T
HIS month, for the first time in 17 years, the
United States resumed carrying out death sen-
tences for federal crimes.
On July 14, Daniel Lewis Lee was executed
for the 1996 murder of a family, including an 8-year-old
girl, by suffocating and drowning them in a bayou in Ar-
kansas after robbing them to fund a white-supremacist
organization.
On July 16, Wesley Purkey was executed for the 1998
murder of a teenage girl, whom he kidnapped, raped,
killed, dismembered and discarded in a septic pond. The
next day, Dustin Honken was executed for five murders
committed in 1993, including the execution-style shoot-
ing of two young girls, their mother, and two prospective
witnesses against him in a federal prosecution for meth-
amphetamine trafficking.
The death penalty is a difficult issue for many Ameri-
cans on moral, religious and policy grounds. But as a
legal issue, it is straightforward. The Constitution ex-
pressly contemplates “capital” crimes, and Congress
has authorized the death penalty for serious federal of-
fenses since George Washington signed the Crimes Act
of 1790.
The American people have repeatedly ratified that
decision, including through the Federal Death Penalty
Act of 1994 signed by Bill Clinton, the federal execution
of Timothy McVeigh under George W. Bush and the de-
cision by Barack Obama’s Justice Department to seek
the death penalty against the Boston Marathon bomber
and Dylann Roof.
The recent executions reflect that consensus, as the
Justice Department has an obligation to carry out the
law. The decision to seek the death penalty against Mr.
Lee was made by Mr. Clinton’s attorney general, Janet
Reno (who said she personally opposed the death pen-
alty but was bound by the law), and reaffirmed by the
deputy attorney general, Eric Holder.
Mr. Purkey was prosecuted during the Bush adminis-
tration, and his conviction and sentence were vig-
orously defended throughout the Obama administra-
tion. The judge who imposed the death sentence on Mr.
Honken, Mark Bennett, said that while he generally op-
posed the death penalty, he would not lose any sleep
over Mr. Honken’s execution.
In a New York Times Op-Ed essay published on July
17, two of Mr. Lee’s lawyers contended that their client
was executed in a “shameful rush” — even though Mr.Lee was sentenced more than 20 years ago, and his ap-
peals and other permissible challenges failed, up to and
including the day of his execution.
Mr. Lee’s lawyers seem to endorse a system of end-
less delays that prevent a death sentence from ever be-
coming real. But his execution date was announced al-
most a year ago, and was initially set for last December.
It was delayed when his lawyers obtained six more
months of review by challenging the procedures used to
carry out his lethal injection.
After an appellate court rejected their claim as “with-
out merit,” the Justice Department rescheduled Mr.
Lee’s execution, providing an additional four weeks of
notice. Yet on the day of the rescheduled execution, after
relatives of his victims had traveled to Terre Haute, Ind.,
to witness the execution, a District Court granted Mr.
Lee’s request for further review. That court entered a
last-minute reprieve that the Supreme Court has said
should be an “extreme exception.”
Given the long delay that had already occurred, the
Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to lift theorder so the execution could proceed. Mr. Lee’s lawyers
opposed that request, insisting that overturning the or-
der would result in their client’s imminent execution. Af-
ter reviewing the matter, the court granted the govern-
ment’s request and rebuked the District Court for creat-
ing an unjustified last-minute barrier.
In the final minutes before the execution was to occur,
Mr. Lee’s lawyers claimed their client still had time to
seek further review of an appellate court decision six
weeks earlier lifting a prior stay of execution. The Jus-
tice Department decided to pause the execution for sev-
eral hours while the appellate court considered and
promptly rejected Mr. Lee’s request.
That cautious step, taken to ensure undoubted com-
pliance with court orders, is irreconcilable with the sug-
gestion that the department “rushed” the execution or
disregarded any law. Mr. Lee’s final hours awaiting his
fate were a result of his own lawyers’ choice to assert a
non-meritorious objection at the last moment.
