The Daily Beast Podcast - Republicans Aren’t All Dumb. They’re Just Part of Cult.

Episode Date: January 31, 2021

Lots of us have been asking ourselves (and Twitter) many questions over the last year. Questions like: How did about 74 million people vote for Trump, again? Why do people actually believe in QAnon? And, more recently, if Republicans can see Trump for who he really is-—and how he has become a hero among a sect of the party that, at their worst, believe celebrities are part of a global pedophile ring, and at their best, that masks are a form of censorship—than why do the majority of them still support him? Norm Ornstein, an American political scientist and The Atlantic contributor, joined co-host Molly Jong-Fast on this members-only episode of The New Abnormal to share his insight. “There are plenty of Republicans, and I put Rob Portman in that category, who know perfectly well that this stuff is just awful, or plenty of it is, but they'd gone along because they're a part of the cult,” he says. He also adds Mitch McConnell to that list: “He knows what Trump is. He knows that Trump is a doofus and a racist and has no ability to govern, to read anything, all of that, but he could get the tax cuts and get all these judges, knowing that basically the best way they can cling to power is to stack these courts that will let any voter suppression measures pass muster, and that will block Democratic presidents and [hit] the goals they can't accomplish in Congress alone.” If it continues like this, he adds, “you can't have a democracy for long that doesn't have two functioning problem-solving oriented parties.” Then there are the Marjorie Taylor Green types in Congress to think about. How did that happen? Trump certainly fueled it, but he didn’t start that fire, says Ornstein. “The Republican party had an insurgent outlier party that was dismissive of its opposition, that was contemptuous of facts and science that had blown up norms and could care less about the others in terms of governing long before Donald Trump emerged as a potential political figure or presidential candidate,” he says. “[Republicans] just dove in headfirst into the muck.” Then! The two discuss a topic Molly gets crap for and that’s why Diane Feinstein really needs to retire. And the two roast Kevin McCarthy, big time. “McCarthy had this moment to be free of Trump. And he just went back for more,” says Molly. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to another Members Only Beast Inside episode of the Daily Beast of the New Abnormal. We thank you so much for being here. Norm Ornstein is an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to the Atlantic. So my first question for you is when we just started to talk a minute ago, you said there was something that happened today, and this is not going to air until Sunday,

but I think we'll still be talking about it on Sunday. They got you a little bit upset, and it got me a little bit upset too. Do you want to talk about it? So one of the people who I have had disdain for for a very long time is Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader in the House. And we went from him basically making excuses for Marjorie Taylor Green, who, you know, it's unfortunate, got elected to Congress, but who should be expelled for behavior that is just beyond any pale that we might consider. that we saw McCarthy go down to Mara Lago, meet with Trump, and issue a statement about how they had this wonderful conversation, and we're going to work hand and glove to elect a Republican majority to the House in 2022. Stepping back from it, stepping back from it, we have a president

who, this is not an allegation, it's a reality, openly incited a violent, attack on the U.S. Capitol trying to overturn the results of a fair election that resulted in at least six people dying. 140 Capitol Police and other law enforcement people injured some severely, one who might lose an eye, others with brain injuries, battered and stabbed with polls and other devices. People who are intent on killing the vice president, lynching the vice president because his president urged them on and could have killed a number of members of Congress. A woman who stole the laptop of the Speaker of the House to sell it to Russian intelligence. That's what this president did. We've never seen anything like it.

and the Republican leader of the House goes down to embrace him and talk about how he's going to be popular again and they can work together. To say disgusting, detestable, I can think of a lot of adjectives that start with D and others that start with other letters. It's just hard to describe how vile all of that is, and that did not make my day when it happened. Yeah, it seems as if McCarthy is going to just, you know, he had this moment to be free of Trump and he just went back for more. It's McCarthy deciding that he is going to tie himself to this terrible president. Try not to have any consequences or get any distance from the behavior of this president, the traitorous behavior of this president. But let's also consider that he has criticized only one member of his own conference, not Marjorie Taylor Green, who called before she was elected to Congress for the assassination of the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and killing others, who went after in the most disgraceful fashion a survivor of the shootings at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas School in Florida and said nothing. You have a woman who carried a gun onto the house floor,

didn't say a thing, in fact, has not said anything except critical comments about having metal detectors now for members who are trying to carry weapons into the house, has said nothing about the vile racist comments of a number of his own colleagues about the great likelihood that at least three of them, according to one of the organizers of the attack in Washington, conspired with them to help pull it off. Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks. And the one person he's criticized is the one who took the moral stand, Liz Cheney. When I tweet about Kevin McCarthy, each one is worst house leader ever. You know, he's getting more and more distance between himself and other house leaders in that category.

