THE MORNING PLUM:
Al Franken’s resignation under pressure, combined with the likelihood that Roy Moore will win the Alabama Senate race next week, has left Democrats deeply conflicted. Many are pleased to see their party coming around, if too slowly, to a principled stand against sexual harassment, while also lamenting that this leaves in place a double standard that penalizes their own while rewarding those in the other party who are not being held accountable for the same behavior.
The Post’s Karen Tumulty reports that Democrats decided ousting Franken would place their party firmly on the side of principle and consistency, while drawing a sharp contrast with Republicans. Some Republicans are condemning Moore, but Trump (himself an accused serial sexual assaulter) and the Republican National Committee are fully behind him. Many Republicans are obviously happy to keep the seat in GOP hands, and just aren’t policing their own ranks to the same degree. “Part of the wager here was to try to force Franken out before Tuesday, to draw a bright line around Moore’s alleged transgressions,” says David Axelrod. “Tuesday will be the test.”
But what if the test fails? What if Franken is gone and Moore, after some hemming and hawing among Republicans, ends up in the Senate, treated by some GOP colleagues as a leper, yet enjoying the status of a U.S. senator all the same? The result of this, some Democrats fret, is that those who brush off sexual assault allegations, like Trump and Moore, are perversely getting rewarded.
As unpleasant as that prospect is, it is mitigated, at least a bit, when you think of what’s happening as a moment situated within broader cultural changes now underway. Why did Democrats decide Franken had to go? Some conservatives have suggested that the Democratic delay on Franken proves their emphasis on women’s issues has always been cynical; thus unmasked, they had no choice but to push him out. Other observers have adopted a softer version of this line by suggesting Democrats are claiming the “moral high ground,” without saying whether this is sincere or not.
But such readings undersell the complexity of what’s really going on here: In a broad sense, one party is moving with the culture on this issue, and the other is not. Just as happened on immigration and gay rights, among other things, the Democratic Party’s tenets and dogma are changing. Such shifts are typically fitful and clumsy, and reveal a messy tangle of contradictory motives and incentives, some noble, others decidedly less so.
Politicians are driven by many things: Pressure from base voters; concerns about their public image and about opinion among the elites whose approval they crave; loyalty to colleagues and their positioning within the party; and, of course, principle. The imperative to “believe the women,” which is driving the deep cultural reckoning now underway, is likely a higher priority among Democratic voters, who are more inclined to believe such charges about their own than GOP voters are. The percentage of Democrats who believed the charges against Franken was nearly as high as that among Republicans. Meanwhile, some segments of elite liberal opinion were quick to demand that his Democratic colleagues believe his accusers.
The mere fact that Democrats were too slow to move on Franken, while unfortunate, isn’t that surprising. “Believe the women,” as a principle, isn’t easy to translate into hard and fast rules about the proper punishment for handling any given set of specific allegations. What we saw, in part, was a party wrestling with how to respond in Franken’s case. When the allegations mounted, the response snowballed, in part out of a bandwagon effect, and in part out of a sense of shame, which itself is not exclusively a noble sentiment. That slowness reveals the motives at play to be complicated. Democrats are bringing themselves into alignment with their stated principles, because they feel pressure to do so, both from the cultural movement underway, which is likely concentrated among their own voters, and from the desire to appear consistent with those principles in the eyes of elites they care about, as well as in their own.
That mix of motives is hardly pure. But so what? These are the sort of pressures and factors that are supposed to drive parties to transform. By contrast, Republicans just don’t have the same incentives to meaningfully shift on the issue. As Brian Beutler argues, there is a profound imbalance here that goes well beyond this issue and deep into the bottomless bad faith that has consumed the GOP on many fronts, and changing it will require new processes of accountability for public officials and more of the hard work of politics, in which voters insist this imbalance must be corrected. That appears daunting, to be sure. But this is what things sometimes look like in the midst of periods of slow but consequential change.
* TRUMP MAY HAVE BEEN OFFERED ACCESS TO HACKED DOCUMENTS: CNN scoops:
Candidate Donald Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr. and others in the Trump Organization received an email in September 2016 offering a decryption key and website address for hacked WikiLeaks documents, according to an email provided to congressional investigators.
