The Washington Post Commits an Unpardonable January 6 Sin

Well, I hate to say I told you so. Back in December, I warned that Donald Trump’s plan to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists was going to be greeted by the media with prewritten takes about how President Biden’s own use of the pardon power justified a decision to free a violent mob. Today, The Washington Post’s editorial board, tasked with the mission of obtaining 200 million paying users while simultaneously following owner Jeff Bezos’s directive to make the venerable newspaper substantially more mendacious, made me look prescient.

“The outgoing and incoming presidents both abused their pardon powers on Monday, undermining the rule of law and setting dangerous precedents that perpetuate America’s divisions,” they wrote. According to the pundit logic here, Biden “started the trouble” after he preemptively issued pardons to immunize members of his family, administration, and Congress from future prosecution related to their activities during his term in office. Then Trump “ended the day by giving clemency” to the aforementioned insurrectionists. Just a bad day all around, and everyone’s to blame!

To put it charitably, this is a bungle from the editorial board. In the first place, the editors demonstrate a real inability to follow cause and effect chains; here asserting that the “the trouble” began with Biden’s preemptive pardons, when the use of the term “preemptive” clearly suggests a precipitating event. In this case, somebody forgot the well-documented history of Donald Trump publicly announcing his plans to persecute members of Biden’s family and administration, over and over again. Just this week, Trump intimated in an interview that he might go after Biden specifically because he wasn’t corrupt enough to pardon himself on the way out the door.

Then, once “the trouble began,” the editors suggest that Trump’s decision to pardon the January 6ers naturally followed from Biden’s actions—leading the reader to make the logical leap that the pardons handed out in the morning forced Trump’s hand later that day. But again, a reminder: Effect follows cause, and it was actually Biden’s hand that was forced when Trump repeatedly made the wanton persecution of his family and colleagues one of his big campaign promises. Meanwhile, Trump’s plan to pardon the insurrectionists has been a done deal for some time; it was another one of his oft-repeated campaign promises.

But the larger problem here is the way the Post editors senselessly flatten two wildly different actions by two wildly different presidents. Their main concern with Biden’s pardon is that it “opens the door for future presidents to likewise immunize their families and staffs from merely theoretical prosecution by their successors.” Meanwhile, they say that Trump’s decision to loose the January 6ers onto the world “risks emboldening militias and others to commit future acts of barbarity in support of political aims.”

Maybe these two things aren’t the same? It sounds to me like I’d grade the Biden pardons as a 3 out of 10 on the “I’m Worrying About the Precedent This Sets Whilst Stroking My Chin Thoughtfully” scale, whereas it’s safe to say I’d give the potential for “future acts of barbarity” a substantially higher rating. What if—and I’m just spitballing here!—one of these theoretical consequences is a lot graver than the other? And honestly, what if one of these theoretical consequences is a lot less theoretical than the other, given that an attempt to unlawfully overturn a legitimate election result actually happened?

Back in December, when I was lamenting the Post’s decision to run an insane op-ed suggesting that Biden should pardon the January 6ers himself because it would, according to the idiots who wrote this idea down, bring the country together, I pointed out that one of the very best reasons for Biden not to do that is that you don’t want to be responsible for setting free the type of person who is likely to reoffend. Say what you want about the people Biden preemptively pardoned, but I don’t see a lot of violent crimes in their future.

I can’t (frankly, I won’t) say the same thing about the January 6ers. One of those whom Trump pardoned this week—specifically a guy who tossed an explosive device into the Lower West Terrace tunnel of the U.S. Capitol—has already been rearrested on a gun charge that had been left pending. According to Politico, he’s got some fun priors: a previous conviction for “domestic violence battery by strangulation in June 2017” and “resisting law enforcement with violence and battery of a law enforcement officer” in October 2021. In short, a real gem, and I’d be willing to bet there are other jewels among his scofflaw comrades. The granting of clemency to this sort of criminal is the kind of thing that more often than not ends a political career. We’ll see how Trump fares now that he’s taken ownership of all of these Willies Horton.

