Michael Avenatti Is Winning the 2020 Democratic Primary
Michael Avenatti Is Winning the 2020 Democratic Primary
He won’t be the nominee. But he’s setting the terms of the debate—and that could damage the rest of the field, and the country.
Jack ShaferSeptember 14, 2018
Attorney Michael Avenatti listens during an event in Las Vegas, Nevada, a key early state.
One month ago, Michael Avenatti—the Stormy Daniels lawyer, Donald Trump antagonist, and yes, potential 2020 presidential candidate—spoke at an Iowa Democratic Party fundraiser and declared to a cheering crowd that there was “no greater question facing our party and our nation” than “how” Democrats fight. He chastised Democrats for having “a tendency to bring nail clippers to a gun fight” when they should be fighting “fire with fire.” Avenatti is the lead storm chaser in a little-noticed front in the 2020 Democratic presidential campaign: Who can out-Trump the sitting president by going the furthest to break procedural “norms”?
Even if Avenatti has little chance of winning the nomination, he could still wreck the 2020 Democratic race. In fact he’s already doing it, by using his considerable media skills and political instincts to frame the contest around how far Democrats should go when wielding power, and to pressure his rivals to follow his cue. If we begin measuring candidates on the basis of who has the weakest attachment to the written and unwritten rules which have stabilized American democracy for centuries, the country will be in serious danger.
The reverberations from Avenatti became apparent during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, as two likely presidential candidates sought to prove their willingness to subvert norms. Sen. Cory Booker boasted about risking expulsion by releasing documents deemed classified by the Republican-led committee, to protest attempts to minimize access to Kavanaugh’s emails from when he worked in the George W. Bush administration. And Sen. Kamala Harris shared on Twitter a truncated video clip of Kavanaugh referring to birth control pills as “abortion-inducing drugs” that left off his attributing of the phrase to anti-abortion Catholic plaintiffs. Then when media fact-checkers called her out, Harris, seemingly following Trump’s “never apologize” philosophy, refused to admit error or recalibrate her charge.
The Democratic antics during the Kavanaugh hearings came on the heels of Avenatti issuing an ultimatum on Twitter: “In light of the [Merrick] Garland seat that was stolen, together with the events of today and the hiding of docs, etc., the court must be expanded to 11 seats after 2020. The Dem nominee must commit to this or not receive the nomination IMO.” During the hearings, Avenatti proceeded to bird-dog both Booker and Harris. In a two-tweet thread, which followed a dramatic interrogation of Kavanaugh by Harris that has failed to amount to anything, he cautioned: “I sincerely hope (1) those four docs that were released this morning by Mr. Booker really were still confidential, so he can prove the GOP is lying and (2) that Ms. Harris discloses the evidence of the communications she suggested last night exists and then eviscerates Kavanaugh. Because if not ... ”
We can finish his sentence: If not, it shows these pretenders don’t know how to fight the way I do.
To follow the call to put down the clippers and pick up the gun with an embrace of court-packing clarifies what exactly Avenatti means by fighting harder: fighting without restraint by governing norms. Avenatti is tapping into a desire on the left to burn the rulebook that has simmered since the 2000 presidential recount. In the opening of the 2004 agitprop film Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore skewered runner-up Al Gore, who resisted the unofficial tally for 35 days, for ultimately accepting legal and constitutional reality. Moore’s movie revisited the spectacle when Gore, as president of the Senate, had the unfortunate ceremonial role of certifying the 2000 Electoral College count. Several House Democrats made a last-ditch attempt to object, but Gore turned them away because their petition lacked a Senate sponsor. Moore didn’t acknowledge that Gore’s actions were necessary to avoid a constitutional crisis that could easily have led to violence. He just demeaned Gore as weak and callous. “One after another,” said Moore, the primarily African-American dissenters “were told to sit down and shut up.”
This Democratic distrust of constraining norms intensified during the Obama presidency, which was constantly buffeted by Republican obstructionist tactics. When congressional Republicans would refuse to raise the debt ceiling in order to extract concessions, some (including Bill Clinton) called on Barack Obama to stretch a Civil War-related provision in the 14th Amendment and declare the entire debt ceiling unconstitutional. Others, like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman backed another legally questionable and economically risky proposal: for Obama to direct the U.S. Treasury to mint a trillion-dollar coin to get around the debt ceiling and pay its obligations. Of course, these proposals were in response to Republican threats to governing norms—namely, seizing the full faith and credit of the United States for use as a bargaining chip. But you can’t protect the sanctity of government debt obligations by undermining the sanctity of government debt obligations.
In the final days of Obama’s tenure, calls rose for Obama to give Garland, the Supreme Court nominee whom Republicans refused to consider, a recess appointment. As the New Republic’s David Dayen strained to argue, on January 3, 2017, there would have been “metaphysical” space between the end of the 114th Congress and the beginning of the 115th, in which Obama could claim the Senate was in recess and appoint Garland without Senate confirmation.
After none of those fantasies came to pass, and after watching Trump chew up and spit out norms as part of his daily routine, the movement of progressive norm-breakers has grown. Roosevelt University political science professor David Faris this year published It’s Time to Fight Dirty, which called for packing the Supreme Court, ending the legislative filibuster, and breaking up California in hopes of creating more blue states and more Democratic senators. Now, Avenatti is poised to elevate court-packing to the level of progressive litmus test.
If the progressive credentials of the 2020 field become judged based on the extent of their disregard for norms, the progressive movement, the Democratic Party and American democracy will all suffer. If Democrats and progressives are perceived as driven by the accumulation of personal power, not the betterment of America as a whole, they will find it challenging to claim the moral high ground when making the case for their preferred policies. And if both parties continually rewrite the rules to consolidate their power whenever given the opportunity, faith in democratic institutions will erode and sow the seeds of authoritarianism.
The latter point was made by Harvard University government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in the book How Democracies Die: “This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and ‘weaponizing’ the courts and other neutral agencies, rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents.” Faris finds this concern quaint at a time when Republicans have been engaged in scorched earth governance, akin to “fretting about whether you should shoot the terrorist sitting next to you on your flight after he’s already blown a hole in the hull.”
Faris’ hyperbole obscures the fact that Democrats have reaped benefits not only from respecting norms, but also from occasionally ending them. Consider the demise of the judicial filibuster. While Republicans guffaw that Sen. Harry Reid largely scrapped it in 2013, only to grease the path of Trump’s nominees, it is also the case that the rule change helped Obama overcome furious Republican filibustering and appoint two more judges than George W. Bush. Yes, Trump is going to get his share of judges, but Democrats will get another turn soon enough. That rule change didn’t fundamentally undermine our norms; it allowed the usual political pendulum swings to maintain a rough judicial balance.
, do you not see the GOP?