How could Republicans, not that they want to, but just theoretically, free themselves from Trumpism, I mean, it seems like they have Stockholm syndrome and they're they're hostages, but they want to be hostages as much as they're actually hostages. But do you see a world in which Republicans could free themselves from? Trump? I can see that world, but it's in a galaxy far away. Yeah. There are a few things to say about that. One is, I believe that when Mitch McConnell talked about how impeachment maybe wasn't such a bad thing and he'd leave it up to the conscience of his own members, a part of that strategy was, you know what, if we could just rid ourselves of Trump and convince a client press corps and others that we weren't the problem. It was just this rogue guy. Then we can keep doing what we've been doing for years and get

away with it. But then he had to step back from that because his colleagues, having no moral fiber whatsoever, looked out there and the reality that a majority of Republicans, or pretty close to it, are still pretty enthusiastic about Trump, that he will not go away of his own accord, that their choices are not good ones, but they're probably better off not detaching themselves from him. It tells you so much about where the Republican Party has gone. But, you know, I'll come back to the other reality. Getting rid of Trump is not getting rid of Trumpism. And calling it Trumpism ignores the fact that the conditions that brought us a Donald Trump were there long before Trump. You know, Tom Mann and I talked about the Republican Party as an insurgent.

an outlier party as a party that was dismissive of its opposition, that was contemptuous of facts and science, that had blown up norms and could care less about the others in terms of governing, long before Donald Trump emerged as a potential political figure or presidential candidate. And the way they performed and behaved all throughout the Obama years, you know, uniting an opposition to everything, delegitimizing what they could, using dog, whistles to portray Obama in the most racist fashion, the birtherism stuff, and more. That wasn't Donald Trump. That was before Donald Trump. Using the anger that was out there after the financial collapse in 2008, when the Tea Party movement emerged, to play on the worst instincts of

the Tea Party. And it worked for them. They gained more seats in the House in 2010, riding on the backs of that anger than they had in a hundred years. And then they got the Senate in 2014 by being obstructionist, all of that. And the dog whistles with Trump became megaphones. There wasn't, you know, coded language, not birther stuff. It was rank racism and nativism and antisemitism and the worst sort of stuff. And instead of getting away from it, instead of putting any check and balance on his maladministration in so many areas, instead of doing any oversight of the corruption, they basically just dove in headfirst into the muck. What do you think Democrats can do?

I feel like Democrats are in this interesting situation where they hold all three branches, right? But they have narrow margins, especially in the Senate. And they have a, I mean, it feels, and Biden's only been president for what, 10 days, but it feels like he's learned some of the lessons of Obama, and he wants to go big. I hope he has. You know, I'm still troubled by his comments during the campaign

and even afterwards that if he got elected, Republicans would, some Republicans would have an epiphany and would decide that they'd had enough of this. I'm still waiting, and I'm not holding my breath, and I won't. And, you know, I understand his desire. I understand the strategy in a sense. He's not a naive guy. He lived through those eight years. But the strategy of trying to move past this and trying to be a president of all of us, that's all fine. It's going to be very, very tough. And a part of the challenge here is going to be timing.

