Fortune Favors the Fawning

I have thought a lot lately about retired North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan’s campaign slogan when he was running for federal office: “A Strong, Clear Voice for North Dakota.” It was a fitting slogan for Dorgan and is a statement of what so many of us are missing in Congress today.

Like other districts with all-Republican Congressional delegations, North Dakota has a weak, muddled voice at best. Really, we have no voice at all. No outrage can elicit the mildest criticism of the Trump administration from them. Even Saturday’s assassination of a Democratic state legislator and her husband and the attempted assassination of another state legislator and his wife in neighboring Minnesota elicited only perfunctory responses. Their reactions to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump just over a year ago were much more vigorous. For Republicans in Congress, fortune favors the fawning. I would say they hold their tongues for fear of losing their seats, but I don’t believe they desire to say anything. The thoughts I would accuse them of biting back never enter their minds in the first place.

In a New Yorker article about Elon Musk published on Monday, Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote,

“A source close to DOGE told me that Musk seemed to regard members of Congress as irrelevant, sometimes referring to them as “N.P.C.s,”—non-player characters—the often mute and nameless figures who populate the backgrounds of video games”

Musk is right, and Republicans in Congress can’t complain about the label, because they have sidelined themselves. They are just extras in the Washington scene practicing their lines of praise for Trump and hoping for a shot at best supporting actor. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) direct an uncredited and inactive NPC: Non-Player Congress.

On Saturday, I spoke at our local “No Kings” rally. I talked about the misuse of our military in Los Angeles and Trump’s horrifically partisan speech at Fort Bragg. I addressed our federal delegation’s silence on those abuses. I talked about their refusal to rebut Senator Joni Ernst who, in response to an assertion that cuts to Medicaid could hasten the death of some people, said, “We all are going to die.” I said that in these cases, silence was endorsement. A couple of days later, a local columnist wrote about parallels he saw between No Kings and the Tea Party movement he had been active in fifteen years ago. A comment under a Facebook link to the article caught my attention:

“A whole lot of people voted from (sic) Trump because Biden and the Harris were so uniquely bad and dangerous. Add to that how the Dems have gone completely insane on gender and Hamas, and you have a bad situation. People voted for Trump to avoid the Dems. As an example, I meet with 5 guys for breakfast weekly, all conservative. Either 4 or 5 of the 6 said they voted for Trump (one did not wish to answer), while the other 1 or 2 went blank. Of this 6, none were enthusiastic about Trump. 0 for 6. And it isn't getting any better with the tariff nonsense and the quotas on illegal immigration....we are so glad he stopped the raids at restaurants and farms. The violent illegals should be the focus. Bottom line...Trump's support is extremely deep, but it is not wide. And that adds up to a lot of losses next year in Congress.”¹

I advise people to refrain from wasting their energy on political arguments on social media, but when I fail to follow my own advice, I do it to the tune of 630 words:

“The deportation scheme was never about crime; that was just the messaging. Immigrants who were doing things the right way have been arrested and deported when they showed up for their check-ins with ICE. Also, the dairy farmer operating near Kristi Noem's ranch hasn't been raided despite revealing on CNN that he employed undocumented workers. The same goes for dairy operations in Idaho who told the Washington Post that they couldn't make it without their immigrant workforce, so it's not even about illegal immigration.

My mom always thought Velva was safe, but Minot was a crime-ridden hell hole. That's the messaging about Los Angeles on Fox News and the Daily Wire (I listen/watch every day), and too many willfully ignorant people believe it. Kristi Noem said that the federal government is in Los Angeles to "liberate" the city from its elected leaders. Meanwhile, raids on ag operations have been limited almost exclusively to blue states. I haven't seen masked ICE agents and deputized contractors snatching anyone off the streets of Minot, but they grabbed a doctoral candidate on a student visa for having the temerity to criticize Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza. The way this is unfolding is no surprise to anyone. It's exactly what the majority of Trump voters wanted, a war on blue states and cities.

Speaking of Hamas, the people "insane" about it withheld their votes from Harris. During the campaign, I talked to Muslim Americans in Fargo, many of whom had friends or family affected by the war. They saw the war and continued settler violence in the West Bank as ethnic cleansing. These folks weren't radicals--they were doctors, engineers, airline pilots, and IT specialists just trying to live their lives while some of them worried about friends and relatives they hadn't heard from days or weeks.

As far as "insane on gender" goes, I wrote a piece titled "The Potential Penis Problem" about the Republican obsession over what might be under a high school girl's basketball shorts. (I suggested that Matt Gaetz, whom both of our Senators would have voted to confirm as AG if he hadn't dropped out, could be recruited to do pregame inspections.) Republican politicians just can't stop thinking and legislating about "franks and beans," so to speak. Democrats’ problem is in taking the bait and rising to the defense of yet another marginalized group—an extremely small percentage of the population whom Republicans in our state legislature and in Congress obsess over more than property taxes, workforce development, and public education combined.

A provision in the House reconciliation bill that Julie Fedorchak voted for says that a federal court cannot "enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued." Since a bond is not generally required in suits against the federal government, and the provision is retroactive, government officials could continue ignore current and future injunctions and restraining orders. So, the judicial branch could not check the executive branch at a time when the legislative branch has lost interest in being a check on executive power.

I have written about how there was no legitimate reason for a representative in Congress to miss the contempt provision. To vote for it and hope the Senate would remove it later would be legislative malpractice and would reveal an incredible lack of leadership and moral courage. Our federal delegation has not even issued a strongly worded statement about the federal government's attack on state sovereignty or the on/off, on/off tariffs or the blatant attempt at partisan politicization of our military. (See Trump's Fort Bragg speech.) They couldn't muster a single criticism of the careless closure of the Burdick Job Corps Center in Minot. Their silence is endorsement. Their silence is consent.

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Their silence is consent. Their capitulation is voluntary. Their constituents and their country deserve better.