Shattering the Myth

The secret is to believe only what is true, not what is feared to be true.

Dec 19, 2024

The Myth of “Total GOP Control”

Imagine for a moment that Vice President Kamala Harris had won the presidential election on November 5, 2024, that Democrats had retained their 51-49 majority in the Senate, and won a 220-215 majority in the House of Representatives.

A jubilant Democratic Party would immediately coalesce behind President Harris, just as they had done when she secured the nomination last Summer. Her cabinet nominees, competent and well-qualified, would be confirmed with little or no controversy, even if they include a Republican as she had promised during the campaign. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) would be elected Speaker of the House by unanimous vote of 220 Democrats on the first day of the 119th Congress.

The Republican Party would not only be in the minority, it would be utterly powerless. Their twice-defeated leader, already a convicted felon, would be facing multiple federal felony indictments. Trump loyalists recently appointed to senior positions within the party would have no incentive to remain in place, leaving the entire structure a hollow shell, teetering on the verge of collapse.

Having long since abandoned any pretense of allegiance to a governing philosophy, the nominal GOP congressional leadership team would be adrift in a sea of recriminations and bitterness — MAGA’s attacking RINO’s, moderates disavowing extremists. All the anger and lingering resentments from the 118th Congress would spill over into a desperate power struggle within the Republican Conference in both the House and Senate.

With no coherent opposition force in place, plans for enacting the new President’s legislative agenda would quickly be set into motion. There would of course be some differences of opinion about priorities and timing. But in general we would say, quite accurately, that Democrats are in complete control. (Savor the moment! --JW)

Sadly, this is not the reality we have today. In 2025, the president will be a Republican, and a majority of both the Senate and the House will be Republican. But will Republicans have total control? Well actually, no they won’t.

Despite their narrow electoral success, the GOP still suffers from all the internal contradictions alluded to above. And thus weakened, they will be facing a determined and well-organized opposition — an opposition fiercely unwilling to cede complete control.

The Democratic Party remains strong and united, fully committed to the defense of our constitution and the welfare of our citizens.

To be effective, we first need to discard some of our assumptions, and soberly assess reality as it actually is. For the last year or so, Democrats have been telling themselves, and anyone else who’d listen, that a Republican victory would bring about the death of our democratic republic. An authoritarian president, bolstered by a rubber-stamp legislature, would dismantle all remnants of the system of government we’ve enjoyed for nearly 250 years.

We became ever more accustomed to seeing the word “fascism” used to describe the threat posed by MAGA extremists. And consequently, dire comparisons to the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany have become commonplace. One recent example is typical:

“It took Adolf Hitler 90 days from accepting the offer of the Chancellorship of Germany the night of January 31, 1933, to consolidate his dictatorship and overthrow the Weimar Republic. . . . Trump could have things consolidated by the end of January, ten days after taking the oath of office.”

While such comments may be well-intentioned, they are at best counter-productive. Stoking people’s fear instills a sense of futility, rather than fostering a spirit of resistance. Adversaries are made to appear even more powerful than they truly are. It is a form of acquiscence, of “surrendering in advance” to use historian Tim Snyder’s terminology.

We aren’t required to believe our own campaign rhetoric.

While the threat we warned about is real, the United States of America in 2025 is not remotely like Germany in 1933, when Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor.

U.S. unemployment is currently about 4%, and average wages have consistently grown at a faster rate than inflation for the last two years. This stands in sharp contrast to depression-era Germany.
In 1933, German unemployment was somewhere around 30%. For those who did have jobs, wages had fallen by 40% over the previous 4 years. And it wasn’t just factory workers who were affected. A Chicago news correspondent in Berlin reported that “60 per cent of each new university graduating class was out of work”.
The social impact of these conditions is inseparable from the appeal of a Nazi party promising reindustrialization and full employment. British novelist Christopher Isherwood, who lived in Berlin at the time, described the German capitol this way:
“Morning after morning, all over the immense, damp, dreary town and the packing-case colonies of huts in the suburb allotments, young men were waking up to another workless empty day, to be spent as they could best contrive: selling boot-laces, begging, playing draughts in the hall of the Labour Exchange, hanging about urinals, opening the doors of cars, helping with crates in the market, gossiping, lounging, stealing, overhearing racing tips, sharing stumps of cigarette ends picked up in the gutter.”

Likewise, the Republican Party in the U.S. House of Representatives is not remotely like the Nazi Party in the German Reichstag.

Most notably, the Nazi Party held 97 more seats than its rival the Social Democrats. Totally and unequivocally unified under the firm hand of a single-minded demagogue, the party had broad popular appeal. There was virtually no public objection when the Nazis, in alliance with other right-wing parties, essentially voted the Reichstag out of existence in March, 1933.
The current Republican Party on the other hand, will hold only a 5 seat majority in the House, and 6 in the Senate. More importantly, the party is splintered into multiple factions. Despite superficial appearances, the GOP is far less united than the now minority Democrats.

