Charles P. Pierce: Donald Trump Has Hijacked Democracy. The Response Is Up to the Country.

Bleak.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a52816/trump-republicans-congress/

Donald Trump Has Hijacked Democracy. The Response Is Up to the Country.

Two weeks in, we already know what we're dealing with.
By Charles P. Pierce
Feb 3, 2017

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WASHINGTON—Most of it happened before dawn. The getaway cars were idling in the plaza in front of the Capitol, a chain of red taillights in the darkness before the dawn. The United States Senate was at work before daybreak, and United States senators wanted to get out of town. Their essential workday was over before eight. They took two votes. One was to kill the SEC's Resource Extraction Rule. The other was to invoke cloture on Betsy DeVos, the ridiculous nominee for Secretary of Education. The rule went down and DeVos went through and the sun had just begun to rise over the capital city and the weekend already had begun.

It has not been a very encouraging week for democracy here, but there are a couple of lessons to be drawn from all the activity, and all the non-activity, that's taken place. First, and this has been obvious for a while, but it became vivid and clear over the past five days, there is absolutely no legitimate political opposition within the Republican party to anything the president* says or does.

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Both of the pre-dawn votes were bad ones. The DeVos nomination is ghastly on its face, but the vote on the Resource Extraction regulation is a vote for serious national security problems down the road. I know I'm harping on this a little but, if you allow American corporations to get back in the business of subletting despots all over the world, you're buying an awful lot of trouble down the line. You're going to have corruption and instability in the places under which resources we need are buried. You're lining up with people who loot their countries and then flee with their ill-gotten gains.

When this happens, you get more instability and more civil wars in which the only things on which both sides agree is that the Americans—or, more generally, the West—are to blame. Of course, this is also how you breed terrorists.

"There's no question that people's public health can suffer," Wyden said. "There is no question that you can have economic dislocation, and real economic pain, for families in a number of parts of the world where every day is an economic struggle just to survive."

They did all of this before the sun came up on Friday and then, for the most part, they were gone, off into a country that doesn't know what's happening to it, and seems to be happier that way, a land of constant surprises now, most of them bad ones.