Artwork by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
There’s an old adage that the balance of power in American politics swings like a pendulum, and that as times and the needs of the electorate change the pendulum will swing from left to right—or right to left, as the case may be, implying there is a balance of power in this country.
It seems that lately, however, the pendulum has jammed in its most extreme far right position—and is being held there by the tiny greedy hands of the present House majority and the MAGA goblins that ceaselessly goad them. They’ve gummed up the works. Normal politics is no longer normal.
Extreme far-right Republicans have taken control of the House of Representatives and created chaos. They recently expelled Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy for collaborating with President Bident to pass budget legislation to keep the government running. They have since threatened the present Speaker with the same fate if he works with the president to pass a comprehensive immigration bill that would also send aid to Ukraine and Israel.
These far-right goblins, including Marjory Taylor Green, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Wisconsin’s own Tom Tiffany, do not have an agenda. They have no policy platforms. Their only ideology is to be against whatever the democrats are for. They are selfish, egocentric, and ruthless. They seem to have no interest in governing, only in granting every request of their deposed liege, Donald Trump, the man who has somehow transformed the once-respectable Republican party into a meek blob of quivering jelly.
Bu the needle seems to be shifting slightly. The pendulum just might be creeping ever so slowly to the left. Although Donald Trump won the Iowa Caucus and the New Hampshire Primary, the margins of victory were smaller than expected for an incumbent (for all intents and purposes) president. While he hung onto the hard-core Republican vote, independent voters flocked to the other Republican on the ballot, Nikki Haley. Some Republicans, sick of his antics, have threatened to stay home on election day rather than vote for Trump. Momentum seems to be shifting ever so slightly.
Last Friday, a jury awarded E. Jean Carrol, the woman who had won a civil settlement for damages after having been sexually assaulted by the ex-president, was awarded a further $83.3 million dollar award from Mr. Trump for making further defamatory statements against her. He is also facing multi-million-dollar damages for committing civil fraud in his business practices, possibly to the tune of over $300 million. Even though Mr. Trump has professed to be worth over one billion dollars, some experts doubt whether that figure is accurate. It’s very possible that ex-President Trump, the self-proclaimed mogul who allegedly forged a real estate empire, may have to start liquidating his assets, meaning he would no longer be the financial wizard or master of the deal he pretended to be. The emperor will have no clothes.
Since his defeat in 2020, the majority of Trump’s hand-picked Republican candidates have lost their elections. The Republicans somehow lost the Senate and came perilously close to losing the House under his leadership, and this breakdown is not only happening on a federal level. State Republican parties seem to be imploding.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court recently ruled that its map of legislative districts, egregiously one of the most gerrymandered in the country, be redrawn to reflect the actual voter representation more accurately. The Republicans have had a stranglehold on the State legislature since 2011 and have clung onto this power ruthlessly through these unfairly drawn maps, nearly increasing their number to a supermajority status because of them, even though Wisconsin is a decidedly purple state. Statewide elections are typically decided—either way—by a few thousand votes.
An audiotape of the chairman of the Arizona GOP offering senatorial candidate and Trump loyalist Kari Lake a bribe to drop out of the race. Former Chairman Jeff DeWitt accused Lake of leaking the tape to a conservative radio host (MSNBC). The Arizona GOP has also been experiencing serious financial problems because of expensive recounts and appeals to the 2020 election results and poor fundraising. This party seems to be trouble.
The Florida GOP recently dismissed its chairman because of charges brought against him for sexually assaulting a woman who was allegedly part of a threesome with him and his wife, who is incidentally a founding member of Moms for Liberty, an ultra-conservative group responsible for the banning of dozens of books—including the Bible—in school libraries.
The biggest force that may nudge the pendulum to move back to the political center and left-of-center is the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe -v- Wade, making abortion illegal and/or inaccessible for thousands of women across the country. The decision, passed by a conservative Supreme Court with three justices hand-picked by Donald Trump, has proved to be decidedly unpopular with the people. Some states, like Texas, have made it a criminal offense not only to have or perform an abortion, but to transport a patient to an adjoining state to have one. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.
An Indiana doctor is suing the state’s attorney general to cease an investigation of her for performing an abortion on a ten-year-old rape victim from Ohio. Kate Cox, a Texas mother, filed a lawsuit to allow her to have an abortion under the state’s medical exception. Her doctors said going through with the pregnancy would threaten her life and chances to have children in the future. She was denied. These draconian measures against reproductive rights, as extreme as what Texas Governor Abbott has implemented to prevent immigrants from crossing his border, are deeply unpopular with the general electorate—and anyone with a grain of compassion.
Donald Trump still has a prohibitive lead as the 2024 Republican nominee for president. The judgement on his New York City fraud case will probably come in this week. He has trials pending in four different districts for everything from absconding with classified documents in Florida to trying to illegally change election results in Georgia, to conspiring to interfere with the 2020 presidential election in Washington D.C., to paying off a porn star with campaign funds to keep her quiet about an affair they’d had.
So far, the ex-president has gotten away with it—most of it. He is still the Republican front-runner, but tiny rumblings seem to indicate that mainstream Republicans are beginning to get sick of him—his crassness, his egotism, his greed, his lying, his arrogance, and his criminal behavior. They are not rallying to him as sycophants would to a party leader in times past. Independents are shunning him. Perhaps, just perhaps, the pendulum will gain momentum in a leftward swing and free itself from the far-right extremists which have held our country hostage for these past eight years.