Locked down in the machine

Update on Florida's Francis Rooney calling it quits:

The headlines wrote themselves. As Rolling Stone declared, “GOP Congressman Open to Impeachment on Friday, Retires on Saturday.”

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Venting privately about the president has become a hallowed pastime in Republican-controlled Washington, a sort of ritualistic release for those lawmakers tasked with routinely defending the indefensible, and Rooney had long indulged without consequence.

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But as summer turned to fall, Rooney wasn’t just bitching and complaining anymore. He was talking about impeachment. And he was talking not in a manner that was abstract or academic, but concrete and ominous. Initially in one-on-one conversations, and then in larger group settings, Rooney cautioned his colleagues that there could be no turning a blind eye to the fact pattern emerging from Trump’s relationship with Ukraine.

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All of a sudden, the once-invisible congressman was the subject of constant surveillance. Rooney could go nowhere, say nothing, without the eyes of the party on him. House Republican leaders, having been made aware of Rooney’s agitating, deputized lawmakers to monitor the malcontent. The White House—both its political team and its legislative affairs shop—did likewise. Before long, the president himself was briefed on the threat from Rooney.

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All the president’s allies agreed Rooney was a problem. But there was no obvious solution. The congressman had yet to say anything menacing about Trump in public; taking some type of punitive measure against him, be it a closed-door belittling or a presidential tweet-lashing, would be strange and possibly counterproductive.

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Ultimately, Republican leaders in Washington and Florida settled on a simple course of action. They would beat Rooney at his own game, doing nothing to undermine him openly but instead orchestrating a whisper campaign aimed at sowing doubts about his devotion to the president. The focal point would be Florida’s 19th, Rooney’s bloody red district, which Trump had carried by 22 points. That way, if and when Rooney broke ranks, the uprising back home would appear instant and organic. The recoil wouldn’t just scare Rooney straight; it would provide a cautionary tale for any Republican tempted to follow his lead.

Rooney knew the trap was being laid, but he didn’t bother avoiding it. On Friday, October 18, the congressman appeared on CNN and said there was “clear” evidence of a quid pro quo based on acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s own description of events. Asked whether he was ruling out voting for impeachment, Rooney replied, “I don’t think you can rule anything out until you know all the facts.”

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[A]s though a switch had been flipped, Rooney found himself under siege.

“The blowback from the people in Southwest Florida was something. I mean, I had people down here in the local Republican leadership mad at me, yelling at me, telling me nothing should happen to make me waver in my support of Donald Trump. Nothing,” he recalls in an interview.

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The intensity of that criticism—and the threats on his career, made implicit and explicit by Florida Republicans in the hours after his CNN appearance—left him with an inescapable conclusion: There would be no coming back to Congress. He had mulled retirement in the months prior, but now the decision was being made for him. The very next day, appearing on Fox News, Rooney announced he would not seek reelection in 2020.

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The implication was clear: Any Republican who so much as flirted with impeachment would no longer have a home in the party.

Justin Amash seems to have weathered it okay. He's no longer a Republican, but he's still in Congress.

Two weeks later, when the House passed a resolution advancing the impeachment inquiry, all 196 of the House Republicans on the floor voted as a bloc against the measure. It was a display of solidarity and a reassertion of supremacy; once again, everyone in the party had fallen in line behind Trump. To the president’s delight, as he watched the proceedings on television, the “nays” even included the troublemaker Rooney, who, Trump concluded, had tucked his tail between his legs and done as he was told.

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In fact, Rooney says now, his vote was in disapproval of the Democrats’ process—not a display of confidence in Trump’s innocence. “That was just a procedural vote,” the congressman says, explaining that he studied the House rules that governed Bill Clinton’s impeachment and was prepared to vote for similar guidelines had Speaker Nancy Pelosi brought them to the floor this time around. “I’m not going to show my hand on impeachment until we get all the facts out there.”

  Politico

And that's the gamble Republicans are taking. If they alienate any members, and the trial goes through the Senate before elections in 2020, they could lose some Republican votes. Probably not the necessary 20 for conviction, of course.

