected to the state House to represent a super-red district that includes north Scottsdale, Cave Creek, Fountain Hills and Anthem. On Friday the Arizona Republic reported that Kolodin made an ass out of himself again, flaming Republican Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, after it was proposed that a statue of her be erected in the U.S. Capitol. Thinking it was supposed to be in the Arizona Capitol, Kolodin hissed, “We cannot allow the distinguished members of this body to have to suffer walking by such an undistinguished jurist when they enter here in the morning.”

What’s happening to our country? Has the decades-long GOP project to destroy public education finally borne fruit? Tom Nichols is calling this Democracy’s Dark Winter. “[V]ital aid to Ukraine,” he wrote “is being held up by the claque of Republican Putin sympathizers, opportunists, and performance artists who control the House of Representatives. (You may be under the impression that a certain Mike Johnson of Louisiana runs the House as speaker. You would be incorrect.) The world— including America— is facing a panoply of dangers, but such perils mean nothing to a group of people for whom Congress is just a lark— a way to live in Washington, raise money, and be on television.”

One indicator of how far American democracy has fallen is the way Mitch McConnell’s impending retirement has sparked concerns about who will replace him—as if McConnell is some lingering guardrail protecting democracy. (Still, McConnell was known to despise Donald Trump and hasn’t spoken to him for three years, which limited the former president’s reach in the Senate, so it’s not a trivial worry that his replacement may be more MAGA-friendly than he was.) McConnell is the longest-serving Senate leader in U.S. history; he will be remembered as one of the people whose decisions were crucial in bringing American democracy to the edge of destruction. Had McConnell retired a decade ago, he would have gone in the books as just another unremarkable party boss who used his talent for cloakroom politics to ensure that laws were written to protect the wealth and interests of his donors.

McConnell, however, worshipped the Senate and was willing to sell his political soul to stay in it and lead it. A master of legislative maneuvering, he helped create a strange new principle in American politics, in which presidents can nominate justices to the Supreme Court only if the Senate majority leader feels like entertaining that idea. He then led Senate Republicans through two impeachments and two acquittals of Trump, the second after the January 6 insurrection.

In a coincidence that Hollywood would not have allowed in a cheap potboiler script, McConnell announced his plans the same day that the Supreme Court granted a hearing on Trump’s ludicrous legal theory that presidents are unaccountable demigods who can rule at will. McConnell is the one man who, more than anyone else in Washington, made sure that Trump could walk free, run for president again, and then make his appeal for an elective monarchy to a Court whose conservative majority smirks at the idea of accountability.

Meanwhile, Trump continues his march to the Republican nomination. He is being aided by a Supreme Court that has agreed to hear his case. Some lawyers have argued that the Court should take up Trump’s case in order to settle the question of presidential immunity once and for all. The tell here, however, is the foot-dragging: After all, the 1974 decision that Richard Nixon had to hand over his tapes to a federal court was reached in 16 days. (In Bush v. Gore, the Court settled the matter in a few days, but they were facing an inflexible constitutional deadline regarding the 2000 election.)

The oral arguments in U.S. v. Trump won’t even occur until late April— as if this is some new problem that no one was prepared to argue next week. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Court’s conservative justices know precisely what they’re doing: They will eventually proclaim that Trump does not have the immunity he claims, while doing so late enough that he will, in fact, end up enjoying exactly the immunity he claims.

Meanwhile, the cruelty and vulgarization of American politics continue apace. President Joe Biden went to Texas and invited Trump to join him in pressing for a bipartisan border-security bill. Trump, for his part, referred to California Governor Gavin Newsom as “New-Scum.” He did this at a campaign event while a two-star general in uniform— the head of the Texas National Guard— flanked him on camera, in yet another departure from U.S. civil-military traditions. And the Border Patrol union, which represents sworn officers who work for the United States of America, posted on X that President Biden should “keep our name out of your mouth today.”

The U.S. was once a serious country, home to a serious people, and it is still a nation in which millions take seriously their responsibilities as voters and citizens. But it is also now, apparently, a place where some Americans who wear badges and carry weapons in the service of the national government feel free to engage in childish snarking at the commander in chief on social media.

As March 2024 begins, a Russian dictator’s war goes on, and a Russian patriot is laid to rest. In the United States, venal would-be autocrats continue to game the political and legal system, smirking at how easily they’ve played their opponents. Spring is inevitable, and we can keep faith that it will arrive, as it always does. But even when the sun returns, the winter shadows of authoritarianism will remain.

Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties

Are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise