By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, May 27,
2024
If you have a few minutes, take a moment to read a piece
of congressional business quickly slipping away down the memory hole: House
Resolution 878, passed by the 118th Congress on December 1, 2023. What,
exactly, was House Resolution 878? It’s the one that begins, “Whereas
Representative George Santos is a Member of the United States House of
Representatives” and ends by making that first sentence no longer the case.
The resolution is pretty funny reading. It talks around
the real reasons Santos was expelled from the House—his embarrassing fictions
about his biography and career and his risible general personal ickiness—and
pretends instead that the main issue was financial wrongdoing:
Whereas, on May 10, 2023,
Representative Santos was charged in Federal court in the Eastern District of
New York with wire fraud in connection with a fraudulent political contribution
scheme, unlawful monetary transactions in connection with the wire fraud
allegations, theft of public money in connection with his alleged receipt of
unemployment benefits, fraudulent application for and receipt of unemployment
benefits, and false statements in connection with his 2020 and 2022 House of
Representatives Financial Disclosure Statements;
Whereas Nancy Marks, who served
as Treasurer to Representative Santos’ campaign, pleaded guilty to conspiracy
to commit wire fraud, falsifying records, and identity theft in connection with
the Santos campaign;
Whereas a superseding indictment
was filed on October 10, 2023, charging Representative Santos with additional
violations related to his 2022 campaign, including allegations of falsifying
Federal Election Commission reports in connection with a $500,000 personal loan
that was never made, falsifying the names of contributors to his campaign,
engaging in aggravated identity theft and access device fraud, and enriching
himself through a fraudulent contribution scheme;
Whereas Sam Miele, who served as
a fundraiser to Representative Santos’ campaign, pleaded guilty to a Federal
wire fraud charge after impersonating a senior congressional aide for the
purposes of soliciting funds …
Etc., etc., et multa c.
No doubt the financial wrongdoing was a real thing.
Santos is pretty obviously a small-time grifter who briefly made it to the
majors before striking out. Silence of the Lambs author Thomas
Harris’ heroine Clarice
Starling might well have been talking to George Santos rather than her
fictional bureaucratic nemesis: “You aren’t fast enough to steal in Congress.
You can’t make up for a second-rate intelligence just by playing dirty.”
Harris, like many writers of pulp fiction, is a
first-rate observer of human facts (so clear as to be off-putting; there is a
reason he had to invent Hannibal Lecter as his authorial alter ego),
but I am not sure that bit of wisdom entirely stands the test of time:
Washington in Anno Domini 2024 is full of people successfully making up
for a second-rate intelligence just by playing dirty, and some of those people
are in Congress. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is one of these. Sen. Bob Menendez
is
another. George Santos is one who tried and failed.
(Ted Cruz, in contrast, possesses a first-rate
intelligence, and so one wonders what it is he is making up
for.)
We have endured a general lowering of standards in order
to accommodate not Rep. Lauren Boebert but the feckless cretins and maniacs—our
neighbors, our fellow Americans—who prefer to be represented by such a figure.
Boebert may not be much of a capital-R Representative, but she represents her
voters perfectly. Santos was an anthropomorphic (more or less) sign of the
times.
I claim that there has been a general lowering of
standards, but please do not read me to mean that Congress in the 19th or 20th
century was free of the kind of financial shenanigans, self-dealing, petty
crime, corruption, venality, and pocket-lining of which Santos and Menendez
stand accused. (I am always surprised how cheap it is to buy an American
politician: Menendez is a man whose head apparently could be turned by a Rolex
and a Mercedes C-Class, a car that can be leased for less than $600 a month.
Yes, I know about the bars of gold, but imagine going fishing for senators with
a Rolex and actually catching one—it is absurd.) Bribery is eternal—it has been
around long enough to have been condemned in the Old Testament, along with
murder and idolatry, and anything that has been around that long must be
understood to be simply a part of the human condition. That sort of thing is
wicked and should be punished severely when wrongdoing is discovered.
My longstanding view is that criminal offenses touching
public trust should
be punished much more severely than merely private money-grubbing crimes,
in much the same way that a police officer who commits a murder (and I do not
mean here merely a questionable shooting in the line of duty but crimes such as
acting as mob assassins)
should be prosecuted much more rigorously than a regular-schmo murderer. But
petty paper-stacking, even when criminal, is far from the worst thing a
politician can do. And sometimes, non-criminal actions by holders
of the public trust merit even more severe reactions.
By which I mean, of course, to bring up only this: Rep.