The most worrying thing is that the most scintillatingly obvious aspect of Trump’s actions completely eluded the Post’s contemplations: that the possibility that these offenders might reoffend might be why they got a pardon in the first place. The main political focus of Trumpism has been establishing the rule of impunity. Trump’s actions here should be regarded as a calculated maneuver to very quickly and substantially reassert that impunity. All of these people who committed acts of political violence have been liberated, the obvious implication being that future criminal acts undertaken on Trump’s behalf will be viewed approvingly.

Here, the fears go well beyond the actual mob of men and women who stormed the Capitol four years ago. These pardons signal that anyone is welcome to get into the game; that a get-out-of-jail-free card is waiting as a reward. And as writer Julian Sanchez noted, Trump needn’t be an active field marshall of these irregulars: “An efficient fascism does not require much direct state violence. It merely requires the assurance that private violence aligned with the desires of the regime will go unpunished.”

This should be easy to understand. Whatever the ethical implications of Biden’s pardons—and I’ll stipulate to the fact that there are some that are worthy of concern—he actually hasn’t established a precedent that other future individuals might exploit, as there isn’t going to be another Biden administration or Biden family for Trump to threaten with unjust prosecutions. Trump’s pardons, on the other hand, beckon forth future acts of violence. Overnight, America has become a more dangerous place to run for office against the GOP, to say nothing of how risky it now is simply to be the person charged with counting votes and certifying elections. It’s disconcerting that the people running a major newspaper in our nation’s capital aren’t intelligent enough to grasp these distinctions.

The most recent entry in the “good advice for Democrats” canon comes from occasional TNR contributor and Bulwark writer Jonathan V. Last, who wrote, “The job of the Democratic party comes in two parts. First: Do not help Republicans. Not in any way. Second: Make Donald Trump own every bad outcome that happens, anywhere in the world.” True enough. The only problem here is the lack of an organized Democratic Party to actually serve as an aggressive opposition party. We could use one of those!

Nevertheless, there is a lesson here for liberals that we should perhaps heed while Democrats in Washington debate how supine they want to get for the incoming administration. During Trump’s first term, much of the mainstream left organized itself around the idea that “this was not normal” and that surely our over-regarded system of norms would save us from Trump. And so deep investments were made in various quick fixes—an impeachment effort and the Mueller investigation chief among them—that seemed to offer the hope of prematurely canceling the Trump presidency, without much regard for how difficult it is to actually oust a president (or for the decades of evidence suggesting that our justice system routinely fails to hold the rich and powerful to account, more broadly).

A second Trump era offers the opportunity for a change of course—a second reckoning of sorts. I think that Last is on to something when he suggests that Trump’s opposition should force him to “own every bad outcome that happens, anywhere in the world.” I’d actually take this a step further. Rather than exert so much energy trying to thrust Trump out of the presidency, liberals would be well served to spend their time thrusting the presidency upon Donald Trump. Instead of searching for illusory quick fixes for the existence of the Trump administration, start demanding the Trump administration fix everything quickly.

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the sample size of one Trump presidency and his four years out of power, it’s that Trump is a bog-standard rich white guy whom the justice system is largely incapable of bringing to heel. He has powerful friends (oligarchs, Supreme Court justices), deep pockets, and a well-tempered ability to joust in the media. By now we’ve watched ol’ Donny “wriggle out of this one” on multiple occasions; he seems to thrive if you put him at the center of something he can deem to be a witch hunt—even when those hunters bag their quarry, as prosecutors did in his hush-money case.

But Trump has historically faltered when he’s been forced to contend with the actual pressure of the presidency and its myriad responsibilities (see also: the Covid-19 pandemic) because his ideas are bad and he doesn’t have a deep and abiding interest in public service to really make a sustained effort to confront, let alone solve, the biggest problems we face.

