What Happens When Partisanship Forgives Incompetence?

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)

I'm aware that I'm slightly behind the curve on this one (this blog is a one-man side operation...occasionally that means that we're going to not have time to respond to all of the political stories of the day), but I wanted to discuss Ted Cruz for a second.  Unless you've been living under a rock, you know this story already.  Last week, during the worst blizzard in Texas in decades, while tens of thousands of his constituents were freezing (some to death) in homes with pipes bursting & roofs collapsing, Sen. Ted Cruz decided it would be best to go to Cancun on a vacation.  The internet spent about 12 hours trying to parcel through whether photos of Cruz were in fact the senator (this was confirmed), and then quickly dissecting the senator's lame excuse that he did this at the bequest of his daughters, and that he was going to return from Cancun immediately after dropping them off (leaked text conversations & flight records show this was not the case, and Cruz was planning on staying in the resort for several days).  Cruz received an enormous amount of bad press, and just weeks after his rhetoric about the 2020 election resulted in the attacks on the US Capitol, there were myriad calls for Cruz to resign from office.

Cruz won't resign.  In the Trump era, Republicans don't resign under any circumstance, and Cruz doesn't have enough shame to compute why it is he should resign in the first place.  And I don't have much to say about Cruz here that hasn't already been said-this was a monstrous, callous thing to do, and Republican claims that a sitting US Senator couldn't do anything in a time of crisis are just absurd, so I'm not going to give them credence.  What I want to talk about instead is the question of whether or not Cruz will be punished for this, and the frightening prospect that in three years time, when he next stands for election (either as a presidential candidate or for reelection to the US Senate), that people will dismiss this incident. 

One of the scarier aspects of partisan politics in the past decade has been that people are willing to forgive their own political party far more than they would have in the past.  Twenty or thirty years ago, Cruz would have had to resign in the wake of such a scandal, or at least would've had to go on Diane Sawyer or Charlie Rose & be further humiliated for so cruelly ignoring the plights of his constituents.  But in the Trump era these sorts of incidents, and criticisms of someone for their actual behavior, have virtually vanished on the Republican side.  While Democrats might still resign for improper conduct (Al Franken & Katie Hill are two high-profile recent examples), Republicans have become content to ride out the storm, knowing that eventually their constituents will forget what they did.

This is a problem for a lot of reasons, not just that someone like Cruz basically took a shot at taking down democracy a few weeks ago & he (and most-if-not-all of his Republican cohorts) won't pay a political price for it, but also because it means that you can get away with incompetence.  Voters get the government they choose, and when you are so blinded by the partisan letter behind an incumbent's name that you are willing to forgive them anything, a problem arises when the person in charge is not good at their job (regardless of whether or not you agree with their politics).

Gov. Sam Brownback (R-KS)

Cruz is not the only person who comes to mind here, and honestly until last week he wouldn't have been a name I would've even added to this list.  In the past decade you have figures like Sam Brownback, who ruined the economy of Kansas and basically bankrupted the school system, to the point where the school year had to end early in 2015 because there was no money to pay educators.  Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has openly favored wealthier & Republican counties in the vaccine rollout, and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has basically watched her state drown in Covid cases because she has refused to acknowledge the recommended pandemic precautions.  Gov. Greg Abbott (TX) has spent most of the last week focused on the specious claim that renewable energies caused the Texas blackouts, which is both verifiably false, and also proves that he has no intention of stopping this problem in the future by updating Texas's antiquated electrical grid; he and other Republicans even went so far as to blame the Green New Deal for the crisis...which is not law yet & therefore this is the equivalent of blaming a unicorn for causing Texas's blackouts.  

And of course there's Trump.  Four years of incompetence are now coming to light, particularly in regard to the vaccine rollout.  It's clear that the Trump administration had no concept of what it would take to get vaccines to the American people, and as a result tends of thousands of people are going to die, not to mention the job losses & shuttered small businesses, from the delayed action of Trump not being ready to get more people inoculated in December & January.  It is unthinkable for a variety of reasons to think about what would have happened had Trump been reelected, but it's clear now that we would have had to live with Covid-19 for the next four years as a reality because Trump's administration simply wasn't smart enough to come up with a decent vaccine rollout plan.

The list goes on & on (don't get me started on figures like Madison Cawthorn & Tommy Tuberville who couldn't pass a ninth grade Civics class, despite being members of Congress), but the point is that this political tribalism comes not just with a cost in terms of what the American people will excuse legally (corruption & attacks on democracy), but in terms of sheer competence in their elected officials.  While Trump lost, Sam Brownback was reelected with the state fully knowing that doing so might destroy its public education system (and it basically did).  Kristi Noem seems certain to win a second term based on her strong support of Donald Trump, even though her actions led to countless avoidable deaths.  It's not clear if DeSantis, Abbott, or Cruz will pay a price in their states, but the fact that it's a question goes to show how dangerous this "gut check" partisanship is.  We are clearly getting to the point where competence in the Republican Party is not something that's going to cost incumbents in a primary, and in red states like Texas & South Dakota, if you can't get rid of incumbents in a primary or a general, you might be stuck with truly dysfunctional government, making incidents like what we saw in the past few weeks in Texas the norm.