This Is a Bad Use of a Democratic Lame-Duck Period As Donald Trump prepares to take power, Democrats are spending a disturbing amount of energy ramping up wars and trying to hand him the powers he needs to crush his political opponents.
The Democratic Party spent the past three years telling voters that Donald Trump was a dangerous authoritarian, a literal fascist who would be a dictator on day one and whose election would mean the end of American democracy. So you would think they’d spend the few, dwindling months until he takes power working feverishly to tweak existing policies, bolster protections for vulnerable groups and Joe Biden–era policies, and generally Trump-proof the country before he comes in and gets the wrecking ball going. You would think. Instead, Democrats and the outgoing Biden administration are devoting a disturbing amount of their energy in these final few months of Democratic governance to fueling wars around the world and handing Trump the powers he would need to crush his opposition. Take the war in the Middle East. The Biden administration’s preelection creation of a November 12 deadline by which Israel would have to stop deliberately starving Gazans or risk jeopardizing further US military aid was a shot of hope: given the pointed date (seven days after the election), maybe Biden and his team were finally going to end US support for Israel’s heinous war, since they wouldn’t have to fear electoral or political consequences for doing so anymore. Instead, when the date came, the Biden administration simply decided, even as eight different organizations declared the humanitarian situation in Gaza was at its worst ever point, that Israel had done good enough — with Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly ignoring the many lower-level State Department officials urging the administration to suspend at least some weapons. As a result, the hard-right government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has continued its gratuitous, increasingly pointless spree of massacres and atrocities in both Gaza and Lebanon. In the waning days of his time in power and his political career as a whole, Biden also: vetoed a United Nations resolution that demanded an immediate cease-fire in Gaza and was backed by every other member of the UN Security Council (unlike even Barack Obama, who in his lame-duck period sent Netanyahu a message by allowing a resolution condemning Israeli settlements to pass); whipped Democrats to vote down Bernie Sanders’s bill to block $20 billion of arms sales to Israel, using talking points that even some in the administration apparently found embarrassing; and denouncing the International Criminal Court for issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu, while personally phoning the president of France to tell him off for saying he would act on them in line with international law. After being rebuked by an electorate fed up with US wars and frustrated at the wealth being sent overseas while problems at home go unaddressed, Biden — whether out of spite or because he doesn’t have to care anymore — seems to have decided to double down on this unpopular course. That’s not just in the Middle East. Biden recently gave the green light for Ukrainian leadership to launch long-range missiles into Russian territory despite nuclear-tinged warnings from Moscow, dangerously escalating the war with little military benefit. Biden had resisted the move up until now, and we very clearly saw firsthand why: Russia — which warned it would view the move as a direct US attack, and that this could be enough to justify a nuclear response — reacted by launching a new, hypersonic ballistic missile, one that can carry a nuclear warhead and left NATO leaders spooked enough to hold an emergency meeting. Blinken has vowed that “every dollar we have at our disposal will be pushed out the door between now and January 20,” even as, for the first time, a slim majority of Americans oppose sending more US military aid for the war. Meanwhile, on the domestic front, the House just last week passed a bill that has been called a “civil rights disaster” and the worst supposedly anti-terrorism bill since the Patriot Act, because it would give an administration the power to strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status if they are labeled, with minimal evidence, supporters of terrorism. Aimed primarily at pro-Palestinian groups and institutions, it passed thanks to fifteen Democrats voting for it, and fifteen more of them refusing to vote, from conservative and pro-Israel Democrats like Colin Allred and Ritchie Torres, to a progressive like Katie Porter, who is about to leave Congress. But it’s not just thirty random House Democrats that are to blame here. The party’s leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, planned before the election was even over to use this lame-duck period to pass the Antisemitism Awareness Act, a bill that would legally enshrine a highly controversial definition of antisemitism for the purpose of enforcing federal antidiscrimination laws — a definition that would be used to go after critics of Israel. This kind of measure is central to Trump’s planned campaign of repression against his political opponents, and Schumer is so committed to handing it to him upon inauguration, he’s using his last moments as Senate majority leader to shove it into the must-pass National Defense Authorization Act so it can sail through virtually unnoticed. It’s all very reminiscent of earlier this year, when Biden, at the exact same time he was painting Trump as a dictator-to-be and making this the central message of his presidential campaign, lobbied feverishly to expand the government’s warrantless spying powers that it’s now passing on to Trump. It was one of the most glaring instances laying bare how cynically and irresponsibly Democratic politicians used rhetoric around authoritarianism and threats to democracy, and how little they themselves actually believed what they were saying. It’s a good rule of politics to not just listen to what politicians say, but to look at what they do. As the country prepares to usher in a second, more extreme Trump presidency, Democrats are telling us all we need to know about themselves and their priorities.Branko Marcetic -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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