President Barack Obama found the presidency to be an exhaustingly taxing job, so much so that he famously went to somewhat mind-blowing lengths to limit the nonpresidential decisions he had to make in order to stay keen enough to handle the toughest of the choices on his plate. Trump, by contrast, mostly showed up late to work and watched cable news all day. Had the coronavirus not emerged as a global threat, he might have made it through his first term having not felt the pressure of the job at all. In his second term, it should be the task of liberals to force Trump to swallow a daily spoonful of the very real job stress that Obama struggled so mightily to endure.

To get there, liberals need to get into the business of identifying the problems that real Americans face (which honestly, is something they could stand to relearn how to do) and more forcefully blame Trump for those problems’ continued existence. They need to raise a hue and cry over everything under the sun that’s broken, dysfunctional, or trending in the wrong direction; pile line items on Trump’s to-do list, wake him up early and keep him up late. Every day, get in front of cable news cameras and reporters’ notepads with a new problem for Trump to solve and fresh complaints about the work not done.

What pitfalls lie ahead? It looks like there will be rough economic headwinds in the form of a potential housing crisis and a labor shortage, for starters; another potential public health crisis looms in the form of bird flu (and probably his own Health and Human Services secretary). There is a real possibility of a market-slaying tech-bubble burst on the medium-term horizon as well. There will also be pitfalls that arise from Trump’s own policies, beginning with the fact that his mass deportation scheme will likely torch the domestic economy. Beyond that, there will be the typical crises of American life—economic predators, polluters, corporate scofflaws, and public health concerns—that Trump has either shown no interest in helping abate or has personally empowered via the decisions of his plutocratic-minded Supreme Court appointments. Democrats should already be planning to hang all the foreseeable albatrosses around his neck, and gaming out how they’ll swiftly nail Trump to the wall for the crises that catch him by surprise.

For certain, Democrats can be grateful if he actually makes good on any of his “I alone can fix it” promises. (Or rather, they can take credit for having goaded Trump to get off his ass and do his job.) But as I’ve suggested before, in advice that Last echoes above, Trump should truly be left to solve these problems on his own. He’s claimed a mandate and congressional majorities, so let him (and his fellow Republicans) figure it out, with Democratic votes on offer only if massive policy concessions supporting Democratic Party interests are included.

Not for the first time will I point out that none of what I’m suggesting Democrats do is outside the norm of typical American politics. I’m merely suggesting that Democrats compete on the same political playing field that Republicans already occupy, instead of waiting for some more favorable terrain to reveal itself. (Which, by the way, it won’t.) Democrats need to have an aggressive and coordinated media strategy involving all of their members, surfacing derogatory information about Republicans, enumerating the problems they’ve failed to address, and filling the news hole with fresh complaints. They need to show real backbone and take pride in their refusal to participate in enacting the GOP’s policies.

Right now, in these heady moments prior to his second inauguration, Trump’s second term could not be going better for him. Over these last remaining loose and responsibility-free days, he’s been able to imagine himself achieving epochal accomplishments—annexing Canada or buying Greenland. Trump has been free to bask in the unknown possibilities of what’s to come. Immediately after he’s sworn in for the second time, that fantasia will fall away and he’ll be responsible for solving a planet’s worth of problems.

It’s always been something of a mystery why someone who was making it in America as an idle rich celebrity asshole abruptly changed course and decided that what he really wanted to do with his life was to become responsible for an entire nation and its problems. Howard Stern famously warned Trump prior to his first run that he “only had about 10 good years left before he starts to drool on himself,” and it was best he spend it at leisure rather than subject himself to the constant slings and arrows of being president. There’s no doubt in my mind that the version of Trump in the parallel universe where he took Stern’s advice is a lot happier. In this universe, liberals would do well to find creative ways to make Trump regret his choices.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Another January 6 has come and gone, and with it the furtive remembrances of the day that touched off so much institutional collapse. Not that you’d know anything was amiss in Washington, where Democrats made an elaborate show of underscoring the peaceful transfer of power—seemingly not aware that the very act of melodramatizing something that should simply be background noise in a stable democracy only suggests the papering over of a greater disorder.

