The Party of Lawlessness and Disorder

GOP presidential primary candidates Gov. Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy. Photos courtesy of NBC News

The night before each morning that I write, I do a lot of reading. That includes the top stories from major papers, the trending pieces from my favorite thought leaders on social media, and lengthy opinion pieces and editorials. From there, I decide what could use a bit more in-depth attention.

This morning I’m following three connected stories. Each of them demonstrates how far from its mantle as the “law and order” party the GOP has drifted. We have top GOP presidential candidates decrying sentences meted out against seditious January 6 conspirators. There are high ranking Congressmembers weaponizing their positions to pressure and obstruct local prosecutors. And there are theatrics around an impeachment of one of their own that leaves you wondering whether there are any serious people at all left in the Republican Party.

These are evidence of not only a party in decline but of democracy at risk. But it’s Friday, and the Republic will not fall overnight, so with inspiration provided by Fani Willis’s epic takedown of Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), I’m going to take this morning to put these damn fools on blast.

DeSantis and Ramaswamy beclown themselves over Proud Boys

This week saw a succession of sentences handed down against convicted seditious conspirators from the Proud Boys, including Enrique Tarrio, who received 22 years. The lengths of the sentences were well below what the Justice Department had sought, but around twice what had been offered earlier in plea deals. (Narrator: They should have taken those deals.) 

Still, Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, eager to smear their faces with MAGA war paint, declared that the sentences were “excessive” and “wrong.” 

“This is wrong & it’s sad that I’m the only candidate with the spine to say it,” tweeted Ramaswamy. 

That apparently forced DeSantis to one-up him and add a bit of racism, why not? “They just walked into the Capitol,” DeSantis declared during an interview with Newsmax, managing to rewrite history on the fly. “If they were B.L.M., they would not have been prosecuted.”

Ramaswamy put out a similar racially-charged statement on Wednesday. “America now has a two-tiered justice system: Antifa and B.L.M. rioters roam free while peaceful Jan. 6 protesters are imprisoned without bail,” he stated.

Both have suggested they would pardon the Proud Boys if elected.

So, reality and fact check time. Neither of these candidates saw or weighed the evidence first hand in these cases. That was done by duly empaneled juries over weeks of trials. Had they done so, they would have to admit that the Proud Boys planned a coordinated attack, with a weapons stash off site in case it was needed. They targeted the Capitol at the very moment the peaceful transfer of power was to occur with the express goal of disrupting it and ending democracy as we know it. 

The judge agreed that their actions amounted to domestic terrorism and applied that enhancement upon the government’s recommendation. Of Tarrio and the others, Judge Timothy Kelly, a Trump-appointee, reflected somberly,

The people he assembled, the people that were there, again, played critical roles ... they played important roles at breach after breach after breach.

What is the proper sentence for such a conspiracy and obstruction of Congress? The law speaks directly to that, and the sentencing guidelines provide a range. Judge Kelly came in well under those guidelines, based on his belief that other decades-long sentences handed down for seditious conspiracy typically included circumstances when the defendants intended or their actions directly led to loss of life (though many would argue that that’s precisely what happened here).

But whaddabout Black Lives Matter? First, the vast majority of those protests were peaceful. It is disinformation to portray the summer of protests against police violence as anything but largely peaceful, no matter what Fox and CNN had on loop. 

Second, when the protests did on rare occasions turn violent, arrests were swift. An Associated Press investigation found that over 120 defendants were found guilty of crimes such as arson, rioting and conspiracy. 

And third, rather than “roaming free,” the B.L.M. defendants, when convicted, received prison terms of over two years on average. By comparison, according to an NPR database, the median prison terms for the 1,100 cases around January 6 have been around four months.

By undermining the sentences of a federal judge, and by making factually inaccurate and racially inflammatory comparisons with the B.L.M. cases, while suggesting they would thwart justice through their pardon powers, DeSantis and Ramaswamy have lost any right to claim they support law and order. Rather, they will say and do anything for the right to claim second place behind Trump, in the ironic hope that the same justice system that takes him down will give them a fighting chance.

Jim Jordan suddenly cares deeply about protecting victims

As I wrote about in an earlier piece in The Big Picture, the GOP has come hard for the prosecutors who are seeking to hold Donald Trump accountable for his various crimes. Rep. Jordan joined two other GOP leaders in seeking to investigate—really, to obstruct—the work of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, even before Trump was indicted by a New York grand jury for false business records. 

He also targeted Jack Smith’s prosecution. Smith largely ignored him, so Jordan tried a different tack: coming after one of the FBI’s top investigators for leaning too hard on a defendant’s lawyer. The Justice Department again had no comment.

Then, predictably, Jordan set his sights on Fani Willis and officially launched a probe into her “motivations” for prosecuting Trump.

