Christmas Eve, 2020 — 2359 mst
Mac Thornberry’s extraordinary plea to GOP
When it comes to stealing Christmas,
Scrooge and The Grinch are no match for Trump
President Trump jetted down to Mar-a-Lago today, where he will spend Christmas with Rudy Giuliani, his personal attorney who also was hospitalized with Covid-19. Under the warm Florida sun, they’ll eat expensive food, play golf, and continue plotting to overthrow the fair and square election that Joe Biden won.
But before leaving Washington, D.C., Trump crammed coal down the nation’s Christmas stocking. He vetoed the defense appropriations bill because it (a) contained a provision to rename military bases now named for Confederate traitors, and (b) did not contain a provision to hamstring social media organizations used by his critics to criticize him. He also announced he might veto the pandemic stimulis bill because it appropriated funds for stimulus checks of $600 instead of $2,000.
The Covid-19 relief bill
Trump’s right that the individual payments are too small to do as much good as they should, but he’s wrong to threaten to blow up the bill. Fourteen million will lose their unemployment benefits Saturday, according to the Washington Post. Millions may be evicted from their homes because they cannot afford the rent. Millions will struggle to provide healthy meals for their children.
Here’s the Washington Post’s summary of what’s in the Covid relief bill:
Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi sought approval of the $2,000 payment today, but Republicans blocked it, killing the larger check for the moment. Now Trump must decide whether to sign the bill with the $600 payments, grumbling with each stroke of his pen, or not sign and thereby do real harm to regular people, including many who voted for him.
Defense appropriations act
Trump vetoed this $741 billion spending bill Wednesday. The house meets Monday to hold a vote to override the veto. If the house overrides the veto, the senate will hold an override vote on Tuesday.
Although the bill passed with veto-proof majorities, there are enough Trump sycophants in that chamber to uphold his veto if they decide their highest loyalty is to the man in the White House, not to the nation. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R, CA-23) pledge to stand with the president forces Republicans who support the bill to defy both their president and their leader in the house.
That’s what makes Rep. Mac Thornberry’s message to his colleague so extraordinary. Thornberry represents the 4013th congressional district in Texas, the second largest in Texas, and with a Cook Partisan Voting Index of R+33, the most Republican district in the nation.
Encompassing the Texas panhandle and counties to the east, the 13th lies atop the Llano Estacado (palisaded plains), and includes Palo Duro Canyon, a huge gash cut by the Prairie Dog Town Fork Red River. It’s oil, ranching, and military, country known for, among other things, helium production, aircraft manufacturing, and the assembly of atomic bombs. Its largest city, Amarillo (Spanish for "yellow"), was where my father and mother met during World War II.
Given his district, it’s no surprise that no one ever has accused Thornberry of being a wimp on defense:
“Mac Thornberry was an extremely polished, articulate hawk who consistently overstated the risks to the United States and called for much more Pentagon spending than is needed to protect the country,” William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, told the Observer. “He often spoke of a ‘readiness crisis’ as a reason to boost the Pentagon’s budget, even though the department has been getting some of its highest levels of spending since World War II in recent years—far more than it received in the Korean or Vietnam Wars, or at the height of the Reagan buildup of the 1980s.” Texas Observer.
After Trump vetoed the defense bill, Thornberry, Politico reported, indirectly urged urged his colleagues to override the veto:
Thornberry didn’t explicitly urge House Republicans to vote to overturn President Donald Trump’s veto of the National Defense Authorization Act in a brief note sent to his colleagues after the veto was issued on Wednesday. But the Texas Republican urged members to weigh the provisions of the bipartisan bill first and foremost.
“Your decision should be based on what is actually in the bill rather than distortions or misrepresentations,” Thornberry said in the note obtained by POLITICO.
The nudge from Thornberry comes ahead of a Monday override vote that Republicans could make or break. The vote will test whether GOP members are willing to defy Trump en masse, a scenario Thornberry hinted at.
“Your decision should be based upon the oath we all took, which was to the Constitution rather than any person or organization,” he said.
After 13 terms, Thornberry is retiring (his successor is former White House physician Ronny Jackson, a former rear admiral in the Navy whose nomination to head the Veterans Administration failed after accusations of medical misconduct). That makes it easier for him to speak freely. Still, his extraordinary parting remarks underscore the extent to which many of his fellow Republicans have subordinated their loyalty to the nation to their loyalty to Trump.
His interview with the Dallas Morning News is behind a paywall, but much of what is said was repeated by the Washington Examiner, a newspaper never accused of liberalism:
Rep. Mac Thornberry, a retiring House Republican, rebuked members of his party he believes are mindlessly obedient toward President Trump and his attempts to remain in office despite losing the election.
Thornberry … told the Dallas Morning News in an exit interview that his party’s support of Trump’s election challenges “damage our system,” adding that “Congress was created to be and meant to be a separate independent branch of government, not one in which its members take their direction from a president of either party.”
The Republican lawmaker blasted many of his colleagues who supported a Texas lawsuit filed to the Supreme Court seeking to invalidate the election results in a handful of battleground states Joe Biden won. The suit, filed earlier this month by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, said the election “suffered from significant and unconstitutional irregularities.” It also claimed there were “intrastate differences” in how certain voters were treated and that there was an unconstitutional “relaxation” of ballot integrity laws. The Supreme Court rejected the case.
“It was a totally bogus legal argument to say that one state has standing to complain about the way another state runs its elections,” Thornberry said of the more than 100 House Republicans who signed on to the suit. “They could do it just as easily to Texas, and you start getting this back and forth that undermines our whole system.”
In two days, Montana Gov-Elect Rep. Greg Gianforte must decide whether to uphold or override Trump’s veto. Gianforte should take his cue from Mac Thornberry, not Kevin McCarthy.
A day later, Sen. Steve Daines may face the same choice. Thus far, Daines has been Trump’s lapdog. But Daines, just re-elected to a six-year term, has little to fear from Trump, who will be 80 and six years out of office in 1926 if he is still alive. Trump will fade away, not quietly or gracefully, but he will fade away, losing political clout as he goes on a revenge binge and tries to stay one step ahead of the sheriff. But veterans, military families, our armed forces, and advocates of a strong national defense, will not fade away. They’ll be watching Daines and will not react well should he vote to uphold Trump’s veto.
Stealing Christmas
Trump’s veto of the defense bill and threatened veto of the Covid-19 relief act suck the joy of Christmas for the millions and millions of Americans those bill would help. Rage and vengeance, not legitimate policy concerns, control his conduct. He’s doing this out of spite, to keep his name in headlines, to punish people who exercised their right to vote for Joe Biden. It’s behavior tantamount to Saddam Hussein’s setting Kuwait’s oil fields afire during his retreat in 1991, to a scorned lover’s murdering the woman who refused to marry him. It’s the lowdown, contemptible, behavior of a defeated sociopath who is determined to destroy what in 28 days he no longer will have the power to control. It’s behavior that makes Scrooge and The Grinch look like saints.