Jamie Raskin Warns Repairing Democracy Will Take Years
Obviously breaking things is much easier than remaking them. Restoration to bring new life and trust to what has been broken can become very long, arduous and expensive.
Just ask anyone taking on an old house.
If we talk about restoring broken institutions and government, the issues are magnified by the loss of trust and a less-than-sure way to see what is supposed to emerge.
Examples abound, of course, as we are seeing play out in this now-stubborn war with Iran. Sending in the bombs and missiles, however skilled, pricey, even gutsy the move, has turned out to be the easy part.
Building, negotiating, achieving whatever was intended to emerge from the damage is much more difficult.
Rebuilding seemingly calls on wholly separate sets of skills and experience to deal with a foe that sees time and effect differently, to regather allies in communal effort, and to require a permanent police role for Iran’s nuclear aspirations.
Whatever else is said about where we find ourselves, all can agree that Donald Trump’s gut-driven, impatient, all-or-nothing approach to deals is far from the deliberate, delaying and deceitful approach favored by Iran, which too has refined its thinking over decades or more of experience.
Broken Institutions
The brokenness of the war matches a bleak domestic governmental landscape littered by these first 18 months of Trump 2.0.
Whether you are among the dwindling supporters who relish it or a critic who thinks the country is going to hell, all will acknowledge that the Trump bull has run amok amid fragile trust stores in justice, health, immigration, education and the economy. Indeed, the Steve Bannon followers say that was the whole point.
Even those in the administration turned against the ill-fated DOGE effort that deployed computer-savvy people with no government experience to shut down international aid agencies, slash public health and Social Security agencies and more, all seemingly without knowledge about what services were being eliminated or why.
With supportive, unquestioning majorities in the House and Senate, a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, and almost unrestrained powers to evade U.S. and international law and democratic precedents, Trump’s break-it-all philosophy is going unchallenged but for political talk and increasingly bad political polls.
Those polls almost uniformly project the Trump majorities are facing rejection in the fall elections — spawning new, unending would-be schemes by the Trump forces to disrupt voting, redistricting, vote-counting challenges and more to break elections too.
The only valid principle seems to be Winning.
But if the elections properly reflect a national mood that has turned against Trump’s insistence on breaking everything in sight, what happens then?
A Generation of Restoration
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., was asked about Democratic priorities should his party prevail in November’s elections. Would the focus be on constant investigations of Trump administration misdeeds and oversteps, even on yet another futile impeachment effort against Trump himself, or on a broader agenda towards Democratic-supported improvements?
It’s a critical question even before November. Public anger has welled over broken promises about high prices, about excesses in the ICE deportation campaign, over cuts to health care, abuses in the justice system to go after political enemies, and, always, about the Epstein Files hypocrisies.
At the White House, The Washington Post reports, sources say the White House Counsel’s Office is already preparing officials for expected, aggressive congressional oversight to come from an electoral swing in Congress.
Raskin, a constitutional expert, was focused on what he called the need for a “sweeping de-Trumpification of the Department of Justice,” in particular, not only for accountability for abuses, but to re-create whole areas that have been abandoned to pursue immigration and political cases.
Justice has said it will no longer enforce the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and has stopped monitoring foreign subversion of American elections. The underpinnings of the pardon process have been thrown out to have the president just pick political friends, Raskin said. The FBI and Justice have eliminated counterintelligence units, even while we are at war in Iran.
Any “repair” is not a quick fix of replacing a name or two at the top of the department or the label of the political party.
Though Raskin, like other Democratic leaders, sees “almost daily impeachable offenses” are occurring, Democrats cannot waste political capital on impeachment.
Rather, he said, restoration work is “the work of a generation. That’s not going to happen in three months or six months when we get the House, the Senate and the White House back.”
Expand that thinking to changes in health cuts, the repair of international relations, food and humanitarian aid, education and environment. The obvious conclusion is that simply electing a different party majority in November may provide substantial political opposition to the Trump break-it agenda, but it will not guarantee that what has been broken will be fixable anytime soon or easily.
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