To be sure, we can not under-estimate the threat posed to our country by the ascendance of Donald Trump to the presidency. But he is nothing like Adolf Hitler, and he will not wield absolute, unfettered power in Congress.

In a country with well-established democratic institutions, a would-be authoritarian can seize absolute power only if he has an overwhelmingly widespread base of popular support, or if he commands the loyalty of military and security forces.

Donald Trump has neither. He received less than 50% of the total vote. What passes as his “blueprint” for governance, Project 2025, is so unpopular he had to disavow it during the campaign. And the American military’s long unbroken tradition of political neutrality shows no sign of faltering.

Perhaps even more importantly, the President-elect is committed to no political ideology, and therefore lacks any strategy for implementing one. This is apparent from his choice of nominees for cabinet positions. Rather than appointing a team of experienced and knowledgeable candidates, he has allowed arrogance and sycophancy to masquerade as competence. If approved by the Senate, the result will be a literal vacuum of leadership in the key positions where power is concentrated.

Unlike the classic fascists of mid-century Europe like Hitler and Mussolini, or contemporary authoritarians like Russia’s Putin, Turkey’s Erdogan or Hungary’s Orban, Donald Trump is an ignorant fool. Armed only with an impenetrable certainty of his own brilliance, he lacks not only an understanding of, but even a basic curiosity about issues of vital importance both to the country, and to his own hold on the levers of power.

Again, this is not to suggest that the incoming administration poses no threat. As former talk show host Charlie Sykes is fond of reminding us, “A clown with a flame-thrower still has a flame-thrower.”

The point here is to keep in mind that the clown is not an evil genius. He is a clown — one who can be out-witted and rendered largely ineffective once we banish our fear of the Myth.

The Myth of “The DOGE”

There’s been a lot of breathless commentary about the new Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to be led by billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. With a self-imposed mandate to reduce government spending by a trillion dollars or more, some of the potentially catastrophic proposals being considered include cutting Social Security, eliminating the entire Dept. of Education, dismantling the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and discarding thousands of federal agency regulations. Predictably, the ensuing discussions are adding yet another layer of anxiety onto an already dispirited populace.

What’s missing is a clear-eyed reality check of how this bogus entity would actually function.

For starters, the sheer magnitude of such an undertaking suggests that the task would require a staff of hundreds, a budget of tens of millions and a timetable measured in years not months. The boy wonders putting this fantasy together claim that AI will do the bulk of analysis. But AI is notoriously ill-equipped for the most critical part of the job: making value judgements about what to preserve and what to jettison.

At an even more basic level, the DOGE is not a federal “department”, which has a very specific legal definition. It is in fact a Presidential Advisory Commission. As its name makes clear, a commission has only the power to advise not to implement. Congress alone can amend the Social Security Act, eliminate a cabinet-level Department or enact most of the “reforms” on the DOGE wish list. That most certainly will never happen.

The con-man’s stock in trade is distraction. Distract the mark from concentrating on the con by introducing a dazzling but irrelevant side show. In this case, the intention is to overwhelm critics with a parade of radical proposals that make slightly less extreme ideas seem reasonable.

The DOGE is also a Myth, a distraction not to be taken seriously.

The House of Representatives, 119th Congress

Republicans will hold a 220-215 majority when the House convenes on January 3, 2025. But Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has said that he does not intend to take his seat. If he doesn’t, the majority shrinks to 219-215. In that case, until another Republican fills the seat in April, they will be unable to pass any legislation without support from Democrats if only two of their number defect. (217-217 tie is a failure to pass.)

Furthermore, after Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20, he’s expected to appoint Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) as UN Ambassador. Her resignation from the House will further shrink the GOP majority to 218-215, at least until April.

As we learned in the last Congress, the House Republican Conference is riven with dissension. This was vividly on display during the first session (2023) when Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) struggled mightily to win and then to retain his Speakership. That debacle exposed not only the extent of Republican disarray, but also the depth of bitterness festering among Members.

Perhaps even more revealing were votes in the second session (2024) supporting military aid to Ukraine, and providing funds to avoid a government shutdown. In those critical cases, the Republican vote was split roughly 40-60% with Democrats providing the margin of victory.

Retiring Rep. Chip Roy (R-VA), former chair of the far-right Freedom Caucus described the Republican Conference this way:

“I would split the Republican majority into thirds. You’ve got one-third that doesn’t want to reduce government. They refuse to join us in spending cuts and eliminating offices and agencies. Then you’ve got another third in the middle that would like to do Republican stuff, but not if it threatens the donations they’re looking for, or not if it risks their reelection, which is the end all, be all. And then there’s really only about a third, 70 or 75 members, who will demonstrate conviction and courage to some degree.”

Mr. Roy’s characterization of the three factions may reflect his ultra-conservative perspective, but he’s spot-on about the fractious nature of the House majority. Tellingly, that division persists even to this very day — fully six weeks after Republicans swept the election, winning House, Senate and Presidency.