It's when do you reach out, put out the olive branch and the second olive branch and the third olive branch. and say you want to work with them and offer them opportunities until you reach the point at which you say enough is enough. And the problem is by that point you may have lost your momentum and lost a lot of your ability to act. And one of the things that we know happens, I mean, I've been around congressional politics for five decades. The further you get into the first year of a new Democratic president, the more the Democrats who are up in the midterm contest, knowing what usually happens, get nervous, that your opportunities are usually greater at the beginning than they are in the middle

and greater in the middle than they are at the end. So it's how long do you go? And a part of that, frankly, is how long does the press corps go along with the charade? And we're already seeing them going along with the charade. The just terrible New York Times editorial about using executive orders and editorial chastising Biden

never once mentioning Mitch McConnell, never once talking about how he began by blocking an organizing resolution to get the Senate together so that the committees could operate, that he's threatened mayhem, that the history of this would suggest why, even if you don't want to use executive orders, your options are doing nothing or doing something that's imperfect. It's back to the old patterns. And of course, we saw that as well with a story. You know, it may have been a style story, but it doesn't matter right off the bat, criticizing him for wearing a Rolex watch, you know, some of this stuff that's back to the Obama tan suit. You've got all of that that will make it harder to draw the line and to make the choice difficult for Republicans. And of course, the other

factor here is you can do some stuff with reconciliation. First, you hope that you've got 50 votes, to change the rules so you can do more so that it isn't just the constraints of having it completely budget-related and not including some of the things you'd like to include. You can do that only maybe twice in this next year, a big package that can get an expedited up or down vote with a majority passing it. But the more you add in there, because you don't have other alternatives, the greater the risk that you lose some of your own members, and you don't have any slack to lose any of them. And then you've got the question of the filibuster. And, you know, the focus has been on Joe Manchin and Kristen Cinema. Diane Feinstein is a huge roadblock here.

Can we talk about Diane Feinstein for a minute? Everyone gets mad at me when I talk about this. But clearly it's time. Yeah. It clearly is time. And that's not a function of me not loving people in their 80s. It's just that she has proven, and it's not her age. I mean, she just, is not, she's not, she's not sharp. I mean, she's not sharp anymore. You know, I've had relatives who begin to suffer from dementia, deny it. And I was, I've just been reading a book that's soon to come out by a great journalist, Jackie Colmes, which reflects on the larger dysfunction, but it's as much as anything about the Kavanaugh confirmation process. And one of the things that stood out to me is that Christine Blaise Ford had an initial conversation with Anna Eschew,

her congresswoman. And then Anna had a conversation with Feinstein. And after that, some weeks later, Feinstein didn't remember that she'd had the conversation. Now, that's not a conversation you're likely to forget if you're completely there. And if you look at some of her actions, Feinstein's actions, embracing Lindsay Graham. Yeah, that was the hug that will live in infamy. Yeah, after everything that Graham had said and done. And now saying that there shouldn't be any action taken against these vile senators, Hawley and Cruz, who contributed to the atmosphere and the incitement that led to the horrors on January 6th,

Not even a censure. It's time, clearly. She was a hero of mine of so many people, going all the way back to the horrible tragedy in San Francisco, the Harvey Milk and George Moscone. Now, my question for you is just, who is the person who makes that decision? Feinstein makes the decision. And one would hope that at some point, her staff, her family. Because I've read the reporting where, I'm sorry to interrupt you, where Chuck Schumer, went in there and had to talk with her and she was furious. Yeah. Her colleagues can't make that decision for her.

I mean, they can try and pressure her. They certainly did it with Al Franken. Yeah. But it was a different set of circumstances, and you had large numbers of them publicly jump up. Now, my guess is if we get to a point where she's, you know, an obstructionist within any of the things that Democrats want to do, or, you know, really embarrasses herself further in a committee, there may be a growing amount of

pressure, but, you know, it's just, there's no way to force anybody out without expelling them, and that's not going to happen. So that's a problem for them, but she's also been, you know, a supporter of the filibuster rule in the past. And there are others who are reluctant to make a change. As you know, I've been trying for a very long time to get them to do something and to get them do something that doesn't require them to abolish the filibuster, to be able to say to a Joe Mansion, what we want to do is to restore the original purpose, which is you put the burden on the minority, not the majority. But, you know, that's not going to happen in the short run. And in the meantime, your ability to get that early action, the sorts of things that really

establish a president as a doer, are going to be tough. Now, having said that, you know, it's true, the executive orders are limited and can be erased quickly. And I'm very concerned about the Supreme Court with justices who were perfectly fine with most of what Trump had done, but will take a very different stance towards a Democratic president, and also want to basically take away the authority of government to do anything, the authority of Congress to act and the authority of a president and regulators to do things. But with the That, the positive side here is if we can get the actions that we are already seeing being taken by the most competent professionals that we have in the country to get the pandemic under control

