Turnabout Is Political Law

By Judson Berger

Friday, November 14, 2025

 

What goes around comes around. Turnabout is fair play. Payback’s a . . . you get the idea. The concept is so fundamental that many well-worn expressions exist to describe it. And yet it routinely eludes those who temporarily wield political power. This past week was a veritable courtroom of exhibits showing how wanton norm-busting eventually comes back to bite each party, deepening D.C.’s dysfunction in the process.

 

Exhibit A: President Trump granted preemptive pardons this past week to Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and dozens of others connected to the push to overturn the 2020 election.

 

Where he got the idea is no mystery. Here’s Noah Rothman:

 

It’s not like Trump invented preemptive pardons.

 

Biden’s pardons of his family members, January 6 committee participants, and public officials like Anthony Fauci — all in the absence of any charge and seemingly only to promote the political narrative that the incoming Trump administration was salivating over the opportunity to persecute them — set the stage for today’s disgrace.

 

Noah goes on to warn that the “political party that forges new weapons for itself to wield in the ongoing culture war will see those instruments turned against it soon enough.” And yet “this unavoidable conclusion seems to elude the political class.”

 

Exhibit B: Congress just clawed its way out of the longest, possibly most pointless government shutdown in American history. Again, it’s not as if the precedent of shutting down the government to seek concessions related to Obamacare hadn’t already been established. Republicans infamously went through these motions in 2013 — in opposition to Obamacare — and more disruptive deadlocks have followed. “Once rare, government shutdowns have become commonplace,” Noah writes. Shutdowns are now one of the ordinary tools the parties use to, if not extract concessions, look like they are on the cusp of extracting them. Expect more of this. With the new deadline pushed into the new year, Jeff Blehar sees what’s coming: “I look forward to meeting you once again, come January 2026, when the next required show of ‘resistance’ rolls around.”

 

Exhibit C: The Trump DOJ continues to pursue shaky legal cases against James Comey, Letitia James, and possibly others. Andrew McCarthy catches us up here on Comey’s specifically. As he’s pointed out before, the prosecutions against Trump during his stint as a non-president helped set the stage for today’s vindictive lawfare. Trump now gleefully turns the turrets of government on his perceived enemies. Perhaps he assumes this will make them even; it won’t. Anticipating a presidential self-pardon in the event of a Democratic victory in 2028, Andy writes, “Given Trump’s unabashedly vindictive lawfare practices, I now have to assume that the next Democratic administration will pursue criminal investigations against him — and that Trump’s lawfare practices make Democratic victories in coming elections more likely.”

 

We should hope that the filibuster does not become Exhibit D. Until the shutdown-ending deal was reached in Congress, Trump had been pressuring Republicans to nuke the filibuster to reopen the government (and to pass his agenda) — as Jim Geraghty put it, “the ultimate short-term gain, long-term loss for Republicans in the Senate.” Yuval Levin writes that the shutdown’s resolution suggests the filibuster might be more durable than thought:

 

The sheer bottomless idiocy of the idea of ending the filibuster to pass a continuing resolution has meant that people trying to reinforce Trump’s doltish haranguing have needed to look for other arguments against the filibuster than the one he was making. And the one reached for by most (like the vice president) is that the Democrats will surely end the filibuster the next time they have a chance, and that they didn’t do it last time only because of opposition from a couple of senators who aren’t there anymore.

 

This is not a foolish argument, and it may turn out to be true. Creating the impression that the filibuster might be in danger was also useful to Republicans. . . . But the end-game of this shutdown suggests that (as usual) the filibuster has more friends than we might imagine.

 

As described above, at least Republicans showed the ability to imagine what the other side might do, albeit from a position of maximum cynicism; the next step is to appreciate that one’s political opponents are, in fact, more likely to commit outrageous acts if one commits them first.