B4 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022unfathomable move by the RNC to throw
shade at its own top senators will keep the
issue alive for several more days. This was
already going to be fodder for the Sunday
shows, even before Trump released the
inevitable statement Wednesday attacking
McConnell and continuing to push the lie
that his 2020 election loss was fraudulent.
That means the focus for people paying
attention to political news is not on what
Republicans should be highlighting: an
unpopular president, the belief among a
majority of voters that the country is moving
in the wrong direction, inflation, rising
violent crime and the growing number of
Democratic governors removing mask man-
dates, a move for which they’d long criticized
Republicans. Instead, it’s on Republican
infighting.
Even worse, all that intra-GOP battling
distracts from the Democrats’ own divisions,
which McConnell’s team has been doing a
good job of branding as “Dems in Disarray.”
The good news for Republicans is that the
political ground remains fertile for them, and
narrow Democratic majorities mean that
even modest Republican gains in November
could easily lead to GOP control of the House
and the Senate.
Come November, perhaps this fight will be
little remembered, just as I can barelynot the job of the RNC” — sounded awfully
similar to comments that Capitol Hill Repub-
licans directed at the RNC in 2010.
I was the committee’s communications
director at the time, and dealing with these
kinds of stories constituted my worst days on
the job. Whenever we became the center of
national news, the self-inflicted crises caused
us to retreat into a bunker mentality. Instead
of focusing solely on pressing Democratic
weaknesses — the then-unpopular Obama-
care bill, the lack of a coherent response to
the long-running BP oil spill in the Gulf of
Mexico, rising taxes and deficits — precious
time was lost trying to take care of avoidable
blunders. Each time, it was as if the RNC had
made an in-kind contribution to the Demo-
cratic National Committee.
That’s surely what this month’s vote was,
too. The move to censure Cheney and
Kinzinger was an internal RNC process —
which is to say, it was a self-inflicted injury
that became a dominant news story, com-
plete with infighting among committee
members and several vocal Capitol Hill
Republicans, including McConnell (Ky.) and
Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah).
That the RNC has now labeled those
senators as part of “the D.C. bubble” will not
do anything to quell the back and forth.
Indeed, the unheard-of and, until now,Republican Reps.
Liz Cheney (Wyo.)
and A dam
Kinzinger (Ill.)
were censured by
the Republican
National
Committee this
month for their
work on the House
committee
investigating the
Capitol
insurrection.Donald T rump’s
recordkeeping
practices have
presented
challenges for the
National Archives
and Records
Administration.remember some RNC imbroglios that con-
sumed my life in 2010; it’s the kind of political
inside baseball that doesn’t register with
voters more broadly. Certainly voters then
didn’t punish the GOP: Republicans picked
up 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate,
though Democrats retained control of the
upper chamber.
But Republicans should not take that risk.
The RNC controversies of 2010 were trivial.
The stakes here are much higher: The RNC is
targeting its own members of Congress and
changing rules so that committee funds may
be spent on a Republican primary (which
might draw money away from targeting
Democratic seats). The description of those
storming the Capitol — people seeking to
lynch Vice President Mike Pence — as
“ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate
political discourse” is seriously troubling.
And, as we’ve seen in the past and are seeing
still, Trump is willing to exploit divides
however and whenever he sees fit.
This is happening at a time when much of
the political incentive structure rewards
fighting over actual results and encourages
intraparty battles. Trump, in his effort to
salve his wounds from losing to Biden, has
shown his willingness to exploit party divi-
sions, even with the House and Senate in the
balance — as Republicans learned last year in
Georgia.
McConnell is mindful of this, which is why,
while being clear and consistent on Jan. 6, he
has otherwise tread carefully around Trump.
Republicans could have supported an
independent commission to investigate the
attack on the Capitol, or they could have
nominated Republican members they knew
would not be rejected. They chose not to and
are now playing with the cards they’ve been
dealt.
But historically speaking, this year’s elec-
tions still favor Republicans. If they want to
maximize their chances of success, the best
thing they can do is avoid unnecessary
intraparty fighting. Election Day always
comes faster than campaigns think. Any day
wasted on self-inflicted controversies — and
we’re on day five of this one now — is a day
that’s not being spent defining your oppo-
nent.
And that is political malpractice. Especial-
ly if it’s coming unprompted from the party’s
national headquarters.P
olitically, 2022 looks a lot like 2010, the
last time Republicans won the House of
Representatives.
As a Democratic president’s popularity
sagged, a Republican gubernatorial victory in
Virginia (and, in 2010, in New Jersey, whose
election for 2022 was much closer than
widely predicted) signaled that the Demo-
cratic lock on Washington was in trouble.