It is still unclear whether the offer was legit, but investigators appear to be trying to determine that. Another question is how this offer (if legit) came together and how the Trumps responded to it.
* REPUBLICANS AREN’T GIVING IN TO COLLINS’S DEMANDS: Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) has made her final vote for the tax bill contingent on getting changes to shore up Obamacare. But Politico reports that Republicans are unlikely to go along:
House Republicans still chafing over the Senate’s failure to repeal Obamacare insist they won’t bend to Collins’ demands. And while Senate Republicans are trying to keep Collins in the fold, there’s little apparent worry so far that her opposition would sink the tax effort.
Republicans either think they can pass the bill without Collins (which would cut it very close, leaving only 50 without Collins and Bob Corker) or that Collins can be counted on to fold.
* ARPAIO MULLS A RUN FOR SENATE: Joe Arpaio, who was recently pardoned by Trump, tells ABC News that he’s “strongly considering” a run for Senate in Arizona:
The former sheriff of Maricopa County said he has not spoken with the president about his thoughts of running for the Senate, but added, “if I run, I’m running for him.”
He’d get Trump’s backing. As a birther who regularly abused and violated the rights of Latino immigrants and lawlessly flouted court orders, he is the perfect standard-bearer for Trumpism.
* JAMES O’KEEFE HAS AN ALLY IN TRUMP: James O’Keefe was recently busted trying to bait The Post into publishing a false story about Roy Moore. The New York Times takes a deep dive into the longtime alliance between Trump and O’Keefe:
Mr. Trump had been promoting Mr. O’Keefe’s work for years … since his inauguration he and his team have continued to highlight Mr. O’Keefe’s work as evidence of the president’s repeated claims that the news media is peddling “fake news.” … Mr. O’Keefe said this week that his group complements — and also stands to benefit from — what he called “synergies” with Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the media, which the president has called “the enemy of the American people.”
It is a perfect alliance. They share the common goal of rendering empirically verifiable facts irrelevant and ensuring that good-faith inquiry itself becomes a cause for suspicion.
* CAMPAIGN AGAINST MUELLER ESCALATES: CNN’s Brian Stelter reports on the conservative media’s escalating attacks on the Mueller probe. Sean Hannity claims the country is “becoming a banana republic” and that “Mueller’s stooges” are trying to “remove President Trump from office.” A Fox anchor rails that the probe “is illegitimate and corrupt” and that the FBI has become like “the old KGB, that comes for you in the dark of the night.”
This is, at bottom, an effort to goad Trump into trying to remove Mueller — these media figures know Trump is susceptible to the narrative they’re spinning.
* HERE’S AN UGLY GLIMPSE OF GOP PRIORITIES: Paul Krugman points out that the GOP’s position is literally to prioritize eliminating the estate tax for one wealthy heir per 1,000 children being denied health care via unrestored CHIP funding, and concludes:
Despite everything we’ve seen in U.S. politics, it’s still hard to believe that a whole political party would balk at doing the decent thing for millions of kids while rushing to further enrich a few thousand wealthy heirs. That is, however, exactly what’s happening. And it’s as bad, in its own way, as that same party’s embrace of a child molester because they expect him to vote for tax cuts.
It’s easier for “objective” media figures to be forthright about the Moore embrace, because it doesn’t constitute taking an ideological stance on an issue, which smacks of “taking sides.”
* THE WORLD ACCORDING TO ROY MOORE SUPPORTERS: Gabriel Debenedetti reports that the pro-Moore Super PAC Solution Fund blasted out an email to supporters saying this:
Al Franken has proven Roy Moore is innocent. … THESE ABUSERS DON’T STOP!!! It’s a way of life. That’s why they all have been forced to admit their misdeeds due to verifiable recent evidence.
In a way, the fact that Democrats are holding Franken accountable, while many Republicans are not holding Moore accountable, actually does enable Moore to more easily proclaim his innocence, if you think about it.