relatively quickly. And if what follows from that is that before the end of 2021, the economy really starts to move in a positive direction, and that will carry forward into 2022, that's going to redound to the benefit of Biden, and it will give him perhaps some more traction. But, you know, when you're operating with the thinnest of margins in the House and no margin of error at all in the Senate, thank God Biden got elected, or we would all be toast, this entire political system would be done for. But anybody who thinks that he can now do big, bold things because Democrats have the House and Senate, has not been paying any attention to the realities of our politics. It seems to me that democracy is not in great shape and that it'll be fine for the next four years,

but we are going to have yet another reckoning in 2024. What do you think we can do to prepare for that? So to me, the most significant thing for the health of the country going forward, other than finding the votes right now or soon to be able to get H.R. 1 and S1 or some package of democracy reforms that protect voting in our elections, federal elections at least, is to have the conditions solid enough that Republicans lose seats in both House and Senate in 2022. And if they do, then Democrats are going to be in a stronger position to do something more, to protect voting, and to implement some of the things in the areas, the crises that Biden and his chief of staff, Ron Clayne, have talked about.

the climate crisis, although you're, you know, there are some limits there, but at least to begin to act, the economic crisis, the public health crisis, which we hope will then be more under control in any case, and the racial equity issue. And I would add that it's not just the economic crisis right now. Democrats have to begin to do something about the yawning economic inequality in the country that is getting worse and not better, and that is there in terms of income and in wealth. there are steps that can be taken to help on that front. If those things happen, I think 2024 looks much brighter. If they don't, if Republicans regain either House or Senate in 2022, because this game plan of obstruction and demonization that worked in the two Obama midterms

works again. And they then have control of at least one of the houses and can block anything more from getting done through Congress, and more than likely you have a Supreme Court that will handcuff the President in terms of executive action. And you'll have a Republican Party that basically believes that the worst instincts of Trump and McConnell and the misogynist, racist, and nativists out there are just fine for them because they can still win. Then we're really fucked. Yeah, I'm worried about this very Republican. Yes, you should be. You know, I'm actually just been writing a piece about, that'll be in the Washington Post, probably Sunday, on the retirement of Rob Portman. So I knew Rob Portman, and I wrote a favorable column in 2003 when I was writing weekly

for Roll Call about how he had worked with Ben Carden, both on the House Ways and Means Committee. He was in the House then on pension reform. And it was kind of a model, even at a difficult time then, of how you could have bipartisan action. But as we talk about the Supreme Court, when he had moved to the Senate and Scalia died, Portman not only went along with blocking Merrick Garland from getting anywhere, unlike many of his colleagues, he at least held a meeting with him. But he wrote a piece in the Cincinnati Inquirer, his home paper explaining why it was such a terrible idea to have a vote on a Supreme Court justice in an election year. And of course, then he turned around eight days before the presidential election and voted to confirm Amy Coney-Barrant. And what that tells you is that, you know, people who have

been lauded by the press as moderates as those willing to compromise and govern all went along with this stuff. And, you know, for McConnell, who like I think a whole lot of Republicans in the Senate, has contempt for Trump. He knows what Trump is. He knows that Trump is a doofus and a racist and has no ability to govern to read anything, all of that. But that he could get the tax cuts and get all these judges, knowing that basically the best way they can cling to power is to stack these courts that will let any voter suppression measures pass muster, and that will block Democratic presidents, and that the goals they can't accomplish in Congress alone, even when they have the power to scale back government or blow it up entirely, they're putting in justices who are perfectly

happy to do that. So, you know, before very long, this Supreme Court is going to have at least five and maybe even six votes to strip out or scale back the Chevron doctrine, which is basically that agencies and regulators have some authority if they follow appropriate procedures and do it carefully and reasonably to issue regulations that go beyond the specific letter of the law, which is a necessary thing to do. Even if you think about, for example, how we handle a pandemic with this kind of virus, the laws that we have in place to deal with these things don't deal with every kind of virus. You can't know in advance. You don't know what pollutants might come along. But if they scale that back and say that it has to be explicit in the law,

