George Will’s June 22 Op-Ed for The Washington Post garnered attention more for its headline than its content. The headline read:
That seems promising. But we’re not ones to judge an article by its headline so let’s take a closer look.
He begins:
Amid the carnage of Republican misrule in Washington, there is this glimmer of good news: The family-shredding policy ... has given independents and temperate Republicans — these are probably expanding and contracting cohorts, respectively — fresh if redundant evidence for the principle by which they should vote.
That principle is in actuality a goal: to cull the congressional republican caucuses so substantially that the remnants are reduced to minorities in both houses.
He refers to the current crop as being “too invertebrate” to stand up to Trump. I’d argue that the current crop are too mired in their own criminality to risk standing up to Trump but Will isn’t willing to go there. Instead he accuses them of being “abject careerists [who] have failed to be worthy” of Congress. Even in the “melancholy example” he gives of Paul Ryan, he says nothing worse of him than that he misjudged his own ability to deal with Trump. His disappointment in Ryan is republican to the core: Ryan traded the promise of a slash-and-burn entitlement cut for a mere tax cut.
He quotes Federalist 51 as a segue into denouncing republicans as having “no higher ambition than to placate this president.” But embedded in that statement is his first mention of Democrats and it is just as censorious: “congressional Democrats are equally supine toward Democratic presidents”.
We’re now at the end of paragraph 4 and halfway through this op ed piece when we discover that he has no better an opinion of Democrats now than he does of today’s republicans. While that’s hardly surprising given that the man has been a lifelong republican who has merely pressed pause in his partisan dedication while Trump is party leader, it does clang discordantly with the headline. (Remember that?) But perhaps he has something more positive to say about Democrats in the second half.
Let us plunge into paragraph 5. Here we find somewhat unexpected praise for Bob Corker being “an exception that illuminates the depressing rule” because of an amendment he proposed regarding trade restrictions.
Side Bar: Corker’s amendment advocated transferring an allotment of power from the Executive to Congress. The Senate like to do this from time-to-time. In the case of Trump, however, it is rather more justified than with any previous occupant of the White House.
Will lamented that not only did the Senate not vote on Corker’s amendment, they “would not allow it to become just the second amendment voted on this year.” Yes well, you can see Will’s point: the paucity of votes for amendments this year — one — does come across as slothful.
But even more than that as he says upon launching into paragraph 6:
This is because the amendment would have peeved the easily peeved president.
While Will’s earlier description of congressional republicans as timid is mild, it is apt.
He adds:
The Republican-controlled Congress, which waited for Trump to undo by unilateral decree the border folly they could have prevented by actually legislating, is an advertisement for the unimportance of Republican control.
Indeed. Why bother fighting to be in the majority if you’re too afraid to use the power as it was intended to be used?
Paragraph 7 is an odd one. In it he rails against Stephen Miller and Corey Lewandowski and concludes that “Trump attracts, and is attracted to, louts.” It’s a paragraph that strays from the central theme and adds nothing whatever to the purport of the headline. (Remember that? We’ll come back to it soon.)
At last it’s the last paragraph! Surely now he’ll explain why a vote for Democrats is better than one for republicans.
First another jab at Trump:
So, to vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him.
Yes, yes, it would really piss off Trump, clip his wings and do the country good. But what about Democrats? What do you have to say there, George?
A Democratic-controlled Congress would be a basket of deplorables
Say what? Oh and not merely half of them, note, but all of them. So why does he want people to vote against the GOP if all Democrats are deplorables?
...there would be enough Republicans to gum up the Senate’s machinery, keeping the institution as peripheral as it has been under their control and asphyxiating mischief from a Democratic House.
In other words, he wants Democrats in power instead of republicans so they have to shoulder the blame for atrophied legislatures due to republican obstruction and Trump’s insane idea of governing by pandering to the lowest common denominator in his base while further enriching himself.
So no, George does not have the will to change. He’s still a staunch republican and still as staunchly anti-Democratic as ever. He just doesn’t like Trump.
His op ed isn’t likely to change the minds of republican voters but he is likely to get his wish anyway, in the US House at least. But I doubt he’ll like 2019 or 2020. Robert Mueller III has plans for his republicans and it will mostly be Democrats filling their vacated seats.
In conclusion I can think of no better close than a popular Australian saying:
Up yours, George.