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July 22, 2018

The dizzying chaos of the past week’s news cycle has been breathtaking. We have watched aghast as Trump doubled down on his pathetic performance in Helsinki by inviting Putin to come to Washington in September. Simultaneously, we learned that the NRA, and those Republicans it supports, were willing pawns in Russia’s plot to subvert American sovereignty, easily seduced by piles of cash and a nubile grad student with a fake gun fetish.

The revelation Friday that Michael Cohen had at least one (and probably several) incriminating tapes of conversations with Trump was a welcome distraction from the depressing realization that one of our two major parties is chock full of traitors. The truth is, though, that we have no control over when or if the content of Michael Cohen’s tapes will be revealed and the effect it will have on Trump’s fate, if any.

We need to be cognizant of the fact that there are multiple incentives for Republicans to continue to support Trump, even as he brazenly destroys our standing in the world and turns us into a satellite state of the Russian Federation. For one thing, many Congressional Republicans share Putin’s goal of establishing a patriarchal white supremacist oligarchy in the United States. In the minds of far too many of them, that is preferable to a Constitutional republic in which women, people of color and LGBTQ people have equal rights and an equal say in governance.

Secondly, those Republicans who are not hostile to equality for all Americans may be compromised as much as we believe Trump to be. Do we think that the Russian hackers limited themselves to breaching only Democratic servers? As Adam Davidson explains so well, all of Russian society is comprised of a “sistema” in which politicians, businesspeople and anyone with stature gathers “kompromat” on everyone else, to maintain control through the mutually assured destruction of blackmail (Source: “A Theory of Trump Kompromat,” by Adam Davidson, The New Yorker, 7/19/18).

Lastly, thanks to the Republican Party’s decades’ long practice of exploiting racism to win elections that started with Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy and their gerrymandered districts, their base is ultra-conservative and hostile to efforts to foster equality for marginalized Americans (Source: “How the Southern Strategy Made Donald Trump Possible,” by Jeet Heer, The New Republic, 2/8/16). For them, Trump’s naked racism is a feature, not a bug, and other elected Republicans cross him at their peril.

That is why Senator Tim Scott’s “No” vote on judicial nominee, Ryan Bounds, last week was so consequential. Bounds, a hard-right, Federalist Society darling currently serving as an Assistant United States Attorney in Oregon, was nominated over the objections of his two home state senators, in violation of long standing senate practice. Scott, the South Carolina Senator who votes with Trump 96% of the time, sank the nomination once Bounds’ racist and misogynistic writing from college was unearthed.

We should keep this in mind as we watch the fight over what amount of Brett Kavanaugh’s records will be released. On Friday, over 100 organizations including the ACLU, the Center for Reproductive Rights, the National Council of Jewish Women and the National Action Network, wrote to Senate Judiciary Committee Chair, Chuck Grassley and Ranking Member, Dianne Feinstein, to ask that all one million pages of Kavanaugh’s record be released. We’ve now learned that Kavanaugh once stated that the Watergate decision was wrongly decided. This last week has shown us that the stakes could not be higher. Read every page. You never know where that “No” vote might come from.

#BlockKavanaugh