It is said there is no use crying over spilled milk. But what if via some mysterious technique, the milk can get put back into the bottle. Then the crying would be the least we might do. The reader should keep that thought in mind as the rest of this post progresses.
I have in mind large events that impacted our national politics and national ethos. Further, in each case there is a large gap in time between the initial act and the subsequent consequence. Let me illustrate then with President Gerald Ford's pardon of former President Richard Nixon. I wrote about that quite a while ago in a post called The "L" Word.
Gerald Ford was a Republican in the Eisenhower tradition. Reagan tried to run for President in 1976. But Ford was the sitting President and he won the nomination. There is no way to know this, but I think it a likelihood that Ford would have won the election had it not been for the Pardon. After Watergate, most everyone hated Nixon, certainly Democrats and then many Republicans too. Ford explained that the Pardon was necessary for the country to heal. Maybe so. I’m not so sure. The Pardon was a huge assist to the Carter candidacy. Consider Ford as President from 1977- 1980, but imagine Ford facing the same Stagflation that Carter had to deal with and imagine the Shah falling and the hostage crisis in Iran happening anyway. Now when Reagan runs in 1980 it’s no slam dunk and quite possibly a Democrat wins that election as a reaction to the previous regime. But the Pardon set in motion the timing that we did observe. It’s not in Krugman’s book at all. It doesn’t help his case. But it clearly did set in motion a chain of events that contributed to Reagan winning in 1980.
This next one I haven't written about before. While there has been a huge focus on the events of 9/11, there has been much less reflection, in my view, on America's reaction to those events. The second war in Iraq, in particular, should be noted as 9/11 seemed only a pretense for starting that war. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the events of 9/11. But since the earlier war in Iraq left him in place, as regime change in Iraq was not part of the agenda at the time, there were some higher ups within the George W. Bush administration who viewed that as a mistake and wanted it rectified. They held sway and eventually we did declare war on Iraq, again.
We operated under a cloud of delusion. Recall that is was said that the American liberators would be welcomed with open arms by the Iraqis. After that initial mirage we ended up losing our soul, most notably by the horrific events at Abu Ghraib. In some sense, this utter disregard for humanity ended up being matched at home by the widespread speculation in real estate, ultimately leading to the burst of the housing bubble and the Great Recession, a kind of penance or so it seemed.
In neither of these first two examples can we get the milk back in the bottle. I'm hoping that with the next one we still can.
Before getting to it, let me levy a criticism against the news which I don't see others making. We seem to be so caught up in the immediate transgressions that we lose track of the prominent events of the recent past. We can't keep all that information present in our thinking. So, intentional or otherwise, the news serves us as a distraction from focusing on some of the particulars in our memory. In that way, alas, it rewards the propagandists, who want to encourage such distraction. The remedy is either to find a way to keep these prominent events newsworthy or to find some other outlet than the news in which these prominent events remain in view.
The event I want to focus on here is President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. This happened on March 16, 2016. The nomination was never put forward for the Senate to consider in its Advice and Consent process, a violation of their Constitutional responsibility. At the time it was said that there shouldn't be Supreme Court nominations in the same year that there was a Presidential election. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, avowed that view. Yet 4 years later he oversaw the nomination and subsequent confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Further, this nomination happened on September 20, 2020, more than 6 months further into the year than the Garland nomination. It clearly put the lie to the earlier claim about no Supreme Court nominations during the year of a Presidential election.
I believe that this event should remain front and center in our political view rather than being swept under the carpet like so much of the rest of our history. Indeed, I was so impassioned about this that in the late summer and fall of 2022 I wrote a novella (at the time I referred to it as a novelette) called The Adventures Of The Minute Women that was largely motivated by this event, though admittedly it was triggered by the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. Chapter 3 of my book, entitled Merrick and Mitch, is devoted to reconsideration of President Obama's nomination.
The events mentioned a couple of paragraphs above are not in dispute. What might be argued is why McConnell and the Republicans didn't take up the nomination. Most likely, in my view, they regarded Garland as too qualified not to be approved. So they hoped that with an open seat on the Supreme Court a Republican President would be elected and a more Conservative nomination would then be put forward. Alternatively, even if they felt they could block the confirmation of Garland in the normal Advice and Consent process, doing so might very well diminish the chances of the Republican Presidential candidate. One of those must be the right explanation. This sort of reasoning should be evident to all voters, regardless of their political affiliation.
The guilty party in this case is the Republican Senate, not Donald Trump. Then, those Supreme Court appointments that happened during Trump's first term - Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett are all tainted as a consequence. Evangelical Republicans are surely willing to live with that, as it produced many of the results they were after. Yet other Republicans, viewing the country on a downhill slide during Trump's second term, might wish for reestablishing faith in the Constitution as primary. Achieving that would require undoing these ill-gotten gains. My book makes the argument that this can only happen via the electoral process, voting out those still in the Senate who won't renounce what happened to the Garland nomination in 2016, and voting in other candidates, regardless of party, who are willing to vote for impeachment of those Justices nominated by Trump, as a necessary step toward reuniting the country. This would happen, of course, with the full cooperation of Democratic voters. But, as should be evident, it can't happen with only Democratic voters.
This is on nobody's radar now and maybe it is too far-fetched to even be considered a possibility. Yet I don't think that can be known until this event becomes prominent in the public eye once again. I hold out the hope that is possible. After that, who know knows what might happen?
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