Mr. Lee’s lawyers also disregarded the cost to victims’
families of continued delay. Although they note that
some members of Mr. Lee’s victims’ families opposedhis execution, others did not. Nor did the relatives of
Wesley Purkey’s victim, Jennifer Long, who were in
Terre Haute on Wednesday afternoon. When the Dis-
trict Court again imposed another last-minute stop-
page, granting more time for Mr. Purkey’s lawyers to
argue (among other things) that he did not understand
the reason for his execution, the Justice Department
again sought Supreme Court review.
As the hours wore on, Justice Department officials
asked Ms. Long’s father if he would prefer to wait for
another day. The answer was unequivocal: He would
stay as long as it took. As Ms. Long’s stepmother later
said, “We just shouldn’t have had to wait this long.”
The Supreme Court ultimately authorized the execu-
tion just before 3 a.m. In his final statement, Mr. Purkey
apologized to “Jennifer’s family” for the pain he had
caused, contradicting the claim of his lawyers that he
did not understand the reason for his execution.
The third execution, of Dustin Honken, occurred on
schedule, but still too late for some of his victims’ fam-
ilies. John Duncan, the father of the victim Lori Duncan
and grandfather of her slain daughters, Kandace (age
10) and Amber (age 6), had urged Mr. Honken’s execu-
tion for years. As Mr. Duncan was dying of cancer in
2018, he asked family members to promise they would
witness the execution on his behalf.
On July 17, they did. “Finally,” they said in a state-
ment, “justice is being done.”
Mr. Lee’s lawyers and other death penalty opponents
are entitled to disagree with that sentiment. But if the
United States is going to allow capital punishment, a
white-supremacist triple murderer would seem the
textbook example of a justified case.
And if death sentences are going to be imposed, they
cannot just be hypothetical; they eventually have to be
carried out, or the punishment will lose its deterrent and
retributive effects.
Rather than forthrightly opposing the death penalty
and attempting to change the law through democratic
means, however, Mr. Lee’s lawyers and others have cho-
sen the legal and public-relations equivalent of guerrilla
war. They sought to obstruct by any means the adminis-
tration of sentences that Congress permitted, juries
supported and the Supreme Court approved.
And when those tactics failed, they accused the Jus-
tice Department of “a grave threat to the rule of law,”
even though it operated entirely within the law enacted
by Congress and approved by the Supreme Court. The
American people can decide for themselves which as-
pects of that process should be considered “shameful.” 0CHRISTOPHER LEE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESJeffrey A. RosenJEFFREY A. ROSENis the deputy attorney general.As a legal issue, the federal death
penalty is straightforward.
Executions Ensure
‘Justice Is Being Done’
THE NEW YORK TIMES OP-EDTUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020 Y A23
ANNE APPLEBAUM’S NEW BOOK, “Twilight
of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Au-
thoritarianism,” begins cinematically,
with a party she threw at a Polish manor
house to mark the dawn of the new millen-
nium.
Applebaum’s husband was then the
deputy foreign minister in Poland’s cen-
ter-right government; she was a right-
leaning journalist who would go on to
write a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of
the Soviet gulag. Many of the guests came
from the cosmopolitan anti-Communist
intelligentsia. About half of them, she
writes, no longer speak to the other half.
In “Twilight of Democracy,” Applebaum
tries to understand why so many of her old
friends — conservatives who once fancied
themselves champions of democracy and
classical liberalism — have become para-
noid right-wing populists. “Were some of
our friends always closet authoritar-
ians?” she asks. “Or have the people with
whom we clinked glasses in the first min-
utes of the new millennium somehow
changed over the subsequent two dec-
ades?”
To Applebaum, today’s right, in both
America and Europe, “has little in com-
mon with most of the political movements
that have been so described since the Sec-
ond World War.” Until recently, she writes,
the right was “dedicated not just to repre-
sentative democracy, but to religious tol-
erance, independent judiciaries, free
press and speech, economic integration,
international institutions, the trans-Atlan-
tic alliance and a political idea of ‘the
West.’ ” What happened?
Like Applebaum, I’m astonished to see
erstwhile Cold Warriors abase them-
selves before Vladimir Putin. But I think
she’s working from a mistaken premise
about what once constituted conserva-
tism. Liberal democracy per se was never
the animating passion of the trans-Atlan-
tic right — anti-Communism was. When
the threat of Communist expansion disap-
peared, so did most of the right’s commit-
ment to a set of values that, it’s now evi-
dent, were purely instrumental.