It’s been fashionable to argue that the 2021 coup plot actually succeeded or, perhaps more accurately, never ended. Either way, the reality is that January 6 may have passed on the calendar but it is not done with us yet. What began on that day was much more than a mere attempt to overturn an election, it was actually a forcible rejection of the principles of democracy that arose out of the post–Civil Rights era. President Barack Obama used to suggest that his election was evidence that the United States was shaping into the “more perfect union” of its dreams. The latest election suggested that what we’re actually rounding into is a mafioso state ruled by a strongman and his affiliated oligarchs. 

This year, the right will be coming after the strongest bulwark against their corrupt vision for our future. It is one of the most important accomplishments of the Reconstruction era, and one of the most critical safeguards of justice, citizenship, and equal protection under the law: the Fourteenth Amendment. What makes this amendment so important is that it plays an outsize constitutional role in enabling the possibility of a robust multiracial democracy. That also makes it a prime target of those who want to prevent such a thing from coming into being.

It makes sense that this battle should kick off with an insurrection. One of the most interesting things about the January 6 attacks is that they were something for which we, the people, had specifically prepared, writing into the Fourteenth Amendment language—which TNR’s Matt Ford described as “thunderous and unequivocal”—barring any person who had sworn an oath of office and subsequently gone on to engage in “insurrection or rebellion” from ever again holding federal office. 

When Colorado voters sued their secretary of state, Jena Griswold, in an attempt to use this constitutional fail-safe to evict Donald Trump from the ballot, it brought Griswold into conflict with the Supreme Court. Like many observers, I felt the disqualification effort would prove fruitless before that body but that the justices would take safe harbor in the lack of any criminal convictions of Trump to make the more abstruse argument that there was too much doubt about his culpability in the insurrection to deny him a place on the ballot in accordance with the disqualification clause. 

Instead, as Ford documented, the majority opinion took a much more severe and unprecedented approach to the problem, effectively applying a judicial line-item veto to the Fourteenth Amendment itself, thereby nullifying its use as an electoral fail-safe. The ruling, Ford wrote, “paves the way for insurrectionists to run for and hold federal office despite the Constitution’s categorical language that disqualifies them,” along the way deciding “questions that weren’t before the justices in this case in the first place,” and providing answers that “will only immunize these and future insurrectionists from potential consequences.”

That the Supreme Court demonstrated a willingness to tear a hole in the Constitution has only emboldened the right to take further aim at the Fourteenth Amendment. (It’s not ideal that a loud segment of the political press, who typically venerate the Constitution in flamboyant fashion, also found the disqualification clause worthy of their ridicule.) As Ford noted in November of last year, the Trump administration is planning to go after another section of the amendment’s unequivocal language—that which protects birthright citizenship. And they’re road-testing a new argument advanced by Trump-appointed federal Judge James Ho, a onetime originalist defender of birthright citizenship who has carved out a unique exception to the rule:

Birthright citizenship is supported by various Supreme Court opinions, both unanimous and separate opinions involving Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and others. But birthright citizenship obviously doesn’t apply in case of war or invasion. No one to my knowledge has ever argued that the children of invading aliens are entitled to birthright citizenship. And I can’t imagine what the legal argument for that would be.

That makes two of us! Given the extreme unlikelihood that there are any living humans who participated in either an invasion or a war on U.S. soil who are now prospective U.S. citizens, I should simply be able to go on never worrying about this. But given the propensity of Republicans to refer to legitimate asylum-seekers as “invaders” and the campaign comparison of Haitian Americans residing in Ohio to illegitimate citizens, I’m starting to think that Ho intends “war or invasion” as something far more malleable and abstract than the literal definitions of those terms.

