You can smell the smoke from the Capitol rotunda these days, or maybe it’s just the smell of a good argument being quietly strangled.
Over in one corner stood President Donald Trump’s favorite Democratic congressman, New Jersey’s bloodthirsty multi-millionaire Josh Gottheimer.
Over in the other, a writer from the Bulwark named Tim Miller, a man who makes his living polishing the brass on a sinking ship.
The subject of their debate was a war. A real one. Started without what most people would call a provocation, by a president who has never been particularly fussy about the rules.
Miller asked a simple, almost childlike question: Was it reckless and uncivilized for Trump to throw the first punch?
It is the sort of question a serious country might ask itself after the bombs start falling. It used to get asked before the bombs, actually, but those days are gone.
Gottheimer, a man who has made a name as a bipartisan dealmaker, heard the question. And then he did something rather interesting. He didn’t answer it. That would be like a mule answering a knock-knock joke.
Instead, he pulled out a list. A long, dusty, moth-eaten list of grievances against the mullahs.
Gottheimer spent 35 minutes detailing how little he knows about this war and why he fully supports it.
He issued a joint statement with a Republican colleague, a man named Lawler from New York—an endangered species, a swing district Republican.
The anti-Constitution statement was careful, well-sourced, and entirely beside the point.
Death to America this, ballistic missile that. The proxies in Gaza and Yemen. The 603 American troops killed in Iraq, laid at Tehran’s feet. Mass burials. The whole dark catalog, rattled off as if he were reading a grocery list for a barbecue he wasn’t invited to.
Every word of it may be true. That is not the issue.
The issue is that none of it answers Miller’s question. Because Miller wasn’t asking whether Iran is a villain. Iran is a villain. Everyone agrees on that, more or less.
The question was whether this particular war, started by this particular president, at this particular moment, without a clear act of war against us, was reckless and uncivilized.
Gottheimer joined Lawler to oppose a bipartisan resolution from two other congressmen, Massie and Khanna, that would have restricted the use of force against Iran—a little piece of paper from two men with sense enough to question the Almighty, daring to put a leash on the White House before it starts another romp in the sandbox.
The New Jersey congressman said the resolution would “signal weakness.” He said it would tie the president’s hands. He did not say that the president was right to throw the first punch. He simply acted as if the punch had already been thrown, and the only remaining question was whether to throw a few more.
And here is the stench in the room. The sad, rotten truth. According to Gottheimer, it doesn’t matter who started the fight. Because the other fellow in the alley, the Ayatollah, once called us a bad name.
The Congressman says the other fellow is a savage, a brute, a sponsor of terror. And when the other fellow is a genuine scoundrel, well, he argues, you don’t need a reason to hit him. You just need the hitting.
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Miller, to his credit, looked at the blood on the floor and asked who spilled it. Gottheimer just pointed to the blood on the other fellow’s hands and called it a day.
That is a curious position for a Democrat. It is a curious position for anyone who remembers a time when the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy at least pretended to care about who started what.
Gottheimer is a bipartisan man, and perhaps bipartisanship now means agreeing that the executive branch can shoot first and ask Congress for permission never.
We are told he respects debate. Yet he looks you straight in the eye and says that to tie the president’s hands would show weakness.
Trump has been threatening to commit war crimes and advocating Armageddon, but Gottheimer doesn’t want him to look weak, or even sane.
As if caution in the face of a self-inflicted wound is a character flaw. As if asking “why” before the bombs drop is a betrayal of the troops, rather than the highest form of loyalty to them.
You cannot lose a debate about whether the current war is justified if you refuse to acknowledge that the current war has a beginning.
You just point to the enemy’s long record of bad behavior, shrug, and say, “Look at what they did.” The implication is that a nation which has done terrible things in the past cannot be wronged in the present.
One might call that logic reckless. One might call it uncivilized. But those are strong words, and columnists are supposed to be subtle.
So let us just say this: The congressman made a very good case for why Iran is a terrible regime.
He just forgot to make any case at all for why the president was right to start this war. Gottheimer failed to justify wholesale murder on a massive scale.
In a town that prides itself on debating every comma and semicolon, that silence is the loudest thing in the room.
So there you have it. A Democrat standing on a Republican stage, defending an unprovoked war started by a madman, by pointing out that the other guy is also a madman.
It is a race to the bottom of a very deep well. And the congressman is perfectly happy to keep digging, so long as nobody asks him to look up and see who is throwing the shovels down.
That is the way it is, and it stinks to high heaven.