USA's national self-defense is failing, and I don't mean the military
We can't afford weaponized political incompetence in a time of crisis.
Over the last 7 years I haven’t had a lot of great nights of sleep as I worry about the problems festering in our US Government. Even with President Biden in charge, it looks like our government is rotting out from the inside due to bad actors who would just as soon see our representative democracy crumble.
See for example, Steve Bannon in February 2017 discussing his planned “deconstruction of the administrative state.” Trump and his minions (or puppet-masters) have never been subtle. They told us what they were going do to, and they have been working hard to tear things down ever since.
All these weaknesses are combining in a very dangerous way right now, as we see the crisis in Israel and Gaza explode, while the war in Ukraine is still going on, and more. The world is a complicated and often dangerous place and the USA is falling down on our self-proclaimed role as a global leader. You can be sure that US adversaries such as Putin are delighted to see this.
There are several fronts to this problem:
The Department of Justice and Merrick Garland slow-walking the January 6 insurrection prosecution of Donald Trump and other coup plotters. I have a mountain of respect for Jack Smith; the problem is that he should have been appointed much sooner. Garland dragged his feet for so long. Action should have been taken starting on January 20, 2021 if not sooner. AG Garland appointed Smith to be Special Counsel on November 18, 2022—more than 20 months after the insurrection—and now we can see it is almost too late to go through the entire prosecution of Trump before the 2024 election. When the second Impeachment trial in the Senate failed to convict Trump, as it should have, it was up to the DoJ to take over immediately. Even Mitch McConnell said so at the time.
Senator Tommy Tuberville has been getting away with blocking military appointments, supposedly to protest a pro-reproductive rights travel policy for soldiers to obtain abort. He will not give this up even in the face of the Israel-Hamas crisis. Is Tuberville’s real end-game to keep as many appointments as possible OPEN so that Trump can fill them with his loyalists?
Senator Rand Paul has been sabotaging Ambassador appointments in a way that would make Vladimir Putin happy. Feels like the US Senate is a place where the government’s machinery is uniquely vulnerable to sabotage by one bad actor who wants to hold things up.
But wait, of course there’s more. I may have saved the worst for last. The US House is incredibly dysfunctional. It is operating under a temporary 45-day deal to keep the government open, but that deal does NOT include funding for Ukraine, and the House is currently leaderless. The idea that Jim Jordan could even be considered as Speaker of the House is an outrage. First, he he a former college wrestling coach who failed to stop a team doctor from abusing hundreds of wrestlers. That should disqualify him, full stop. This man cannot be elevated to second in the line of Presidential Succession, right behind VP Harris. Jordan was deeply involved in Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. Don’t take my word for it, here’s Liz Cheney:
What are the solutions? Our best bet is to mobilize our citizen power to vote out every single Republican candidate we possibly can in 2024. It is going to take all our effort as we have to overcome structural obstacles such as gerrymandering and other voter suppression efforts.
Whether or not you “like” Joe Biden, or identify as a Democrat, or agree with all of Democrats ideas, right now we need to take the majority power back from the failed Republican Party which has descended into madness, happily embracing the idea of a post-Constitutional authoritarian state.