Reading Applebaum’s book, I kept
thinking of an infamous 1981 interview
given by the Republican campaign con-
sultant Lee Atwater. In the 1950s, Atwater
said, Southern conservatives would just
repeat a vile racial slur. By 1968, “that
hurts you, backfires,” he said. “So you say
stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and
all that stuff.” From there, right-wing poli-
tics grew even more abstract, so “now
you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all
these things you’re talking about are to-
tally economic things and a byproduct of
them is, blacks get hurt worse than
whites,” he said.
There were always some American con-
servatives who really were in it for laissez-
faire economics. But it’s now clear that
those conservatives were wrong about
their movement’s animating passion. So
too with those on the center-right who
thought their comrades were opposed to
authoritarianism on principle.
Back when the idea of a President
Trump still seemed an absurdist impossi-
bility, the political theorist Corey Robin
wrote, in his 2011 book “The Reactionary
Mind,” about the recurring argument that
conservatism had slipped its sober moor-
ing to become populist and radical.
He saw this as a misunderstanding of
the right. In his view, reaction has always
had a revolutionary edge. Conservatism,
he wrote, seeks to “make privilege popu-
lar, to transform a tottering old regime
into a dynamic, ideologically coherent
movement of the masses.” Seen this way,
corrupt autocratic populists like Trump
and Viktor Orban of Hungary fit quite
neatly into the tradition Applebaum was
once part of.
In her book, Applebaum explores the
purported ideological evolution of the Fox
News host and Trump sycophant Laura
Ingraham, an anti-immigrant demagogue
who has three adopted immigrant chil-
dren. In the 1990s, Applebaum associated
Ingraham with a “kind of post-Cold War
optimism,” an American conservatism
that was “energetic, reformist and gener-
ous.”
But it’s hard to see what was ever re-
formist, never mind generous, about In-
graham.
It was 2003, not 2016, that Ingraham
complained about “police departments,
hospitals, courts, schools and government
agencies” that “now prefer hiring multi-
lingual employees owing to the number of
illegal and non-English-speaking immi-
grants in the community.” Her conversion
to Trumpism doesn’t require much expla-
nation.
I’m genuinely grateful for the moral
courage and concrete political work of
anti-Trump conservatives. It can’t be easy
to break with the politics and the people
that have defined one’s life. I’m aware, too,
that the left has its own ingrained patholo-
gies; Applebaum’s center-right views
were shaped by the lived reality of Soviet
Communism.
“Twilight of Democracy” is certainly
worth reading. Applebaum has a keen un-
derstanding of how conspiracism and cor-
ruption intertwine to suffocate democra-
cy. Her description of Poland’s Law and
Justice government, which has “put a fan-
tasy at the heart of government policy,”
helps illuminate the role Trump’s obses-
sion with the “deep state” has played in
our own rolling catastrophe.
But there’s no mystery in the right’s
surrender to authoritarianism, because
for many of the people Applebaum de-
scribes, it wasn’t a surrender at all. It was
a liberation. 0
MICHELLE GOLDBERG
Twilight of the
Liberal Right
Conservatism always
contained the seeds of
authoritarianism.
IF DONALD TRUMPstages another come-
from-behind victory in November —
helped, in all likelihood, by the collapse of
public order in American cities — the Re-
publican Party will become an oddity for
the Trump Organization: the only entity
it owns but does not brand. Not only will
Trump remain in office for another term,
but the Trumpers will also dominate the
G.O.P. for another generation.
Look for Tom Cotton to be the likely
nominee in 2024 (with — why not? —
Laura Ingraham as his running mate).
And if Trump loses? Then the future of
the party will be up for grabs. It’s time to
start thinking about who can grab it, who
should, and who will.
Much depends on the margin of defeat.
