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Fifty years ago, America was in agony. His home unit and his position abroad were deteriorating. Today, the country is once again facing a deep political crisis and the summer of 1968 is instructive. One party controls the White House and both Houses of Congress, as was the case at the time, when Lyndon Johnson was president. But this crisis differs fundamentally: fifty years ago, the party of the president had the will to answer. On April 4, Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot dead in Memphis and riots broke out in about 100 cities. The next day, Johnson wrote to the Speaker of the House, John W. McCormack, a Massachusetts Democrat, imploring Congress to adopt the Fair Housing Act, declaring, "When the nation so urgently needs the healing balm of the Unity, a brutal wound on our forces of consciousness. What's more to achieve fraternity and equality among all Americans? The act passed, on a Southern buccaneer, on April 10, the day after King's funeral.
But Democrats did not hesitate to use their checks and balances against Johnson. The Tet offensive, launched in January of the same year, undermined the Administration's claim that it was winning the war in Vietnam. Senator J. William Fulbright, of Arkansas, had previously concluded that the escalation was a folly and had attempted in private to change Johnson 's spirit. When that failed, he invoked the Senate's constitutional responsibility to advise and consent, and in 1966 convened a series of unprecedented public hearings on the handling of the war. The following year, most Americans disapproved of it, and Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota competed against a president of his own party, arguing that this duty required him to challenge policies of "dubious legality and dubious constitutionality". 19659002] This summer, President Donald Trump upset American security by opening a trade war with China, reprimanding American allies in Europe and, at a press conference in Helsinki, after a private meeting of two hours with President Vladimir Putin, accepting his claim that Russia did not interfere in the 2016 elections. The Times reported that US intelligence officials had presented to Trump evidence that Putin himself had ordered cyberattacks in order to influence the election results. A few days before the Helsinki meeting, Robert Mueller, the special advocate, indicted a dozen Russian intelligence agents on detailed charges of hacking democrat e-mail accounts. In a separate case, prosecutors also accused a Russian woman in Washington, Mariya Butina, of advancing a plot to influence the National Rifle Association. (His lawyer denied the charges.) And again Trump congratulated the Russian leader.
The outcry, including Republicans, was instantaneous. Senator John McCain said, "No previous president sank down more despicable in front of a bully." McCain's young colleague, Senator Jeff Flake, described Trump's behavior as "shameful." During the rest of the week, the president's allies tried to signal their independence. When asked if Trump was right to meet Putin, Dan Coats, the national intelligence director, said, "I would have suggested a different way." The Senate, in a rare act of unity, passed a non-binding resolution against Putin's request to question US officials, a proposal that Trump had amused but ultimately rejected.
More remarkable, however, was what did not happen. Nobody resigned from the Cabinet. No Republican senator took concrete steps to restrict, contain, or censure the president. Julian Zelizer, a professor of history at Princeton University, noted that fifty years ago, "you had elected officials, including the president, who were fundamentally committed to governance. They were not dismissive of the operation. They were cautious in the way they did things because they understood the issues of what elected officials do. None of this is true right now. "
The model is already visible to tomorrow's historians." When Trump called the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville "very good people," when he endorsed a child molester accused for the Senate when he separated children from their parents on the Mexican border, the Republican Party, on the whole, accepted it.And, when Coats said, Russian cyberattacks, that "the warning lights blink red again, "the Party has not put pressure on the President to mount a defense.In the meantime, Trump has returned from Helsinki and has started reprimanding his fellow Americans, especially the press ("the real enemy of the people") .Thursday, it was announced that he had invited Putin to visit Washington in the fall – an invitation that Coats learned from an interviewer.
If the Republicans decide to put the country before the party, as did the mocrates in 1968, they have several options. They could stop confirmation hearings from Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court's candidate, until Trump strengthens safeguards against electoral pirates and embraces the investigation into Russian interference. Bob Corker, from Tennessee, who will be leaving the Senate next year, called the idea uninitiated. "I like the Supreme Court candidate," he told reporters. lower courts, or threaten to change party. At a minimum, they could hold public hearings, such as Fulbright, to examine Trump's actions on trade, or NATO or Russia. Most immediately, they could pass a law to prevent the President from firing Robert Mueller; In April, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance a bill for this purpose, with four Republicans joining Democratic members, but Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked it. The privilege of power carries with it the moral duty to use it
. In private, some Republican lawmakers offer a clearly timely defense: they scorn the president, but, as long as he is popular with more than ninety percent of the party's base, confronting him would open the door to challenges primary successors even more consistent. In truth, many Republicans are more comfortable with Trump than they want to admit. Although they have retreated from images of children in cages at the border, the G.O.P. the leaders approved Trump's crackdown on immigration, as they did for his tariffs and his attacks against Canada, Mexico and our European allies. Until that changes, it is the Republican Party of 2018.
In the moments of American agony, we seek solace in the legends of our resilience. In 1968, we found the will to govern, to unite and to control a president who had gone astray. This is another moment for political courage. It only misses someone to grab it. ♦
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