given what we know about how difficult it is to make law to begin with, they're basically cutting the heart out of government's ability to do much of anything. And then we know that we have at least five justices who would be perfectly happy to return to the Lochner era, the pre-New Deal era, where you define the Commerce Clause in the Constitution so narrowly that Congress, for example, would be forbidden from enacting any kind of national health care plan. That's a very scary scenario. It is. And I think, you know, Roberts, whose ideology would move him in that direction, is enough of a pragmatist understanding that it's his court and it's his,

historical judgment, that if they push that too far, the public will go ballistic. So he, you know, tries to keep it at least within some boundaries, although when it comes to voting rights or campaign finance, he'll do anything, whatever the reality on the ground is. You know, he's not a swing justice anymore. And you've got five radicals there. You know, it's a, it's a grim picture in a lot of ways. And if we can't manage to get through 2022 and 2024, and 24, and if we can't manage to get through, can get through 2022 and 2024, I'm hoping we can make changes in the Supreme Court, as well as making sure that people who have the right to vote, have the ability to vote, will be in okay shape going forward. It's really scary to me. And it just seems like Republicans are never going to come

to their senses. I, you know, the only thing that would put them on a different path, I believe, is losing big in the midterm. You got to lose, you know, I called it before the rule of three. I, You need to lose three national elections in a row to change. And it's basically you lose one and it's, oh, how could we have been so dumb as to pick that candidate? And you lose two and it's, oh, we did it again. By the third time, you realize it's not just one bad choice. There's something more going on there. And the fact that they have done so well for so long in midterms, because the electorate changes to their advantage.

and when there's a Democratic president, it means they're very likely to make gains and therefore, you know, to think that their problems are more limited. But when I see the direction that the party is taking more generally, when I see that you've got state parties in Michigan and Oregon and Florida and Texas and Hawaii and Arizona, where the party hierarchy is people. people who are as crazy as Louis Gohmert and Marjorie Taylor Green. You know, Alan West, who was a complete nut case as a Republican in Congress from Florida, you know, then moves and becomes the chair of the Texas Republican Party, which issued its platform a few years ago that included, you know, pulling out of the UN and eliminating the Federal Reserve. I mean, you know, we're dealing with crazy people, the Arizona party that just condemned the governor and Cindy McCain. That's the direction we're heading in. We've got state legislatures filled with conspiracy theorists and nut cases

who really believe this stuff. One of my favorite anecdotes, which is true, one of the true anecdotes, that I heard from my late friend Harry McPherson, who was Lyndon Johnson's legislative guy when he was in the Senate, that back when we had these filibusters on civil rights bills and voting rights, senators, Southern Democrats all had to take to the floor and speak at length back when the filibuster actually met you had to speak. And there were two senators from South Carolina. One was Strom Thurmond, and the other was Olin Johnston. And Olin Johnston was a new deal kind of guy, but he had to go along because they all had to go along with segregation. And so he goes out on the Floren gives his speech during the filibuster on the 1957 civil rights bill. And then he walks back

into the Senate Democrats cloak room while his counterpart Strom Thurman goes out there to take over. And Johnston walks in and turns to Harry and says, you know, pointing back to the floor, old Strom, he really believes that shit. And it's sort of a template for me because we now have, look, there are plenty of Republicans. And I put Rob Port. in that category. Who know perfectly well that this stuff is just awful or plenty of it is, but they've gone along because they're a part of the cult, they're loyalists, Lamar Alexander, because he didn't want to go back to Tennessee and be shunned by his longtime friends. But now we're getting more and more people who really believe this shit. How do you change a party when that's the

next generation coming forward? Unless they lose big in 2022 and you get at least some traction for the David Frums and the never-trumpers to begin to create a real party instead of a fanatical religious-type cult. We got a long ways to go. And that's bad for all of us. It's not just bad for people who believe a different thing. You can't have a democracy for long, like ours, that doesn't have two functioning problem-solving-oriented parties. Thank you, Norm. Have a nice day, Molly. You didn't make me feel better. Can I not get anyone on this fucking podcast who will make me feel better? I think we're going to have to look for a cheesecake or something else.

Right. You're saying it's a cake night? Unfortunately, Norm, every night in my house is a cake night. I understand. On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks in the Daily Beast and beyond for media, culture, politics, and science, who will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media.

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