All of which would be perfectly consistent with Trump’s second-term agenda, in which he’s promised to transform the federal government into an instrument of personal revenge and roll back the rights and benefits that people and groups he disfavors currently enjoy. As TNR contributor Susan Rinkunas recently reported, much of this will come down in a battle to strip citizenship from people, and the Fourteenth Amendment will be under attack once again:

The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to extend full citizenship to formerly enslaved Black people, and it undergirds the right of all Americans to be treated equally under the law, no matter who they are or in which state they reside. Yet over the past year, conservatives have been increasingly open in their beliefs that pregnant women, transgender adolescents, affirming parents of trans kids, and immigrants are not legally entitled to the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections—all while arguing that fertilized eggs are. Republicans are using strategic litigation to effectively rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment to prioritize conservative white men and embryos above and beyond everyone else. They are warping something used to grant rights into a bludgeon to take them away, and are redefining who counts as a person in the United States.

Those who are familiar with Wilhoit’s law—which holds that conservatism, in the words of Ohio classical music composer Frank Wilhoit—“consists of exactly one proposition.… There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect”—will recognize that Trump’s plans aren’t novel but rather stem from the primordial ideas that have long guided his party along its postmodern evolution into a haven for authoritarianism and oligarchy. 

What’s changing now is that the right’s embrace of this philosophy is becoming more explicitly stated; the need to couch this despicable notion in what Wilhoit referred to as “an elaborate backwash of pseudophilosophy” is less necessary now that the Supreme Court has granted the president monarchic immunity powers and indicated its openness to redact and rewrite whole parts of the Constitution. Thus begins the great unbinding of the right from their constitutional obligations, and the lifting of constitutional protections for those they deem to be “enemies within.”  

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

I’m not sure that I can improve on TNR’s Matt Ford’s assessment of President Joe Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter as “a quintessentially corrupt act.” That just about covers it. With scant weeks remaining in Biden’s term, his act will look even worse if he fails to extend the same sweeping protection to the numerous other people threatened by the incoming Trump administration—to say nothing of the many nonviolent drug offenders who, unlike Hunter, are doing time in federal prisons. But, this being Washington, there is always some reprobate lying around with an even worse idea than the one making all the headlines. Congratulations to Marc Thiessen, an inexplicable survivor of multiple rounds of Washington Post layoffs, and his American Enterprise Institute podcast host Danielle Pletka for suggesting an even more rancid use of Biden’s pardon power: Use it to take Donald Trump off the hook.

According to the pair’s recent op-ed, “A pardon would make good on the president’s inaugural pledge of unity.” I must hasten to clarify, this would be Biden’s pledge of unity that they are referring to here, a long-forgotten relic of his inaugural address. Trump, for his part, has promised to persecute his political opponents, “remigrate” disfavored legal immigrants, fire the civil service workforce to turn the administrative state into an engine of revenge, and turn Kash Patel—a nefarious troll with a foot-long enemies list—loose at the FBI. This is a different vision of unity: one nation under a boot.

Acknowledging the obvious—that Trump is all but set to skate on everything he’s been charged with, regardless of the merits of the cases against him—Thiessen and his co-author write, “Trump may not need Biden’s pardon, but America does.” Naturally, you shouldn’t hold your breath that these two will hold Trump to account when he launches his revenge campaign in a few weeks’ time for the sake of “America.” The whole point of this call to have Biden pardon Trump is less about any authentic desire to heal our divisions than it is to simply entangle Biden more permanently in Trump’s lawlessness.

More importantly, you can mark this op-ed as the last time we’re going to hear about the importance of unity for a while. With Trump returning to office, Thiessen won’t be the only person in the commentariat who’ll be recalibrating their barometers for harmony and unanimity. The media will soon be leaving their fetish for bipartisanship, compromise, and comity behind since the only people on whom they ever impose these standards—Democrats—will be out of power.

If you are old enough to remember the first time Trump came to power, then you’ve seen this movie before. During his tenure, President Barack Obama was constantly besieged by the worst pundits in America for his failure to bring Republicans—who were at the time following Mitch McConnell’s monomaniacal pursuit of obstruction at any cost—to the table to support broad bipartisan initiatives. The chief dunce of the Washington press corps at the time, David Broder, established his own benchmark for Democratic policy legitimacy at 70 Senate votes, thus setting up the Affordable Care Act to fail at an arbitrary standard that ended up not mattering because, as near as I can tell, Obamacare is still the law of the land, oddly durable for having failed Broder’s big purity test.