If it’s razor thin and comes down to a
vote-count dispute in a single state, as it
did in Florida in 2000, Trump will almost
surely allege fraud, claim victory and set
off a constitutional crisis. As Ohio Statelaw professor Edward Foley noted last
year in a must-read law review article, a
state like Pennsylvania could send com-
peting certificates of electoral votes to
Congress. Interpretive ambiguities in
the 12th Amendment and the Electoral
Count Act of 1887 could deadlock the
House and the Senate. We could have
two self-declared presidents on the eve
of next year’s inauguration.
Who controls the nuclear football in
that event is a question someone needs
to start thinking about right now.
But let’s assume Trump loses nar-
rowly but indisputably. In that case, the
Trump family will do what it can to retain
control of the G.O.P.
Tommy Hicks Jr., the current Republi-
can National Committee co-chairman, is
one possible candidate to move up to be-
come chairman, and run the R.N.C., but
the likelier choice is Hicks’s good friend
Donald Trump Jr. The Trumpers willmake the argument that NeverTrumpers
cost them the election and are thus re-
sponsible for everything bad that might
happen in a Biden administration, from
crime on the streets to liberal Supreme
Court picks to some future Benghazi-
type episode.
Something unpleasant might come of
this. It tends to happen whenever a large
mass of conformists convince them-selves that they’ve been betrayed by a
nonconforming minority in their midst.
Then there’s the third scenario: An
overwhelming and humiliating Trump
defeat, on the order of George H.W.
Bush’s 168 to 370 electoral vote loss to
Bill Clinton in 1992.
The infighting will begin the moment
Florida, North Carolina or any other
must-win state for Trump is called for
Joe Biden. It will pit two main camps
against each other. On the right, it will be
the What Were We Thinking? side of the
party. On the further right, the Trump
Didn’t Go Far Enough side. Think of it as
a cage match between Marco Rubio and
Tucker Carlson for the soul of the G.O.P.
Both sides will recognize that Trump
was a uniquely incompetent executive
who — as in his business dealings — al-
ways proved his own worst enemy, al-
ways squandered his luck, never learned
from his mistakes, never grew in office.
Both sides will want to wash their hands
of the soon-to-be-former president, his
obnoxious relatives, their intellectual va-
cuity and their self-dealing ways. And
both will have to tread carefully around a
wounded and bitter man who, like a
minefield laid for some long-ago war, still
has the power to kill anyone who mis-steps.
That’s where agreement ends. The
What Were We Thinking? Republicans
will want to hurry the party back to some
version of what it was when Paul Ryan
was its star. They’ll want to pretend that
Trump never happened. They will orga-
nize a task force composed of former
party worthies to write an election post-
mortem, akin to what then-G.O.P. chair
Reince Priebus did after 2012, emphasiz-
ing the need to repair relations with mi-
norities, women and younger voters.
They’ll talk up the virtues of Republicans
as reformers and problem-solvers, not
Know-Nothings and culture warriors.
The Didn’t Go Far Enough camp will
make the opposite case. They’ll note that
Trump never built the wall, never got
U.S. troops out of the Middle East, never
drained the swamp of Beltway corrup-
tion, ended NAFTA in name only, did
Wall Street’s bidding at Main Street’s ex-
pense, and “owned the libs” on Twitter
while losing the broader battle of ideas.
This camp will seek a new champion:
Trump plus a brain.
These are two deeply unattractive ver-
sions of the party of Lincoln, one feck-
less, the other fanatical. Even so, all who
care about the health of American de-
mocracy should hold their noses and
hope the feckless side prevails.
As with the Democrats after Jimmy
Carter’s defeat in 1980, it will probably
take more than one electoral shellacking
for conservative-leaning voters to appre-
ciate the scale of disaster that Trump’s
presidency inflicted on the party and the
country. It will probably also take more
than one defeat for the party to learn that
electoral contests should still be waged,
and won, near the center of the ideolog-
ical spectrum, not the fringe.
But everything has to start some-
where. A decisive Trump loss in Novem-
ber isn’t a sufficient condition for the
G.O.P. to begin to heal itself. It’s still a be-
ginning. 0BRET STEPHENS
What Will a Post-Trump G.O.P. Look Like?
DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMESAnd consider, what will
it take for the party to
begin to heal itself?