Marjorie Taylor Greene should be expelled from Congress. Her offenses are not
(so far as I know) criminal, but they are in every way worse than Santos’
offenses, more corrosive to the public trust and to the institution which she
(theoretically) serves. Congress has a surfeit of self-importance but only
rarely can rouse itself to a display of self-respect, as in the expulsion of
Santos.
Greene is not the most significant of the parties who
have worked to spread the wild lie that the Biden administration attempted to
assassinate Donald Trump during the search of Mar-a-Lago. Donald Trump is the
most important of the liars. Julie Kelly of RealClear (ha!) Investigations
is another. But Greene is a member of Congress, not a social media troll. And
while she is not the only member of Congress to traffic in this nonsense, she
is the worst offender.
If you would like an excellent chronicle of how the
Trump-assassination lie made its way from the sewers of the Internet to the
halls of Congress, my colleague Mike
Warren’s account is unimprovable. The short version: It begins with Kelly et
al. claiming that bog-standard boilerplate language regarding the use of
force in serving a warrant was some kind of extraordinary plan to have FBI
agents “engage” the Secret Service—during a search that intentionally was
conducted when the former president was not at Mar-a-Lago. The imbecility
worked its way up through figures such as Dan Bongino (whose enduring soreness
over having failed to make the cut at the FBI is palpable every time he talks
about the agency) and then to Greene, who offered this doozy:
The Biden DOJ and FBI were
planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light. Does everyone get
it yet???!!!! What are Republicans going to do about it? I tried to oust our
Speaker who funded Biden’s DOJ AND FBI, but Democrats stopped it.
Oh, we get it. We do. It is as plain as day: Moscow Madge
is still looking for some flimsy post-hoc vindication for her risible, failed
attempt to get
rid of the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, a coup-backing knee-walking
MAGA grotesque and Trump enabler who is somehow not depraved and sycophantic
enough for Greene. The speaker’s great sin against the One True Faith was
deciding, for whatever reason, that House Republicans’ No. 1 priority was not
not having a Department of Justice. Moscow Madge demanded that Johnson defund
the police at the federal level, and Johnson, who occasionally does an almost
persuasive impersonation of a functional adult human being, demurred.
Taking bribes and stealing from campaign funds and all of
the rest of that time-honored stuff is bad and awful and disreputable and
should be punished with a pair
of pliers and a blowtorch when appropriate, but the sort of thing Greene is
engaged in is much, much worse. You can bomb federal buildings—and who doubts
that Tim McVeigh would be an unrelenting consumer of Greene’s social-media
output, had we not had the good sense to poison him
to death and burn what was left over—but what Greene is doing with the
effort she is helping to lead will do far more harm to institutions such as the
FBI and the DOJ than a mere bomb would. Perhaps you do not much care for the
FBI or the DOJ—there is no shortage of legitimate criticism to make of these
institutions, where there is much that is in need of reform. But let your
little libertarian heart flutter for only the briefest moment before your brain
rejoins the conversation to ask: What do you imagine would come to replace the
FBI or the DOJ. Something good? Something better? Something more in keeping
with our ancestral liberty?
Please.
(It isn’t that an agency cannot reach a state when
replacing or abolishing it is the best option: Some agencies outlive their
usefulness, and a few develop such crippling deformities of corporate culture
that reforming them would be more effort than it is worth. I would argue that
there are three prominent examples: One is the IRS, whose leaders and managers
should be dismissed with prejudice, but even with a wide and deep and maybe
even radical reform of the U.S. tax code, somebody is going to do most of the
work the IRS does today. Another is the Department of Education, the main
legitimate purpose of which is the dispersal of federal funds, a job that could
be better done by an agency unburdened by broader policy questions best left to
the states and to the educational institutions themselves. The third is the
ATF, the operations of which have no meaningful effect on the violent criminal
use of firearms, which has an extremely dysfunctional institutional culture,
and which is tasked with overseeing a portfolio that contains an incoherent mix
of retail regulation and organized-crime work.)
We know what Greene’s beef with the FBI and the DOJ is:
These organizations are asked to enforce the law at a time when Donald Trump
and many Republicans are inclined to break it. While the Trump element goes
back and forth between insisting that January 6 never happened (Julie Kelly
claims it was staged by federal law-enforcement agents) or that it was an
admirable exercise in patriotic protest, because, somehow, the right has gone
from Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley Jr. to …
 |
Jacob Chansley, also known as the "QAnon Shaman," screams "Freedom" inside the U.S. Senate chamber after the U.S. Capitol was breached by a mob during a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images) |
… well, you know.