Rooney insists he’s not alone. It was only after he spoke candidly on CNN, he says, that other members began confiding in him that they, too, were losing confidence in their defense of the president. “There are a lot of Republicans who feel varying levels of disquiet at the idea of using American foreign policy power to gin up domestic political investigations,” Rooney says.

But apparently none brave enough to do anything about it.

From dozens of interviews with GOP lawmakers, congressional aides and White House staffers over the past month, it’s evident that Rooney is right: There is a sizable number of Republican senators and representatives who believe Trump’s actions are at least theoretically impeachable, who believe a thorough fact-finding mission is necessary, who believe his removal from office is not an altogether radical idea.

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He could lose a stray vote in the House, maybe even two, when articles of impeachment come to the floor. He could fare even worse in the Senate, knowing that more than a few of the 53 Republican jurors might be tempted etch their names in the history books at his expense. None of this will alter his standing atop the party; none of this will change the fact that he is president through January 2021 and perhaps beyond.

And yet, Trump cannot stand to be embarrassed—and there is no greater embarrassment to a president than being impeached, much less with the abetting of his own tribe. There is an urgency, then, not only to limit defections but eliminate them. The administration, working in concert with its allies on Capitol Hill, has been hard at work identifying potential turncoats in the party and monitoring their activities to catch any sign of slippage.

Stalinesque, you might say. It must feel that way in the GOP Congress these days, run by lunatics and enforcers.

To understand Trump’s fixation on the word loyalty is to understand that his interpretation, at least in a political context, means submission, subservience, subjugation.

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Trump has been preoccupied with questions of treachery within his newfound tribe. When we sat for an interview early this year for my book, American Carnage, the president returned time and again to this notion of fidelity. Because he had returned the GOP to power, Trump intimated, allowing Republicans to claim victories on all matter of policy and personnel, they owed him their unwavering support.

“The Republican Party was in big trouble,” Trump told me. “I brought the party back. The Republican Party is strong. The Republican Party is strong.” He then added, “They’ve got to remain faithful. And loyal.”

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Rarely does the president become more wrathful, his allies say, than when he learns of a Republican criticizing him, particularly if done in a public setting. And even when he hears of an internecine attack launched behind closed doors, Trump has been known to fly into a rage, calling people who were in the room to grill them for details on the alleged act of duplicity.

"Human scum," he called "Never Trumpers" in an October 23 tweet.

Given the history of hostilities between them, and [Mitt] Romney’s obvious belief that Trump has abused his power and used the office of the presidency for his personal gain, it’s easy to understand why the junior senator from Utah is universally viewed as the likeliest Republican apostate on the question of impeachment, in either chamber.

What’s harder to understand is why Trump would choose to deploy the phrase “human scum!” in describing disloyal Republicans—a rhetorical eyebrow-raiser, even for him—without making clear to whom he was referring or what specifically was provoking his fury.

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[C]onsidering the historic nature of the converging events of late October—the Ukraine quid pro quo, the forsaking of the Kurds, the decision (later reversed) to host the G-7 at Trump’s luxury golf resort in Florida—and the unprecedented outcry heard among Republicans, the “human scum!” outburst provides a valuable window into a presidency in crisis. That Trump was not singling out Romney, the president’s team began to sense, reflected a pair of interrelated realities: first, that the Utah senator was a lost cause; and second, that Trump suddenly had other senators to worry about.

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Nobody on Capitol Hill believes the number of GOP mutineers could even remotely approach the 20 needed to convict Trump in a Senate trial. All the same, there is a recognition among the president’s allies that his reelection campaign, not to mention his place in history, could be crippled by even the smallest clique of Republicans banding together and issuing what would be an institution-defining rebuke.

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[I]t wouldn’t shock anyone if Susan Collins, the centrist from Maine, turned on Trump once and for all. She has never thought highly of the president. She has exhausted the polite ways in which to articulate her belief that he is unfit for office. She, like Romney, called Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president “appalling.”

