Would You Buy a Used PAC From This Man?
What To Do With the Mooch?
I like Anthony Scaramucci, a charmingly roguish and brilliant promoter of his high fee funds at the speed-dating schmooze-fest SALT (Skybridge ALTernatives) Conference that links up brainy macro thinkers, celebrities, high net worth and institutional investors. His video interviews with Bitcoin speculator and Microstrategies CEO Michael Saylor showcase his talent for hitching his wagon to the bubblicious man of the moment, which is exactly what he did with Trump in 2016. He’s the funnier — and far smarter — than Trump reality-TV version of the alternative investment biz. So, as Tiffany Cross understood when she interviewed him, caveat emptor and exercise very cautious DD (due diligence).
The Mooch and almost every other constitutionalist refugee from the Republican Party were all virtually blind to how Trump merely finished a generation long process of turning them into the conservative fringe in an authoritarian white nationalist party, a process that began with Nixon’s southern strategy, accelerated with Reagan’s welfare queens and Bush 1.0’s Willie Horton dog whistle and was fertilized further with Big Lie Birtherism. Trump accelerated and ratified a conversion to nativism and white nationalism that had already happened. Neither the Mooch nor his fellow Never Trumpers have ever owned up to their role in their party’s inverting its old status of a conservative party with a white nationalist fringe to white nationalist party with a conservative fringe.
The Price of readmission to respectability for the Mooch, Bill Kristol, George Will & Co, who were all previously quite happy to double down on Republican racial dog-whistle politics, is their support for permanent, irrevocable democracy reform that transforms the US into a fully multiracial democracy. They must support the United States’ conversion to one person, one vote democracy, consigning the white and rural tilt of American institutions to the same trash heap as the 3/5 compromise, Jim Crow, poll taxes and the appointment of senators by state legislatures. Our price for readmitting Never Trump conservatives to the club is that they sign up for a 21st century version of Sherman’s march to the sea to permanently and irrevocably demolish the southern veto in American politics (which predates the revolution; but that’s another conversation). Here’s the policy menu for this transformation:
1. Support for ending the filibuster.
2. Support for DC and Puerto Rico statehood.
3. Support for abolition of the electoral college to end our small state rotten borough system that values rural and small state votes more than others. We should get out of 18th century Britain and catch up to the one person, one vote systems that prevail in more democratic states like Taiwan and South Korea.
4. Support for HR 1 as the new Voting Rights Act that throws out all GOP voter suppression laws. No support for state legislatures' lawsuits against HR1.
5. Support for Saturday and Sunday voting and automatic voter registration. Support election day as a two day national holiday with all workers given at least one day off to vote in person if they choose.
6. Support universal no excuse no notary needed mail in voting and a federal standard to early voting and ballot drop boxes in all states. No more forcing Harris County voters to drive 30 miles to vote because Texas' governor closed all but four drop boxes.
7. Support reforming the Senate so that small states are guaranteed one senator each and additional senators are allocated by population: 6 for California , 4 for Texas, 3 for NY and Florida, 2 for Pennsylvania, New Jersey,, Michigan, Georgia. Wyoming and California should not have the same number of senators. Votes from Liz Cheney's voters should not be worth 60 California votes.
8. Support for public financing of elections and prohibition of dark money financing; put the Mercers, the Koch brothers & Co. out of business. No more America, the land of the best elections money can buy.
9. Support for banning partisan gerrymandering and overturning Citizens United through legislation that mandates independent commissions to draw congressional district boundaries. End Congress as a perpetually safe space for incumbents.
10. No funding of their PACs from fossil fuel corporate front organizations denying climate change.
11. No funding and political banishment for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which seeks to reinstate choosing senators by state legislatures.
12. Support expulsion from Congress or at least from congressional committees of all who expressed support for the January 6 insurrectionists: Cruz, Hawley, Gohmert, MTG, Gaetz, Gosar, Brooks. No get out of political jail for free cards for lethal sedition.
13. Support for the impeachment conviction of Trump.
If they can agree to all of this, fine. If not, send the Mooch back to his high class boiler room at the SALT Conference.
The off ramp for the Mooch & Co. is for them to adopt as their cause a COMPLETE transition to multiracial one person, one vote democracy through ending the legal and institutional structures that enable minority rule in which 41 senators representing 11% of the US population can block all but budget reconciliation laws.
Absent agreement to this menu, let the Republican Party tear itself apart so the rest of us can do to it what FDR did to Alf Landon in 1936: demographically and electorally crush it and send it the way of the Whigs and Know Nothings. Only that fate will produce a reality-based, non-authoritarian Republican like Eisenhower, who knew better than to dismantle FDR’s New Deal. Authoritarian, nativist and racist demagogy is like alcoholism. There's no cure without a lost weekend of hitting bottom and gazing into the mirror and seeing total defeat.
