The Dangers of Disarray

Republicans are failing to govern and to keep politics out of our foreign policy. And that is very worrisome.

House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Photos by Chip Somodevilla, Kevin Dietsch (Getty Images)

As I’ve been reporting throughout this week, there have been three stunning displays of Republican dysfunction in Congress.

First, the Senate GOP, under pressure from Trump, killed their own border bill. This was the very bill they had demanded from Democrats and had sent top Senate negotiators to work on for four months with their Democratic counterparts. The resulting proposed legislation would have been the most significant conservative win on immigration policy in decades, and they still walked away from it—all because Donald Trump doesn’t want Biden to claim a political win in an election year. It seems the “border crisis” wasn’t so urgent after all.

Second, the House failed to pass a stand-alone aid bill for Israel. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) tried unsuccessfully to muster a two-thirds vote of the whole chamber to bring the bill directly to the House floor, all to get around opposition to the bill from within his own party. But even staunch supporters of Israel correctly saw this as just another cynical way to hang Ukraine out to dry, and the bill went down to defeat. 

And third, not satisfied with losing just one big vote on Tuesday, Speaker Johnson once again proved boy math is hard when the House embarrassingly failed to impeach DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Johnson had unscrupulously sought to squeak the bill through while one Democrat, Rep. Al Green (D-TX), was recovering from abdominal surgery in the hospital. But Rep. Green, wearing a blue patient gown and sitting in a wheelchair, showed up anyway to support his friend, Secretary Mayorkas, and he cast the decisive no vote on the impeachment.

While we shake our collective heads in disbelief and understandably even laugh at the sheer incompetence of the GOP, there’s also a dangerous downside to these political failures. In today’s piece, I’ll discuss three of these that I find most concerning.

Loss of faith in democracy

The American public already has a low opinion of Congress. And this week’s antics aren’t likely to improve it.

For weeks, Republican officials, and their right-wing media mouthpieces, have stoked fears about migrants surging across the border. They have railed against them as if they were all drug traffickers, rapists and murderers, rather than families desperate to escape political persecution, gang violence and ecological disaster that we largely caused.

“So why the sudden reversal among Republicans who’ve been claiming that the situation at the border is an existential crisis that threatens our very sovereignty?” asked Linda Chavez, a former Reagan appointee, in her OpEd in The Bulwark. “The problem is that they’ve demagogued this issue (and so many others) for so long that they’ve effectively divorced electoral politics from policy. They have told so many lies—big and small—about immigration and immigrants that, faced in an election year with the chance to enact their policy proposals, all they can do is lie some more.”

What’s more, how can Democrats take seriously anything that the GOP offers going forward? After all, they’ve already sought to undo the budget deal negotiated by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and that wound up costing him his job. Their current fixation on impeaching Mayorkas (and Joe Biden) means that hearings are essentially a waste of time because actual facts and evidence don’t matter. 

And now they have walked away from the border deal after insisting a border policy solution be included in any aid package for our allies and after spending months negotiating it. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) identified the problem this creates for the Senate going forward: 

I have a difficult time understanding again how anyone else in the future is going to want to be on that negotiating team—on anything—if we are going to be against it…

I’ve gone through the multiple stages of grief. Today I’m just pissed off. 

While it would be great if voters saw clearly that the dysfunction in Congress is one-sided, many who are less tuned into the details will simply chalk it up to Congress once more failing to provide real solutions to the border. Worse still, they will still blame President Biden for failing to take strong action himself to address it, even though he currently lacks congressional authority to take action, including shutting down the border.

This dysfunction feeds into Donald Trump’s favored narrative: that he alone can fix everything by acting like a dictator on Day One. He claims, falsely, that the border was under control while he was president. He says that he would restore order, even if it means acting outside the law, as he did with his first Muslim travel ban. 