Nor would it surprise Republicans if Lisa Murkowski, the other quasi-independent in the GOP caucus, turned on Trump. The Alaska senator has been a chronic problem for the White House. Whether it was her vote against the GOP’s Obamacare repeal proposal, or her persistent abuse of the administration for its handling of a 35-day government shutdown, or her go-it-alone refusal to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Murkowski has shown a unique capacity for afflicting the president.

He has female problems.

In late October, it was those three GOP senators—Romney, Collins and Murkowski—who conspicuously refused to co-sponsor Lindsey Graham’s resolution condemning the House of Representatives for its impeachment inquiry.

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[T]hree is more than zero. And what if it’s more?

Sounds like Francis Rooney makes it four at least.

What if Lamar Alexander, the retiring statesman from Tennessee who has struggled to mask his disillusionment with Trump’s destruction of norms, decides to go out with a bang?

What if Cory Gardner, whose reelection in Colorado seems destined to be doomed by the top of the ticket, thinks his next act in politics depends on establishing distance from Trump?

What if Ben Sasse or Pat Toomey or Rob Portman, all thoughtful conservatives in the Burkean tradition, reach a point where they feel compelled to meet a moment on behalf of their party and their country and perhaps even their constituents, as upset as many of them might be?

None of this might seem realistic. Yet these are precisely the scenarios being bandied about by the president’s team—and on occasion, by Trump himself.

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It’s never ideal for a party to lose control of Congress—particularly not in a hyperpartisan, zero-sum atmosphere where gridlock is guaranteed. But for Trump, the silver lining of the GOP’s drubbing in 2018 was a party, purged of many of its gadflies, that emerged looking and sounding a lot more like him. This was true in the Senate, where the president shed the baggage of Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, but even more so in the House, where, as former Congressman Mark Sanford says, “the conference got a whole lot Trumpier.”

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What the House GOP was left with, entering 2019, was a smaller, more demographically homogeneous and ideologically concentrated membership. There was no longer a list of mischief-makers for the White House to track. In reality, there was one remaining voice of consistent dissent: Justin Amash. When the Michigan Republican announced his decision to leave the GOP on July 4, declaring his “independence” from Trump’s party, the president and congressional leaders celebrated. His takeover of the House GOP was all but complete.

By contrast, when Texas Congressman Will Hurd announced his retirement a few weeks later, there was cause for concern in Trump’s orbit. [...] With Hurd no longer constrained by the considerations of running for reelection on the same ticket as Trump, the White House feared, he might feel liberated to step out on impeachment. The congressman has been under the administration’s microscope ever since, his public statements and private interactions parsed for clues.

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In an interview, Hurd, a former CIA officer who sits on the Intelligence Committee, does not sound like a man ready to impeach the president.

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Noting how Trump can be impetuous and indelicate, Hurd stresses nonetheless that every elected official’s threshold for impeachment will vary. “For me, impeachment is a clear violation of the law,” he says. “And I haven’t seen anything — yet — that looks like a clear violation of the law.”

Seriously?

And please read the Constitution, Mr. Hurd. Impeachment is not defined as a clear violation of the law. Impeachment is a Constitutional remedy for a president who abuses the power of his office.

Amash, who voted for the House inquiry to proceed, is wrestling with that same question. “I think we’ve seen plenty of evidence that the president is abusing his power, abusing the office of the presidency,” he says. The independent congressman understands that his former GOP comrades disagree, or at least say they disagree, with him on that front. What he wonders is what, if anything, could change their minds; whether even a smoking cannon of misconduct linked directly to Trump could convince them of their responsibility to impeach.

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“The administration’s approach with a lot of things is to put out really bad information and then pretend like it’s not bad. It’s sort of a different way of covering up. It’s gaslighting—just put out the bad stuff and then tell everyone it’s not bad, and that you’re shocked that anyone would think it’s bad. ... Trump understands that. He’s figured out that he can say and do pretty much anything and people will cover for him.”

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There is, however, one conservative who continues to be monitored closely: Chip Roy.

A former federal prosecutor who made a name for himself in Washington as Ted Cruz’s original Senate chief of staff, Roy is a true believer who was sharply critical of Trump throughout 2016. When Roy decided to run for Congress in 2018, in fact, he was reminded to scrub his social media of attacks on the president. With so many of his Freedom Caucus colleagues springing to the president’s defense in recent months, Roy’s silence has been a subject of growing concern.