(If that jabroni were a fed, he’d be wearing shiny black
FBI shoes. Everybody knows. Ask
Tom Wolfe.)
A free society can weather many kinds of abuse and
trauma: violence, wars, economic convulsions, natural disasters, the wax and
wane of the Mandate of Heaven as it is filtered through the dirty laundry of
democracy. But a free society cannot endure government by lie. Government by
lie is not the same thing as a government that includes the usual share of
lying politicians. Government by lie is what you get when lying becomes, in
effect, a political creed of its own, a party and a movement unto itself.
Lying is unpatriotic. It is dangerous. It is corrosive.
There isn’t much that can be done about the lies of Donald Trump other than
what’s already being done, and there isn’t much that can be done about the lies
of such figures as Julie Kelly, because the people who read her and the people
who employ her do not have the necessary self-respect to act. There is not much
that can be done about social media at large or even about big, lying
institutions such as Fox News, which, even though it has been chastened a bit
by recent defamation judgments, is essentially only Julie Kelly writ large.
(Indeed, Kelly has long been a Fox News regular.)
But Marjorie Taylor Greene is not only a social-media
troll—she was that, but, thanks to the miracle of democracy, she is something
more than that today: the honorable representative for the good people of
Dalton, Georgia, and the surrounding area. But the House can expel her. It
expelled George Santos for much less serious offenses. And, really, that’s
Republicans in 2024: When they can be bothered to act, it is almost exclusively
in the service of the insignificant and the symbolic. But Greene is undermining
the government she supposedly serves, and she is setting the stage for
political violence in the wake of a Trump loss in November, if such a thing
should come to pass. As somebody once demanded to know:
“What are Republicans going to do about it?”
And: What are Democrats going to do about
it?
Anybody?
Words About Words
Adults who use the word “scary”
to describe anything in American politics should be … I don’t know, but made to
suffer something unpleasant. We should take all their pencils
away until they learn how to write like grown-ups. E.g., this Slate headline,
changed since the original:
“Alito
flag scandal: The second one is even scarier than the first.”
I read in vain to try to discover the part that should be
scary, or even scarier. But the article offers little fortification for fear.
Indeed, Molly Olmstead notes:
House Speaker Mike Johnson, too,
displays an Appeal to Heaven flag outside
his office door. Johnson, though, is Southern Baptist—not a background that
aligns with [Dutch] Sheets’ particular Christian tradition. Alito
is also not affiliated with charismatic Christianity. He comes from a
Roman Catholic faith tradition. Nor is Leonard Leo, who also flew the flag.
Leo, the Federalist Society figure often credited for the current makeup of the
Supreme Court, is a traditionalist Catholic.
Radical posturing is a real temptation for men and women
in public life. God knows I’ve been guilty of it myself at times. There is a
long tradition on the right (and a lesser one on the left) of associating
Revolution-era symbols with current political contests. (Such imagery also
finds many uses in non-political
contexts.) The notion that Samuel Alito is some kind of closet Talibanist
who fancies the idea of imposing … what, papal sharia? … on the United
States is implausible. Might he feel that he, and the Supreme Court, and the
country at large are set upon by dangerous and irresponsible partisans? He
might. He should.
Would that be scary? I don’t see why it
should.
Additional Wordiness
Consider the “evergreen pine.”
Here is an interesting (I think so, anyway) thing that’s
been on my mind because of that book I keep threatening to finish but haven’t
quite yet. The “Appeal to Heaven” or “Pine Tree” flag, currently in the news
because it flew over Justice Samuel Alito’s beach house, had of course been
around for a long time before it was taken up as a symbol by Trump cultists.
The pine tree is a symbol of New England, and the “Appeal to Heaven” flag,
which first was displayed during the American Revolution, still is used as the
naval ensign of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (without the text). The words
“Appeal to Heaven” are from John Locke and refer to the moral legitimacy of
revolution.
The flag does not belong to the Trump cultists, but it is
a perfect symbol for them. Pine trees (and other evergreens) are, for obvious
reasons, ancient symbols of fertility and prosperity, and they are used by all
sorts of tribal chieftains as symbols for the fatherly and wealth-sharing
capacity of their office. As the Trump cult grows increasingly and obviously
cultlike, its character religious rather than political, such symbols take on
additional urgency.
The tribal-father aspect of the evergreen was reflected
in a famous Walter Scott poem that, after a few twists and turns, became our
familiar “Hail to the Chief.” Because, of course it did. We have been
building a cult of the presidency since before they hired away an artist from
the Vatican to paint The Apotheosis of George Washington on
the underside of the Capitol dome.