The greater the chaos, and the more Congress seems like it is wasting time, money and resources, even if it’s all coming from the GOP, the more Americans will shrug and think, “Maybe we should just let Trump take full control.” This is a common ploy out of the authoritarian playbook, and many Americans are sleepwalking their way right into it.

Loss of confidence by our allies

In a democracy, where there is strong support for something like continued aid to Ukraine, it ought to logically follow that the aid is in fact forthcoming. President Biden, the Pentagon and the State Department have all pledged to stand by Ukraine in its brutal war with Russia, and Ukraine has based its plans, both military and domestic, around such aid.

But now that aid lies in significant doubt, held up by a minority of GOP representatives willing to carry water for Vladimir Putin. It’s as if the U.S. is now saying, “Sorry, Ukraine, the American people don’t want to see you obliterated by a hostile, invading army. But crazy cousin Marjorie and this new guy MAGA Mike just won’t let us help. We really tried.”

One of the primary reasons we don’t play politics with our foreign policy is to keep America strong and united in the eyes of the world and to be able to make good on the pledges we make to our allies. But at every turn, Republicans, under pressure from Trump, have undermined that credibility. They did so under Trump with threats to defund NATO and the U.N. and by pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement. They did so last year by threatening to blow up the debt ceiling and cause a global financial meltdown, leading to downgrades of our creditworthiness.

And now they are playing chicken with aid to Ukraine, which faces annihilation by the Russian military if U.S. aid is not soon forthcoming. It would be understandable if future U.S. presidents were met with skepticism and even cold shoulders from our most trusted allies and friends when they come with offers of assistance. That significantly reduces our influence and therefore our options. It is a serious blow to our global standing. And most of the GOP doesn’t care.

Our enemies are watching and learning

If this debacle has demonstrated anything to anyone, it is to our enemies. They are learning that it doesn’t take much to rot the American system from within. Simply flood gullible viewers and listeners with misinformation, enable demagogues like Trump, capture the most extreme wing of the Republican party, and presto! Weakness and paralysis abound.

That one of our political parties can so quickly become corrupted and beholden to an asset like Donald Trump is frankly terrifying. And Russia and other nations are learning that it pays to invest even more heavily in disinformation, espionage and psyop programs because they are so effective in crippling the basic functioning of our democracy. 

Putin is becoming visibly bolder, even inviting former chief Fox propagandist Tucker Carlson to interview him in Moscow, with the interview to be aired on the platform of another red-pilled, useful idiot, Elon Musk. Americans are largely accepting this as normal, but it is far from normal.

The interference by the Russians in the 2016 election was just a glimpse of what would be possible to pull off years later, with many GOP leaders and Republican voters now even siding with Putin against our own ally in Ukraine. That would have been unthinkable even ten years ago, when Americans correctly understood who the real enemy was.

Why November matters so much

The disarray and dysfunction has now reached the Senate, which was once considered the less-captured body when it comes to MAGA and Trumpism. No more. 

Senate GOP leaders have proven incapable of controlling their own conference. We saw this with Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL)’s shameful, nine month blockade of all military promotions and appointments—a situation that Republicans couldn’t fix on their own without Democrats threatening a complete change to the Senate rules. 

And now we’ve seen it again with the border bill, which when examined was really a GOP dream list of demands with few concessions at all for the Democrats. But Minority Leader Mitch McConnell could not keep his party in line, and they had to kill the very bill they had demanded. The idea that the GOP can ever self-regulate against Trumpist extremism is now out the window.

That leaves us, the voters, to force the change this November. We need to remind the public that when Democrats controlled Congress and the White House, we got the American Rescue Package, the infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science act, the PACT bill, and even a gun safety bill passed and signed into law. By contrast, this Congress, with the GOP holding one chamber by a hair and causing obstruction at every turn, has seen no bills of any consequence signed into law. It is the most dysfunctional and least productive Congress in several generations. 

And that, as I’ve discussed above, is not only embarrassing. It is highly damaging and extremely dangerous.