Obama, who was nevertheless pathologically eager to please the chattering class, followed their lead down a multitude of blind alleys, from negotiations over the debt ceiling to multiple failed attempts at debt-slashing committees. With each failure, the pundit class slagged Obama for his failed leadership. It was, to me, such a deeply rooted insanity that I often wondered what it would take to dislodge these obsessions with watering down policy in order to broker deals with Republican sickos. Little did I know that the answer was to elect Trump president.

But yeah, that did the trick. Seemingly overnight, the constant chorales to the virtues of bipartisan deals and the need to pass laws with 70 Senate votes vanished. And I’m guessing that when Biden quits the scene at last, you won’t hear anything more about the importance of unity or harmony again. You’ll want to remember how quickly the pundit class flips the off-switch, and recognize their unrelenting cynicism: When, after all, is it more necessary for critics and observers to try to hold fast to a high standard than when the person doing the standard-bearing is bent on debasing the constitutional order? And yet, these clowns only found the courage to pillory a president for supposedly insufficient bipartisanship when that president was someone who more or less agreed that sensible centrism and adherence to polite norms was the way the country should be run.

I’ve no idea how the press will respond to a second Trump presidency. But I can already hear pencils being sharpened, ready to greet the president-elect’s plan to pardon the January 6 rioters with a flurry of hot takes about how Biden’s pardon of Hunter made it all OK.

Who even knows what purpose such journalism is supposed to serve? The senseless flattening of wildly different offenses by wildly different presidents is not going to help make sense of the world, give people the information needed to confront big problems, or really make anyone happy or better off. It’s a thought exercise, invented by nimrods, that will fail in advance—but every nincompoop in the political media is going to follow this and other bankrupt notions in a lemming-like parade off the discourse cliff, all the same. But this makes my admonition for Democrats to quit the bipartisanship business all the more sensible, because if they’re not careful, in a few weeks’ time they’ll be the only people left in town pretending it’s a virtue.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

One of the many commitments that the incoming Trump administration made on the campaign trail this past year was a promise to find new ways to weaponize the federal government against the GOP’s opponents. But if Republicans get their way, we won’t have to wait until Inauguration Day for Trump to earn broad new powers to crush his enemies. Worming its way through the legislature at the moment is H.R. 9495, a bill that would give the executive branch the power to unilaterally declare any nonprofit organization in America to be a terrorist organization. Outfits so deemed would be stripped of their tax-exempt status and subject to what amounts to a financial death penalty, as banks would no longer be permitted to service them. What’s more, these organizations would have no legal recourse to fight back.

It’s not hard to see why Trump might covet these powers. With the wave of a pen, he’d have the capacity to eliminate all manner of civil society organizations and liberal nonprofits, permanently damaging the electoral and policymaking infrastructure on which Democrats rely. What’s harder to understand is why a Democrat might vote for what is, essentially, the “Destroy the Center for American Progress Act of 2024.” Last week, more than 50 Democratic representatives did just that, joining the GOP in a vote that failed to advance the bill out of the House. (That vote was taken during a suspension of the rules in the House, requiring a two-thirds majority for passage.)

In the week since that vote was taken, enormous pressure was applied to those Democrats who, in a fit of what was either ignorance or insanity, voted to give Trump the power to lay waste to the Democratic Party. On Thursday, the House took another vote on the bill, this time passing it by a vote of 219–184. The full-court press to get Democrats to change their vote had some limited impact. It’s still disheartening to see that 15 Democrats backed a plan to give the incoming president these dangerous new powers. The tendency of some Democrats to seek common ground is a habit that they must begin to unlearn as they face the prospect of a second Trump term. Instead, they should steal what’s been a highly successful move from the Republicans: Don’t provide any votes for the things that the GOP majority wants to do, no matter what they are.