I slightly prefer the lyrics Jack Lemmon made up for the song in My Fellow
Americans, but here’s Scott in the pagan-chieftain mode increasingly
fitting to our conception of the president:
Hail to the Chief who in triumph
advances!
Honoured and blessed be the
evergreen Pine!
Long may the tree, in his banner
that glances,
Flourish, the shelter and grace
of our line!
Heaven send it happy dew,
Earth lend it sap anew,
Gaily to bourgeon and broadly to
grow,
While every Highland glen
Sends our shout back agen,
‘Roderich Vich Alpine dhu, ho! ieroe!’
Other than being competently written verse and generally
literate, there is no real reason this couldn’t have been produced by a modern
American president-worshiper.
Economics for English
Majors
The Wall Street Journal has published a very
interesting article arguing that Republicans may think inflation is
worse than Democrats do not only out of partisan prejudice but because
inflation has been higher in Republican-leaning areas than in Democratic
ones.
Republicans right now think
inflation is a much bigger problem than Democrats do, and a lot of that is just
politics. But here’s another possibility: Many of the places Republicans live
indeed have had significantly higher inflation than Democratic enclaves.
In new research, economists Carola
Binder, Rupal Kamdar and Jane Ryngaert examined Labor Department
inflation figures for U.S. metropolitan areas, and compared them with voting
data. Their finding: Metro areas with more Republicans and independent
voters tended to have higher inflation in 2022 than places where Democrats
live.
A Wall Street Journal analysis
found a similar pattern at the state level. Inflation estimates provided by
Moody’s Analytics, combined with voting data, show that states
where Donald Trump garnered the most votes in 2020 have on balance
experienced higher inflation.
For example, South Carolina has had the highest recent
inflation, New Hampshire the lowest. South Carolina was a Trump state, New
Hampshire a Biden state.
The kooks will of course say that the Biden
administration is somehow engineering relatively high inflation in Trump-voting
areas, but that is nonsense. What might actually account for the
difference?
At the county level, Democratic areas tend to be
wealthier and more economically productive than Republican ones do. That is
because these are cities, which are, have been, and almost certainly will
continue to be the great centers of innovation. Republicans would do well to
think about what their terrible political position in the cities bodes for
their party.
That being said, economic growth at the state level has
recently been much stronger in Republican-leaning states: South Carolina had
the third-fastest-growing
state economy in 2023, behind No. 1 Florida and No. 2 Washington.
Washington is generally Democratic-leaning, but most of the rest of the states
leading the list are Republican-leaning: Florida and South Carolina, Nebraska,
Kansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Idaho, etc.
New Hampshire, which is where upper-class white people go
to die when they cannot afford Vermont, is not exactly an engine of dynamism.
It has no major city (its largest, Manchester, would be the 15th-largest
municipality in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro if it were transplanted to north
Texas), its people are old, and it is less attractive to immigrants than Iowa,
South Dakota, or the United States at large. With the (arguable) exception of
Allegro MicroSystems, there is no company of national or international
importance headquartered there. (Sorry, Planet Fitness!) But it has a higher
average household income than any state save Maryland, Massachusetts,
and New Jersey, all of which are behind the District of Columbia.
The general economic inertia of rich but stagnant places
such as New Hampshire may act as a brake on inflation, whereas the flux and
turnover of states like South Carolina—less affluent but more dynamic—may make
such places more sensitive to short-term economic trends.
That’s my guess, anyway. I’d love to hear yours.
In Other News …
I am disappointed by Nikki Haley’s halfhearted
endorsement of Donald Trump, but I am not surprised by it. She ran a
halfhearted, lily-livered campaign during which she plainly was terrified of
offending the Trump element, or even being seen as insufficiently energetic in
pandering to that element. Of course she was going to come around to Trump.
She’s a young woman by Washington standards, ambitious and gifted, and, as she
sees it, she’s stuck in the desert with only one horse available to ride out
on. I think she has made a miscalculation—and I think well enough of Haley to
reject out of hand any suggestion that she is acting out of principle here—and
I suspect that miscalculation may well be the end of her political career. But,
again, she is a young woman by Washington standards, ambitious and gifted. Life
is long, and memory is short.
When the time comes, I’ll try to help everybody
remember.
In Conclusion
Many thanks to those of you who keep sending me those YouTube videos of the guy
who has triplets and figures out clever ways to move them around. Very
amusing.
But, recall: I have four baby boys under the age
of two. Triplets plus.
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