Michael Schaffer of Politico wonders aloud why people who write obituaries of House Republicans don’t build them around their votes against certifying Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. This was not just a random bad take in a tweet; Schaffer wrote an entire 1,200-word column on the subject. I have a couple of questions.
First, has Schaffer ever met any human beings? “Don’t speak ill of the dead” is not an iron law, but it is typically observed as a guiding principle for organizing obituaries for a reason: most people have virtues and vices, and one need not whitewash the dead in order to start off by painting them in their most sympathetic light. Moreover, most people, even most people in politics, do not suffer from monomania, and the people who do are typically pretty unpleasant to be around. If Barack Obama died tomorrow, would you start his obituary with “Obama, who promoted the legal abortion regime that has killed 60 million innocent Americans,” or “Obama, who launched his political career in the home of an unrepentant domestic terrorist and named one of his books in honor of a racist preacher,” or “Obama, who droned an American citizen to death without a trial,” or “Obama, who ran on a ‘Hope and Change’ platform but left in place an oppressive capitalist structure dominated by Wall Street and did nothing to dismantle America’s racist system of law enforcement or stave off climate catastrophe”? Well, some people would, and they have moral arguments for doing so. But if you purport to do journalism from something resembling an objective point of view rather than that of a single-issue activist, you’re supposed to have enough perspective to distinguish between the things most widely seen as central to your subject’s story, and those that are significant but contested — and the traditional framework of starting most obituaries of elected politicians off on a positive note is a good way of organizing that information.
Second, in treating Republican votes against certifying Biden’s election as if they were indelible moral crimes on par with participation in the Holocaust, Schaffer does not bother to be even-handed. He does not suggest that Jamie Raskin’s effort to oppose certification of Donald Trump’s 2016 electors deserves the same treatment. He does not argue that the votes of James Clyburn, Maxine Waters, Bennie Thompson, Raúl Grijalva, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Ed Markey, John Conyers, John Lewis, and other powerful current and former House Democrats to oppose certification of George W. Bush’s 2004 electors should be given similar prominence. True, those were cynical stunts that were doomed to failure, but then, the Republican votes were also cynical stunts that were doomed to failure. We knew going into January 6 that there were, as in 2016 and 2004, not the votes to overturn Biden’s electors. We knew that there were, as in 2016 and 2004, not even semi-legitimate contending slates of electors. This is not to say that everything was identical in those situations; Donald Trump conducted a much more toxic campaign against the 2020 election, and that is absolutely a central fact about Donald Trump. So is the January 6 riot at the Capitol. But a major part of why Trump and the rioters bear particular culpability is that they tried to force an outcome for which there were not votes in Congress. The central fact about the 2020 objectors is the same as the 2016 or 2004 objectors: they took a dishonorable position in a symbolic vote, but they did so with the cynical moral calculus that their votes would not achieve the outcome they were voting for. Which is a thing that happens all the time in Congress. And besides that, the January 6 riot was terrible, but not everything that is terrible is equally so. It’s not September 11, no matter how hard some people in the Beltway press try to make it so.