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“I have not associated myself with any of the defenses of my colleagues on this issue, because I’m going to make my own assessment and frame it however the facts present themselves,” he says. “I’ve got my own views on this, and I don’t necessarily believe the arguments I’ve heard to date have been the best arguments, because people are just firing on the fly without thinking it through.”

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He explains that he has been marking up hundreds of pages of documents and building a prosecutor’s case file from which to draw his ultimate conclusions. Unlike some of his colleagues, Roy says, he sees “a line” that needs to be enforced as a matter of precedent. It’s just that Trump, from everything he’s gathered thus far, has not crossed it.

Does he literally have to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue?

Trump and his team [are also keeping] a close eye on certain individuals, such as Adam Kinzinger and John Shimkus and Fred Upton, who fit the description of the centrist, traditional, Bush-friendly Republican who have been known to voice their displeasure with the president. And indeed, both Kinzinger and Shimkus leaped off the radar in recent weeks due to their broadsides against Trump. But their invective had more to do with abandoning the Kurds than pressuring the Ukrainians.

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If disgruntled Republicans didn’t sign up for impeachment amid the swirl of betraying the Kurds, admitting a Ukrainian quid pro quo, soliciting China’s help investigating the Bidens and self-dealing to the Trump family on a scale of many millions of dollars, well, it’s tough to imagine them finding reason to do so now.

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[Patrick McHenry, who served in previous Congresses as the House GOP’s chief deputy whip], renowned for his read on the instincts of his fellow House Republicans, predicted that not a single one will vote for impeachment.

Amash made the same prediction. So did Hurd. And Roy. And every other House Republican lawmaker interviewed for this story, including those who spoke on condition of anonymity.

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Even Rooney, the retiring Florida Republican who remains on a political island all his own, admitted he doesn’t expect a single Republican defection in the House. That is, of course, unless he takes it upon himself.

“The whole thing is one step removed from the president—it’s [Rudy] Giuliani, it’s [Gordon] Sondland,” Rooney says, referring to the president’s lawyer and EU ambassador, who stand accused of orchestrating a shadow foreign policy to pressure Ukraine into investigating the Bidens.

Which is the obvious work-around to keep the president protected. It's a constant in American presidencies. It even has a name: plausible deniability. We'll see how they all feel after Gordon Sondland testifies, if, that is, Sondland doesn't just take the fifth or refuse to answer questions.

“So, the question is, is that enough of an abuse of power to remove the president from office? I don’t know. I need to think about that a lot more. I haven’t made up my mind.”

He adds, “I’ve got to be able to look at myself in the mirror, and I’ve got to be able to look at my kids and my friends and family, and know that what I did was right.”

I expect Mr. Rooney will be able to look in the mirror and at his kids and friends and family with no problem if he stands strong in the GOP machine, but hiding behind plausible deniability should prevent it.

Some Senate Republicans who are frequent allies of President Trump have called for a motion to speedily shut down an impeachment trial, a move that would require a simple majority of 51 votes. Senators Lindsey Graham, Rand Paul, David Perdue have all said they back such a motion.

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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday shut down an option floated by some Republicans to quickly dismiss articles of impeachment against President Trump, saying he fully expects the matter to go to trial in the Senate.

“I don’t think there’s any question that we have to take up the matter. The rules of impeachment are very clear, we’ll have to have a trial,” McConnell said as the first public impeachment hearing was underway before the House Intelligence Committee.

  National Review

And here's a possible factor in how emboldened Republican Senators might be when that trial begins:  Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently missed Supreme Court arguments reportedly due to a stomach virus.  Her health is an issue.  Should Ruth be unable to hold her position throughout the next year, and Trump gets to nominate another right-winger to the court who gets approved, McConnell may feel secure enough that Trump has outlived his usefulness and turn the GOP's senators loose. 

That's admittedly a long shot, but we'll see.  Trump could easily become a bigger liability to the party than asset in a year's time.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.