The local prosecutors didn’t take this lying down. Bragg issued a letter calling Jordan’s inquiry “an unprecedented inquiry into a pending local prosecution.” And yesterday, Willis fired back, and hard. Vanity Fair’s headline said it best: “Fani Willis All But Calls Jim Jordan a Moron in Scathing Letter about Prosecuting Trump.” 

The article also does a great job of encapsulating Willis’s letter:

More or less suggesting that the Republican Congressman ought to take a remedial civics course, Willis dubbed his request for the Trump records “offensive to any notion of separation of powers that recognizes the distinct roles of the executive and legislative functions of government,” writing: “Your attempt to invoke congressional authority to intrude upon and interfere with an active criminal case in Georgia is flagrantly at odds with the Constitution ... There is absolutely no support for Congress purporting to second guess or somehow supervise an ongoing Georgia criminal investigation and prosecution. That violation of Georgia’s sovereignty is offensive and will not stand.” 

Wait. There’s more.

Apparently operating from the assumption that the House Judiciary chair knows less about how the US government works than a third grader, she added: “As the Supreme Court has explained, ‘the Executive Branch has exclusive authority and absolute discretion to decide whether to prosecute a case.’ Congress, in contrast, is barred by precedent from using investigations for ‘law enforcement purposes.’ You have thus violated the basic constitutional rule that ‘the power to investigate must not be confused with any of the powers of law enforcement; those powers are assigned under our Constitution to the Executive and the Judiciary’.” 

The most scathing moment came here. I have nothing to add but the context that Jim Jordan graduated from law school but never actually took nor passed the bar exam. Willis writes,

Allow me the opportunity to provide a brief tutorial on criminal conspiracy law, Chairman Jordan. As I explained to the public when announcing the indictment, the overt and predicate acts are included because the grand jury found probable cause that those acts were committed to advance the objectives of a criminal conspiracy to overturn the result of Georgia’s 2020 Presidential Election.

For a more thorough understanding of Georgia’s RICO statute, its application and similar laws in other states, I encourage you to read “RICO State-by-State.” As a non-member of the bar, you can purchase a copy for two hundred forty-nine dollars [$249].

Don’t mess with Fani Willis, Jim.

The Texas impeachment trial is an embarrassment

As the Texas GOP got set to devour its own over a high-profile, and what should be a historically significant, impeachment trial of the state Attorney General, Ken Paxton, many on the left got out the popcorn. But if any were hoping for the GOP to finally find some semblance of normalcy in holding one of its own to account, they were quickly disappointed.

Per reporting by the Washington Post, the trial began with an effort to establish the “credibility” of the first witness, Jeff Mateer, who was Paxton’s former top deputy turned whistleblower. How counsel sought to buttress Mateer before the Republican senators who would decide Paxton’s fate was telling.

“Are you a RINO?” the lawyer asked Mateer, who answered in the negative. (RINO stands for “Republican In Name Only” if you’re unfamiliar with how Republicans insult each other these days.)

He then asked about Mateer’s co-workers in the Attorney General’s office. Were they members of the “deep state”?

He then went on to establish how religious Mateer is.

This is what passes for credibility in the Texas GOP these days. You need to be an arch conservative, an evangelical, a true believer. Anything short of that, and apparently you’re just part of the conspiracy to “get Paxton.” Mateer himself is no moderate; he is famous for being a failed Trump judicial appointee who delivered speeches about how transgender children are proof that “Satan’s plan is working.” 

The cross examination was no better. The way to discredit a Republican these days, it seems, is to link them to establishment Republicans like those terrible RINOs, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. Paxton’s lead defense counsel tried to tie Mateer to the political backers of George P. Bush, grandson and nephew of the elder Bushes, who had tried to unseat Paxton as AG.

“You were staging a coup, weren’t you?” he asked Mateer.

Lordy. These, in the words of Logan Roy, “are not serious people.” And this is not a serious proceeding. Loyalty to party and to God carry more weight before these GOP senators than any actual facts or evidence. And so we find ourselves back in a Twilight Zone from the 1950s, railing about communists and atheists (or RINOs and the deep state).

This serves as a disturbingly clear window into the rotted core of the GOP, addicted to Trumpian opiates and saddled with self-consuming MAGA identity politics. It is emblematic of the slow implosion of the party, which is experiencing a race to the bottom that makes sense only to those wholly caught in the pull of the vortex. 

But to the broader majority of Americans, the trial gives strong authoritarian state vibes, which is perhaps unsurprising in America’s biggest state laboratories for fascism. Perhaps the lawyers will get around to the actual evidence and the factual record. But so far, this is not about the rule of law but about the rule of men and their loyalties, and about party purity. 

And that is just about all the GOP has left.