This would be a great way for Democrats to honor the outgoing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who made the denial of bipartisanship a singular demand of his caucus during the Obama era, correctly understanding that whenever the president earned GOP votes for his agenda, these became more resounding wins than bills passed under party-line votes. Democrats need to approach the next Congress with the same zeal: If the GOP wants to claim a mandate, good for them. But they’ll have to shift the millstone of governance on their own, which is something that many Republicans aren’t sure they’re good at doing. If they come looking for Democrats to help, the message should be consistent: KMAGYOYO.

The fact that H.R. 9495, a bill whose sponsors are essentially asking Democrats to be the brilliant ally of their own gravediggers, even exists should be sufficient to steel the party to the task ahead. Democrats should reflect on just how difficult the GOP has made it to do the nation’s urgent business over the years—from pandemic mitigation to confirming routine appointments—and on the incoming president’s plan for mayhem, and be willing to challenge the GOP to run the country on their own. In fact, the Democrats’ baseline assumption should be that they don’t want their fingerprints anywhere near the things that Trump plans to do.

Obviously, there might be some moments when bigger disasters unfold. Take the next debt ceiling fiasco. It’s likely that most of the members of the GOP will simply rubber-stamp a rise in the debt ceiling, if only because Trump’s plans to deport tens of millions of people is estimated to cost more than $300 billion (and an additional $46.8 billion budget shortfall tacked on). But if things stay true to form and Trump doesn’t want the “destroy economy” button to get pushed, there’s still a decent-sized rump of wack-ass QAnon headcases in the GOP caucus who are itching to meet the Great Debt Default Jesus in the sky by whatever means. As we’ve seen in numerous instances during Mike Johnson’s speakership tenure, these members often break from the herd and pick their own (crazy) paths. And tight margins in the House make it easy for a handful of weirdos to threaten to drive the train off the rails.

Will Johnson need Democrats to help him out of this potential jam? He has, in the past, been heavily dependent on the charity of the opposition. It could be that there might be extraordinary moments where Democratic participation is needed to save the day. On those occasions, Democrats need to keep a list of demands close at hand—to my mind, Johnson would have to make new committee power-sharing arrangements, as well as a slew of policy commitments attached to any must-pass legislation. The price of the bipartisan bag is going up, folks! Barring that, Johnson will simply have to prove his mettle as a majority leader. (The next time he demonstrates that will be the first time.)

Obviously, there is going to be a lot of pressure placed on Democrats to bail the GOP out of the various messes they get into. As I’ve mentioned before, this is the role that the media has assigned to Democrats: They exist solely to be the helpmates to Republicans, and to curb their excesses. There’s never been a better time to shuck off this fake obligation and step aside from a role that has served their party’s constituents poorly. The voters handed Republicans full control of the presidency and Congress. That means Republicans are now obligated to advance a comprehensive agenda on their own and answer to the American people.

Think of it this way: What sense does it make for Democrats to dilute this accountability by lending their votes to this effort? This is the GOP’s moment to deliver the goods. If they can’t figure out how to do that, we deserve an unobscured view of their dysfunction and corruption. Perhaps they’ll rise to the occasion. More likely, they’ll unleash chaos and shit—and there’s no need for that to become the Democrats’ burden. Democrats aren’t going to get any credit if things go well, so why volunteer to take a share of the blame when things go badly?

The fact that there are 15 Democrats willing to hand Trump the insane power to wish a nonprofit off to La-La Land illustrates how hard it will be to discipline this party into a fighting force. Between the naïve norms-respecters, the Trump-curious, and the genuine dullards in the party who voted for this bill, I’d expect to see far too many Democrats make the incorrect choice over the next few years. But that’s where we come in: Our obligation will be to name and shame, give the Democrats who support and enable the Trump agenda hell, and maybe primary a few of them into their next career. We can begin with some encouragement on the next vote on H.R. 9495: If you’re in the liberal nonprofit world, I’d be in contact with the Democrats who voted to let Trump destroy you, and let them know that you’ll be canceling any work you’d planned to do on their behalf.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.