This Week in Conservative Hypocrisy
If you hate people saying one thing and doing another this is the post for you.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up below.
Just a quick reminder that while today’s post is free to all subscribers, what keeps Truth and Consequences chugging along is the financial commitment of subscribers. I know there are many worthwhile subscription-based journalism outlets, but if you enjoy the content here, please consider clicking below and buying a yearly or monthly subscription. A paid subscription gets you access to all newsletter content, allows you to comment on posts, provides access to weekly zoom chats, and, above all, helps support independent journalism!
If you don’t have the resources to purchase a paid subscription you can help out in other ways! Please share Truth and Consequences posts on Twitter and Facebook and with friends. The best way to bring in new subscribers is word-of-mouth from those already enjoying the content.
Hypocrite, Hypocrite, Two-Faced, Two-Faced
Last week in a speech in Atlanta, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said this:
“… people must ‘live with outcomes we don’t agree with’ or the judiciary would be threatened, citing recent Supreme Court events as ‘one symptom of that.’”
Thomas noted that as a society, “we are becoming addicted to wanting particular outcomes, not living with the outcomes we don’t like,”
Here’s a text that Ginni Thomas (who is married to Clarence Thomas) sent to the White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows the day after news networks called the 2020 election for Joe Biden.
“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!...You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”
In the days after Politico published Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, Republican lawmakers obsessed not over the content of the potential decision but rather the leak itself. For example, according to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell:
Last night’s stunning breach was an attack on the independence of the Supreme Court. By every indication, this was yet another escalation in the radical left’s ongoing campaign to bully and intimidate federal judges and substitute mob rule for the rule of law.
So leaking Supreme Court deliberations is bad … except when it isn’t (from the Washington Post) …
The leaked draft opinion is dated in February and is almost surely obsolete now, as justices have had time to offer dissents and revisions. But as of last week, the majority of five justices to strike Roe remains intact, according to three conservatives close to the court who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.
From Mother’s Day:
Left unmentioned in this tweet is that Senate Republicans are actively blocking Democratic plans to create a paid maternity leave program, provide parents with subsidized child care, and expand health care access so that all mothers have access to pre and post-natal care. Forcing women to bring unwanted children into the world and then doing absolutely nothing to use the awesome power of the federal government to help those mothers isn’t just hypocritical — it’s malevolent.
Ted Cruz thinks it’s terrible that the Biden Administration is forcing members of a deeply hierarchical organization, like the US military, to get the COVID-19 vaccine ….
… which is an ironic complaint on the same week that the Supreme Court is prepared to strip American women of the right to control their bodies.
Meanwhile, on Fox News …
Yeah, that’s really awful …
I’ve been around politics long enough to understand that hypocrisy is part of the game. But this goes beyond inconsistency to outright gaslighting. You can’t spend two years complaining that mask-wearing and vaccine mandates violate bodily autonomy or argue that people should have a “choice” as to whether they want to wear a mask or get vaccinated … and then take the position that the government has the right to force a woman to carry a baby to term against her will.
You can’t, without evidence, complain that Democrats won’t accept judicial outcomes they don’t like when more than half your party refuses to accept that Joe Biden won the last presidential election.
You can’t call yourself a pro-life party because of an oft-stated commitment to protecting the unborn and then do nothing to help the recently born.
Of course, you can do these things! It happens all the time. But then, you probably shouldn’t be taken too seriously. But this is yet another by-product of America’s intense political polarization. Facts and truth don’t matter. Both parties (though overwhelmingly Republicans) are willing to twist themselves into knots to cast their political rivals as villains and decry behavior that they endorse when done by members of their own tribe.
It’s yet another reminder of the deep, seemingly unbridgable divides in American society. We don’t just live in two different political worlds — we live in two different realities.
Not Helping
I don’t have a major problem with people protesting outside the homes of Supreme Court justices, as long as they are doing so peacefully. I’m basically agnostic on their propriety.
But the ongoing debate about this issue is enough to make me want to pull my hair out. None of these protests matter. They aren’t going to change the minds of any of the conservative justices, and the immense energy expended on social media defending these demonstrations could be much better spent thinking about ways to mobilize pro-choice voters this Fall. These protests also aren’t going to change the minds of on-the-fence voters. To the extent they are weaponized by Republicans — and that’s already happening — they become a political liability (albeit likely a minor one). Americans have long been wary of political protests, but demonstrations that target individuals, particularly at their homes, generally falls into a different category. Yes, Democratic politicians, like Chuck Schumer, regularly get protests outside their homes. So what? Just because the other side does it doesn’t mean you have to same thing.
It wouldn't be controversial if pro-choice voters were marching in Washington, even peacefully protesting outside Congress or the Supreme Court (in front of the giant fences erected outside the building). But why focus the demise of Roe around protests that are controversial and that invite legitimate criticism? And then why defend it and thus bring more attention to it? Why not channel this energy into more worthwhile pursuits.
This is all part of a more significant problem of liberal activists focusing on symbolic acts rather than the difficult work of marshaling substantive political change. We saw something similar in 2020 with the slogan “Defund the Police” and the bizarre refusal to acknowledge that it was not only unhelpful but also inaccurate. “Defund the police” literally doesn’t mean what it says. Liberal activists wanted to reform the police and shift police funding to social services — all reasonable goals, but a bit harder to explain when your slogan uses the word “defund.” Not surprisingly, Republicans used it as a tool for attacking Democrats and portraying them as radical and extreme in their views on American policing, especially at a time of rising crime rates.
These examples are also emblematic of a party base that blames party leaders when bad things happen and refuses to look in the mirror at its failings. As I wrote in a subscriber-only piece on Monday:
“As long as I’ve been involved with and writing about Democratic politics, Democratic politicians have unceasingly talked about the threat to abortion rights from a conservative Supreme Court. Many did so for political reasons: talking about abortion was assumed to be a sure-fire way to rile up Democratic voters, especially women voters. Indeed, if one issue unites Democratic politics (with a few exceptions), it’s abortion rights — and that has been true for decades.
The reason Roe is about to be scrapped is not because of Democratic politicians … it’s because of Democratic voters. Quite simply, pro-choice voters have never fully internalized the threat to Roe. Now it’s likely too late.”
Party activists understandably make a host of policy demands on party leaders. That is their job. But being an activist also means thinking strategically. A few hundred people protesting outside the homes of Supreme Court justices is not the end of the world, but it ultimately doesn’t help the cause of abortion rights. Pushing a stupid and inaccurate anti-police slogan definitely doesn’t help much either — in fact, it actively undermines your agenda. All you’re doing is giving political ammunition to the other side. And yes, I understand that Republicans will weaponize any issue, but why help them?
Rank-and-file Republicans will, as noted above, believe practically anything that GOP leaders or Fox News tells them — no matter how ludicrous. But there are plenty of voters out there who might be persuadable and reached by smart, strategic communication. So focus on that, not bread and circuses that do nothing to help your cause.
What’s Going On
Great piece by Ron Brownstein on the Democrats’ increasingly intractable midterm identity crisis.
Gun deaths surged by 35% in 2020. I’m sure Washington will get right on tackling this problem.
More than 100,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in 2020. Every year, the death toll from the opioid crisis rises, yet Congress is still doing precious little.
Yet, Congress does have the time to appropriate $40 billion in aid to Ukraine. I’m all for helping Ukraine fight off Russian aggression but imagine if Congress took as much time and attention to helping Americans dying here at home.
Musical Interlude