Does "Conservative" Have Any Meaning Today?

Last night I had the pleasure of being on a Zoom panel with California Congressman Jared Huffman (our guest for “Five Questions With” on July 4), and Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin. Our topic was a deep dive into Project 2025.

You might think now that Trump has disavowed his connection to the project and its leader has stepped down that interest might be waning. But last night proved that not to be the case. The crowd was at full capacity.

It makes sense that there is still a lot of interest in understanding Project 2025. When has Donald Trump ever lied to the public? If his claim that he has no connection to Project 2025 is true, then it’s pretty amazing that he was able to force Paul Dans, who was running the Project at the Heritage Foundation, to step down and end the Project. Dans was the Chief of Staff at the Office of Personnel Management during the Trump Administration. There is still good reason for the public to pay attention to Project 2025.

In any event, we had a fascinating conversation last night that you can watch on YouTube in its entirety if you missed it.

But I wanted to share with you one part of our conversation that I think was especially important. Congressman Raskin stalked out this territory: it’s no longer appropriate to refer to Trump Republicans and to the faction of the Supreme Court appointed by Republican presidents as “conservatives.” That old-timey word implies a legitimacy that the unprincipled members of the cult of personality don’t deserve. This is something I’ve been thinking about and having conversations with colleagues about for the last couple of weeks.

As someone who believes in the rule of law and believes it’s critical to the health of our democracy, it’s painful to acknowledge that what’s happening at the Supreme Court isn’t business as usual—judges deciding close cases on the basis of legitimate differences of opinion over how to apply guiding principles. But it would be even worse to fail to acknowledge it.

Precedent is dead at the Court, at least insofar as sidestepping it is necessary to protect Donald Trump. Whether it’s the 14th Amendment case that ignored the plain language of the Constitution, or the presidential immunity case where the Court created a safe harbor from criminal prosecution for Donald Trump that the Constitution doesn’t give voice to, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Court is behaving like an unelected political body. The Court itself hasn’t given us reason to. As an institution, it has refused to address clear abuses by Justices Thomas and Alito, adopting a nonbinding ethics code but not using it to rectify what is wrong. Its decisions have split along ideological lines where Trump’s interests are concerned.

So much for the notion that there is a “conservative wing” of the Court. As columnist and founding editor of the National Review Online Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2020, “For most Americans, conservatism basically means the stuff Republicans are for, and liberalism means whatever Democrats are for. I don’t mean this as a criticism, just a statement of fact.” Today, the “stuff” Republicans are for is Trump.

It’s important that we use more precise language to convey that the decisions made by the MAGA faction on the Supreme Court are unprincipled and the people who make them have abandoned the rule of law and the Constitution in the service of Donald Trump. They will let us slip into his authoritarian rule if he is reelected, and they may well have some say in the outcome of the presidential race. We cannot gloss over that reality.

That means that the language we use is critical. I’m working on exorcising “conservative” from my vocabulary when talking about these Justices or elected politicians. Representative Raskin suggested that we use the term “neo-monarchical” to describe them, which seems precise. My husband, who I shared the conversation with, said his word is “corrupt.” That fits too. How have you been describing it? I’m still trying to decide exactly what words to use, and this feels like the kind of thing we’re good at hashing out together.

The conversation with Representative Huffman and Representative Raskin was uplifting despite the dark topic. Two members of Congress took an hour out of their day to talk with not just their own constituents but with people from across the country about a topic of serious importance to all of us. In a time when Americans need examples of good leadership, this is a shining one.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, today is the one-year anniversary of Trump’s indictment in the District of Columbia for trying to steal the 2020 election. Although Trump is the only defendant in that case, he obviously did not act alone.

DOJ lawyer Jeffrey Bossert Clark, a Trump co-defendant in the Fulton County case, was the acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division who was willing to sacrifice DOJ to support Trump’s fake claims of voter fraud. Clark pressured the leadership at DOJ to get on board with Trump or step aside so he could be appointed acting AG. That culminated in a contentious meeting at the White House with Trump that we heard testimony about during the January 6 committee hearing. Clark was a proponent of the plan to have Republican-controlled legislatures appoint Trump electors in states where President Biden was the winner. If there is anyone who merits prosecution alongside Trump, it’s the lawyer who took an oath to uphold the Constitution but was willing to corrupt the Justice Department to shred it.

Like a number of Trump’s other lawyers, Clark is also facing disbarment proceedings. We learned today that the District of Columbia Bar hearing committee assigned to the matter recommended that Clark be suspended from practicing law for two years rather than the recommending disbarment, despite finding that Clark’s conduct threatened to destabilize the country. Disbarment would have been a far more appropriate remedy.

This is not the final decision. The matter now goes to the Bar’s Board of Professional Responsibility, which will make a recommendation to the D.C. Courts after it reviews it, a process that could take another year before it’s complete and discipline is imposed. Meanwhile, Clark is frequently mentioned as a possible Attorney General pick for Trump. And why not? There’s every reason to believe he would continue to do Trump’s bidding. Clark is one of those loose ends that is yet to be tied up almost four years after the insurrection. While his future is uncertain, it is clear he is not a conservative. He is a Trumpist.

So, when we’re talking about neo-monarchical Trumpists, I’m working on purging the word “conservative” from my vocabulary. Because that’s not what they are.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

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