Ben Sasse spent much of his life in the belly of the liberal elite beast, gathering intel on us. He did his undergrad at Harvard, got a Ph.D. from Yale, and in between cadged a master’s in liberal arts from tiny but respected St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where all they do is read great books from Aristotle to Hume to Hegel to Merleau-Ponty and think deep thoughts.
You’d think after all that field work that he’d have a pretty good sense of the species. But he made it clear over the weekend that he understands nothing of liberalism.
His statement explaining his vote to convict Donald Trump opens thus: “An impeachment trial is a public declaration of what a president’s oath of office means and what behavior that oath demands of presidents in the future. But here’s the sad reality: If we were talking about a Democratic president, most Republicans and most Democrats would simply swap sides. Tribalism is a hell of a drug…”
Sorry, Ben. This is wrong. Democrats would not acquit a Democratic president who did what Trump did. I’ll be charitable and chalk this up to your ignorance about liberals, rather than any malicious intent on your part, but you are wrong wrong wrong, and this is how the two parties are completely different animals.
OK, first of all, I should note that this hypothetical is ridiculous, because no Democratic president would do what Donald Trump did. No Democratic president would spend months lying about rigged elections. In fact, we know that Al Gore was in a somewhat similar situation in 2000. He had a much stronger claim to being robbed than Trump ever had, because Gore lost by a mere 538 votes in one state (Florida) whose electoral votes would have flipped the presidency to him.
The governor of that state was his opponent’s brother, and the state official in charge of counting votes was an openly partisan Republican. He had plenty of justification, in other words, to yell and lie about a massive conspiracy to steal the state from him. But he did not. He simply said let’s count the votes over. And when the Supreme Court stopped the recount—an outrageous and rancidly partisan decision that still ranks as one of the worst and most hypocritical decisions in the court’s history—Gore graciously stood down.
So no; no Democratic incumbent would behave as Trump behaved. But even this is ridiculous to contemplate, because Democratic primary voters would never nominate a lying buffoonish sociopath in the first place. I often wondered in 2016, who would a Democratic Donald Trump be? Michael Moore? Sean Penn? Sort of, in terms of implausibility, but that actually insults Moore and even Penn, both of whom are more intelligent about policy (Moore in particular) than Trump. And can you imagine the Democratic Party nominating Michael Moore for president? He wouldn’t last past Iowa.
So, this entire hypothetical is crazy, which is an important point because it, too, shows us how the two parties are different. Democratic voters don’t vote based on their ginned-up cable-news rage. They had a candidate who was sort of like that in Bernie Sanders, at least to the extent that he inveighed against a political foe, in his case the capitalist class. But again, there is utterly no comparing Sanders to Trump, because Sanders is an honest and intelligent man who knows policy and reads books. But anyway, Democratic voters rejected even him. They nominated the guy they thought could win, and who was comparatively moderate and uncontroversial.
So the ideas that 1) there would even be such a thing as a “Democratic Trump” and 2) that this Democratic Trump would lie, lie, lie and incite a riot on the Capitol are patently absurd. But just for the sake of argument, let’s go with this for a minute. Let’s say a Democratic president did precisely what Trump did, leading to precisely the same historic catastrophe we saw on Jan. 6. How would Democratic senators vote?
I have zero doubt that the bulk of them would convict. Not because Democrats are great heroes. They are not. But they are, simply, democrats. The Democratic Party is a functioning political party whose leaders take seriously the ideas enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. Those commitments would lead them to be absolutely aghast at what happened on Jan. 6, and they’d convict the president in a heartbeat, especially if he were no longer in office. And yes, they’d vote to banish him from public life, too.
Ben Sasse’s party would once have done the same, by the way. The Republican Party of the 1970s or 1980s would have been horror-stricken at Jan. 6 and would have punished a president of its own party who made it happen. But then again, the GOP of that time also would never have nominated a fascist charlatan. But the GOP of today is no longer a political party worthy of the name. It’s a racket and a cult. There is no principle. There’s just fear, lust for power, and trolling the libs.
Now I know some half-witted readers out there are puffing out their chests and thinking: hey, but what about Bill Clinton? Please. Clinton lied under oath, yes, and that was bad, but it was about a sexual liaison. There were no constitutional principles at stake. He certainly led no assault on democracy. Comparing Clinton’s crime to Trump’s is like comparing day-old milk to mustard gas.
Besides which, even though Democratic senators acquitted Clinton, a number of them sought to reprimand him so that their acquittal vote wasn’t the only thing on the record. Thirty Democrats, led by Dianne Feinstein, signed a nonbinding resolution condemning Clinton and entered it into the Congressional Record. I’d recommend that you not hold your breath waiting for Republicans to do even that.
And then, when Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, Democrats exploded in fury. That was Clinton’s last day in office, but if he’d had more time, there’s no doubt that Democrats would have called for an investigation. In fact, there was an investigation—initiated by a Democratic federal prosecutor who’d been appointed to her post by Clinton himself!
That’s what you call having principles. Democrats have them. I’m not saying they’re perfect. All politicians, and parties, do the expedient thing sometimes. But the Republican Party, which once also accepted the basic principles of democratic accountability, does the weak, unprincipled, expedient thing all the time.
So Sasse is dead wrong. The parties wouldn’t simply “swap sides.” Liberals would not hand their party over to a gangster and spend five years excusing his assaults on democracy and pretending they didn’t read his tweets, and then absolving him of his obvious responsibility for the worst home-grown assault on democracy maybe ever.
I applaud Sasse’s vote to convict and recognize that it took some guts given the current debased state of his party. But if he really thinks the parties, and contemporary liberalism and what passes for conservatism, are morally equivalent on these points, he wasted a lot of time and money in Cambridge and New Haven.
