There is no Tomorrow

As much as I love Brother Charlie Pierce, sometimes his writing is maddening to decipher.

[T]he Republicans are unsure whether or not they want to blow up the filibuster to install Gorsuch on the Supreme Court. (My guess? Boom!) A lot of this ambivalence, I believe, is rooted in their vestigial conscience as a party.

They know what they did to Merrick Garland. They know why they did it to Merrick Garland. At some level, they know how ridiculous their whining about how roughly Gorsuch has been treated sounds to anyone with a short-term memory that extends back to 2015. The longer this stretches out, the more time their vestigial conscience has to work on them.

I had to read that a couple of times before I realized he was talking about the Republicans' "vestigial conscience" and that GOP senators were the "they" in the second paragraph. This vestigial conscience is what I was talking about in the previous post about responsibility, at least in Democrats. The idea that nothing has changed and business can and should be carried on as though the opposition party, now in the terrifying majority, was still operating in good faith. That the previous year of completely stonewalling the constitutional imperative of the sitting president to nominate and have confirmed in a timely manner a Supreme Court Justice.

That is bad faith, we can so we will, conscience and morality play no role. The republican senate majority is based on the rotten boroughs of flyover states that practically no one lives in. No one that would tolerate a Republican with a conscience. My fair weather friend Thomas Frank laid out the strategy, since the Great Depression republicans have built a narrative that they are the outsiders, no matter how much of government they control it is never theirs. Therefore they feel no responsibility to make it work or simply not break it. Just like a public restroom in a slight condition of anomie, successive waves of republicans have shit on the walls and the floor, ripped out toilet paper rolls, graffitied the stalls, broken mirrors, and thrown trash in the urinals. And Democrats have always played the role of volunteer janitor, never able to catch the vandals in the act but always willing to clean up the mess. As though this selfless act will garner goodwill and good faith in the future from people who just don't give a damn.

This is why, when the Democratic Party sent me an email asking for my suggestions I wrote this:

We have entered a completely new era of unified authoritarian rule, you will have to approach every aspect of your job with that in mind. I'm sure that you are aware that Democrats will be completely shut out of governance, and the party will have to act like a shadow government. Do not collaborate in any way with the republicans, resist in the strongest terms any attempt by them to pin blame for their actions and failures on you or our party. It is time to become an unabashed voice for working people of all shapes and sizes. And you must really mean it. The party will be in the wilderness for a long time, there will be no reason for to remain tied to a party that surrenders or compromises our values. The national government is lost, aim lower at local levels. The republicans must fail alone, only when they have inflicted so much pain and suffering on so many people that not even Fox News and breitbart can make excuses for how bad they are can democracy return.

In other words, "you [Democrats] do not own government, stop acting like you are responsible for the vandals". And that was why I was so elated that Brother Charlie Pierce subtitled that article "It's not their responsibility to be the grown-ups while children vandalize the government." What followed was hist description of the way rotten actors in the media goad Democrats to "keep their powder dry" for a battle that really matters. "The only minor flaw in this plan is that it never works." I have written as well that when the Nazis took over Germany, the Social Democrats and others kept waiting for a big provocation to finally push back. It never came. Just as Democrats sighed and keep letting horrible pitches just sail past them without even trying. Bush's tax cuts, the patriot act, torture, Alito...

The time to fight is now! Every day in every way. There is no tomorrow. There is only today. Tomorrow will be tomorrow. But it cannot stand that an illegally elected tyrant who committed treason and is under investigation by the FBI can appoint someone to the Supreme Court in a seat that was stolen itself! Gorsuch should not be on the court, all else follows. If republicans blow up the filibuster, they blow it up. It is on them. Democrats have no obligation to play nice. The fascists want to blow it up anyway. This is not a case of "well, maybe if I don't hit back they will stop hitting me", this is war man and we don't get another chance at democracy. It has to be today! If the Democrats fail to stop Gorsuch from taking Merrick Garland's seat, then they fail but they have to try and get it their best shot. Otherwise there's no point.