The hapless Speaker Mike Johnson has stumbled through the last few months of the 118th Congress, failing to get essential appropriation bills passed in a timely manner. Consequently, he came into the “lame duck” session hoping to avoid a government shutdown on December 23 by passing a Continuing Resolution (CR) with the support of Democrats. (See our post last week: Mike Johnson Rose to the Level of His Own Incompetence.)

But in the process he managed to anger almost everyone in the Republican Conference over compromises and trade-offs included in the final bill. Wednesday night, just two days before the scheduled end of the 118th Congress, Donald Trump weighed in, calling for “a temporary funding bill WITHOUT DEMOCRAT GIVEAWAYS.” Given that procedurally the CR needs a two-thirds majority to pass by the Friday midnight deadline, the President-elect is demanding that his party produce the impossible.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. But clearly the anger and bitterness will spill over into January and beyond.

We can expect the 119th Congress to be slightly more productive than its predecessor when it comes to routine matters. But while the MAGA faction may feel emboldened by Donald Trump’s presidency, they obviously will not be able to depend on party unity for more radical measures favored by extremists. Such unity is entirely illusory.

There still remains a significant block of traditional moderate Republicans, and efforts to strong-arm them into submission have mostly failed. Members representing districts where MAGA extremism is unpopular are not intimidated by the threat of a primary challenger. As one long-serving Congressman remarked, “If you’re afraid of elections you’re in the wrong business.”

Once the myth of futility is shattered, paths of resistance appear.

Democracy is not merely a passive term describing a particular form of government. It’s the active expression of a worldview that seeks to balance the worth of each individual with the welfare of the community as a whole. At every level of society Americans instinctively presume that their interests will be represented in open discussion, that differences will be debated and decisions reached by majority vote.

Democracy is a kind of social muscle, one that becomes vital and strong only by being exercised. Whether it’s a school board, a town council, the state legislature or the United States Congress, our democracy functions only when a substantial number of citizens engage in their own governance. If not exercised regularly, the muscle atrophies.

At the federal level, The House of Representatives is where democracy is at its most robust. Or, it’s where democracy begins to wither and die. So if we are to confront the threat of authoritarianism, this is an ideal place to make our stand.

That’s where the Feathers of Hope network comes into the picture.

At the end of every one of our posts on Substack you will find this tag line:

“This is a network of ordinary citizens. In a democracy, we exercise our power by raising our voices. To be silent is to be powerless.”

The declaration is meant both to call attention to the nature of our activist network, and to inspire members to be vocal advocates in our participatory democracy.

During the 118th Congress we mounted multiple efforts to persuade moderate Republicans (those Minority Leader Jeffries calls “traditional Republicans”) to join with Democrats in a temporary bipartisan alliance for the purpose of countering attacks by MAGA extremists in the House. We made phone calls and wrote letters to media personalities as well as Congresspeople. We posted in the comments sections of traditional media and on platforms like Substack.

In short, we raised our voices. And while we can’t claim full credit for the outcome, we contributed to the national narrative and ultimately did see a de facto bipartisan alliance emerge in opposition to the “burn it all down” forces of the far-right. We defended democracy not only by the specific things we did, but also by the mere act of doing them.

Fortunately, that de facto alliance still exists, and it continues to provide an entry point for our efforts in the coming year.

Wait, we’re working with Republicans?

In a word, Yes. No matter how small their majority, Republicans hold the balance of power. It’s simple arithmetic: 220 - 215. Even if Democrats remain entirely united, a few from the other side will need to join them in order to impact the proceedings.

For all the reasons explained above, there’s every reason to expect that there will be some defections among traditional moderate Republicans when the stakes are highest.

Keep in mind that we’ll disagree with them on most policy issues. Policy issues reflect the differences between parties, and are what divides us. Commitment to the institutions of government, where our differences are debated, is what unites us as a democracy.

For a more extensive, though slightly dated, discussion about “Moderate” Republicans, see our post from November 13, 2023, right here.

Initially, we’ll be focusing on three moderate Republicans who represent districts carried by Vice President Harris in November. Here are the phone numbers for both their DC and district offices:

Don Bacon (R-NE-02): (202) 225-4155 D.C. or (402) 938-0300 District
Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA-01): (202) 225-4276 D.C. or (215) 579-8102 District
Mike Lawler (R-NY-17): (202) 225-6506 D.C. or (845) 743-7130 District

Mr. Bacon, who represents Omaha, and Mr. Fitzpatrick, who represents Philadelphia’s northern suburbs, are veteran leaders of the moderate faction. They can be counted on to vigorously defend institutional norms and traditions of the House. Mr. Lawler, whose district is about 40 miles north of NYC, will be serving only his second term. But he has emerged as a leading spokesman in opposition to far-right radicalism.

Additionally, there are about a half-dozen Republicans whom we know to be strong supporters of Ukraine. Their names and numbers will be posted when the time for renewing American military aid comes up in a few months.