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I have been writing these “back to school” stories about Congress coming off its August recess for years now. They catch people up on what the legislative branch’s top priorities are, and there’s always a laundry list of things to attend to. And I guess I could go through the motions and give you that information again.
I could say that government funding runs out at the end of the month and the two parties are nowhere near a resolution. I could talk about the looming health insurance price spike and whether Republicans will extend Affordable Care Act subsidies. I could talk about the expectation that Senate Republicans will change the rules to speed up confirmation of judges and administration appointees, even as some Republicans try to put up their own roadblocks on certain nominees. I could talk about Donald Trump’s crime bill that Republicans are sure to try to fast-track, and the House-Senate friction on doing another partisan mega-bill. I could even get into the weeds and talk about the defense authorization bill and a long-awaited bipartisan crackdown on pharmacy benefit managers and a House Republican bill trying to regulate college athletics.
But at this point, I think it would be a fruitless endeavor to operate as if the U.S. Congress is a primary or even peripheral engine for making policy in this country. I don’t want to bestow a cutesy nickname to trivialize the situation, but we just got through four weeks of, for lack of a better phrase, Authoritarian August. Federal troops are in one American city (albeit engaged in sanitation duty) and will soon be in others; federal agencies are being dismantled at the whim of the powerful; federal paramilitaries continue to kidnap people off the street, often people here legally, and disappear them into the carceral state; people who have criticized the president are being targeted for arrest or harassment or worse; a compliant Supreme Court blesses illegal administration activities on a routine basis; the firing of a railroad regulator for the offense of being a Democrat in the midst of a review of the largest consolidation of freight rail in U.S. history is a mere footnote amid the chaos.
Essays about precisely where we are on the road to fascism or authoritarianism or “competitive authoritarianism” are proliferating, and hard to refute. But the one that stuck with me came from Jonathan Bernstein, illustrating the real dichotomy at work in America today. Usually, a despot grows unpopular after years in power, but in this case, Trump is already unpopular amid his ascent to power. His latest approval numbers are at 37 percent, a low for this term; even the good numbers show him to be unpopular.
How can such an unlikable figure be so intimidating? How can the Wizard of Oz inspire obedience after the curtain has been pulled back, revealing his diminutive stature? As Bernstein explains, everybody with the ability to stop Trump is simply sleepwalking. |
