In the spirit of the season, how about a glass-half-full view of our parlous politics as 2023 ends?
Whatever else it’s been, 2023 was a year of finally holding scofflaws, outlaws and godawful politicians accountable, thanks to decisions from courts, prosecutors and, yes, voters — events that broke records, made history and affirmed justice.
This list isn’t exhaustive, nor in any order.
Opinion Columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical eye to the national political scene. She has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
Let’s start with a recent development: Rudy Giuliani’s conviction and $148-million penalty for defaming two Georgia election workers as fraudsters after Donald Trump lost in 2020. Giuliani filed for bankruptcy less than a week after he was ordered to pay Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss.
It’s become hard to recall that Giuliani once was far more esteemed than that other longtime New York newsmaker, Trump. As “America’s Mayor” on 9/11, he marshaled the city’s response to the terrorist attacks while the self-absorbed and mendacious Trump boasted that a Trump building was now the tallest in downtown Manhattan. (It wasn’t.) Giuliani is now paying a price — literally — for shifting from renowned mob-buster to consigliere for a mob-like boss, Trump.
Giuliani’s fall is a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare, but he elicits no sympathy. For all his other alleged sins in trying to keep Trump in power — he still faces charges in Georgia and is an unnamed co-conspirator in the federal case — the horrors Giuliani brought upon Freeman and Moss with his lies are the most vile. The Black public servants endured racist messages, death threats and even a break-in by vigilantes seeking to make a “citizens’ arrest.”
Outside the courtroom this month, Giuliani repeated his lies about the women to reporters. Inside, he declined to testify under oath. That says it all.
Speaking of defamation, in April we saw Fox News — Faux News — penalized $787.5 million for allowing right-wing hosts to knowingly air false claims that Dominion Voting Systems rigged election machines against Trump in 2020. The sum, believed to be the largest media defamation settlement in U.S. history, might have been smaller but for Fox’s arrogance in not settling sooner, before pretrial proceedings publicized internal texts humiliating to Fox founder Rupert Murdoch and celebs Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity.
In the summary judgment that finally spurred the settlement, the judge ruled that it was “CRYSTAL clear that none of the statements relating to Dominion about the 2020 election are true.” Of course, Fox News viewers were told little of the gory details of Fox’s deceit — such as Carlson’s text about the Trump team’s allegations against Dominion — “The whole thing seems insane to me” — even as he gave the falsehoods oxygen on air.
As for Carlson, who’d have thought that Fox News would ever fire its top-rated host? Yet that’s what happened in April, and so far Carlson has failed to re-create the outsized platform he once had to spew his toxic anti-democratic, racist and misogynist rants. Fox finally decided he wasn’t worth the legal costs and the loss of advertisers repelled by his poison.
I predicted it would never happen. I’m happy to have been wrong.
When the Supreme Court reversed half a century of abortion rights in 2022, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the majority, “We do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond.” In 2023, they found out.
November’s election results confirmed a reassuring trend: Every time voters have spoken in the 18 months since the Dobbs decision, they’ve favored those rights — rebuking the court’s supermajority and the Republican-run state legislatures that rushed to impose abortion bans.
Another well-deserved comeuppance: This month’s House vote to boot Republican Rep. George Santos of New York. The cartoonish congressman had falsely claimed all kinds of achievements in selling Long Island voters on his candidacy last year, but he finally accomplished an actual doozy: He is only the sixth House member to be expelled in its history.
Santos still faces trial on multiple federal charges. Meanwhile, he’s shamelessly making the most of his 15 minutes of post-expulsion fame, er, notoriety, including by charging users online for personal messages. A Dec. 18 interview with comedian Ziwe Fumudoh went viral. At one point she asked, “What could we do to get you to go away?” “Stop inviting me to your gigs,” he replied. Here’s a new year’s resolution for all bookers out there: Heed the man.
Two months before Santos’ ouster was a far more historic humiliation: The House vote making Rep. Kevin McCarthy the first speaker ever dethroned, and thanks to the very sort of MAGA extremists he’d bootlicked to get the job. (Welcome as McCarthy’s sacking was, Republicans replaced him with someone arguably worse: Rep. “MAGA Mike” Johnson of Louisiana.)
Much-deserved accountability also came for the leaders of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and democracy itself.
In what has been the biggest criminal investigation in U.S. history, more than 1,200 people have been charged and among those convicted in 2023 — for seditious conspiracy and more — were several chiefs of the extremist groups the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. The longest sentences were 22 years in prison for Proud Boy Henry “Enrique” Tarrio and 18 years for Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers.
And of course, the ultimate would-be insurrectionist, Trump, this year became the first president in history to be criminally charged. Among his four indictments and 91 felony counts are the cases in Washington and Georgia alleging his illegal efforts to overturn his 2020 loss.
Forget the punditry about whether the charges have backfired, helping Trump become the favorite for renomination and perhaps reelection. There’s only this question: What would it say about a democracy based on the rule of law if it didn’t hold accountable the first defeated presidential candidate to reject an election’s results and oppose the peaceful transfer of power?
Here’s hoping that a year from now America’s glass will be full, that we will have seen the ultimate accountability: Trump’s conviction and, if he’s nominated, a second defeat.
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