Republican voter enthusiasm began to rise,
as did confidence about big GOP gains in
Congress.
If these were normal political times, it
should be easy for Republicans all to sing
from the same hymn book, focusing the
party’s energy on President Biden and his
congressional allies, seeking to pick off the
Democratic majority seat by seat and effec-
tively ending the Biden legislative agenda.
These are no ordinary times, though. And
as a House committee continues to investi-
gate the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, the probe
— essentially asking, “What did the president
do, and when did he do it?” — has led
Republicans to expose their internal cracks
between those who remain enthusiastic
backers of all things Trump and those willing
to be critical of the former president (or those
who just hope to avoid him as a topic).
Which made the decision of the Republi-
can National Committee to censure Reps. Liz
Cheney (Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) at
its recent winter meeting in Salt Lake City for
the crime of merely participating in the
investigation both obvious and curious.
Obvious, because the RNC is eager to do all
it can to stay in Donald Trump’s good graces
— as demonstrated by the committee footing
the bill for his legal expenses, even though
the former president controls a $120 million
war chest of his own. Curious, because by
taking the unprecedented step against two
Republican members of Congress, the com-
mittee ensured that the GOP’s internal
divisions would come to the surface. And
these divisions were guaranteed to bring
significant media coverage.
Today’s tension between the RNC and the
Capitol Hill GOP is somewhat reminiscent of
the 2010 election cycle. Back then, the RNC
was hit by wave after wave of controversy,
including, infamously, a scandal in which a
staffer spent nearly $2,000 of the party’s
money at a risque Los Angeles nightclub and
a leaked internal fundraising memo critical
of party donors. Republican congressional
leaders vented their frustration publicly and
privately because the party committee should
not have been a front-page story.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s
comment Tuesday on the censure — “That’sRepublicans are attacking each other at the worst possible timeSTEFANI REYNOLDS FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTThe party
should do well
in November —
but censuring
its own
members can
only hurt its
chances, says
GOP strategist
Douglas HeyeTwitter: @DougHeyeDouglas Heye, a former Republican National
Committee communications director, was deputy
chief of staff to former House majority leader Eric
Cantor.investigating administrative malfeasance. But
it will also be necessary to confront archival
challenges if we hope to safeguard democracy.
Like rebuilding levees to be higher after a
hurricane, these measures form part of a
program of improving institutional resilience
before the next storm. Choosing inaction
instead means hoping that the storm will not
return — a dangerous, even reckless choice.sional allies. Bolstering the number of NARA
personnel tasked with preserving presidential
records would enhance its independence.
Similarly, subjecting the preservation of presi-
dential records subject to stronger independ-
ent scrutiny would make flagrant violations of
the law easier to detect. And the impending
retirement of long-serving Archivist David S.
Ferriero offers another chance to stiffen
independent leadership at NARA.
Much of the public’s attention is focused on
issues such as reforming the Electoral Count
Act, strengthening voting protections and“there is no NARA police.”
Improving NARA’s enforcement capacity is
something that Congress could change, at
least at the margins. In its FY2022 budget
request, NARA framed its challenges for
preserving presidential records in terms of
updating its system to cope with modern file
formats. Yet the Trump administration’s be-
havior shows that the challenges are not
technical, but fundamentally political. As a
small and relatively weak agency, NARA is
poorly equipped to navigate the challenges of
standing up to presidents and their congres-the disposal of presidential records (as there
was not until only a few decades ago), there is
a moral imperative in a democracy for the
public to have access to the accurate history of
its leaders’ decisions. The selective withhold-
ing or destruction of those records by presi-
dents threatens that principle. History should
not be flushed down the drain — or down a
White House toilet, as the case may be.
But the response will have to include more
than repatriating these records. Even the
welcome news that NARA officials have asked
the Justice Department to investigate the
mishandling of the records for possible crimi-
nal investigation is insufficient. (The referral
does suggest that relations between NARA
and the Trump camp have been less friendly
than Mar-a-Lago wants to advertise.) We need
to strengthen all of our institutions to better
check and resist abuses of presidential power,
not just tweaks to government record-keeping
procedures, though the latter is absolutely
part of the former.
The appropriate steps will have to be
proactive. Prosecuting a former president
over his handling of documents is unlikely.
Guaranteeing a fair trial for such a notorious
defendant would probably be difficult if not
practically impossible — just imagine the jury
selection process. Nor would this calculus
change much even if there were classified
materials in the collection. As The Washing-
ton Post reported, presidents have essentially
unlimited ability to declassify records, which
would make prosecution difficult — and, of
course, Attorney General Merrick Garland
tends to err on the side of caution anyway.
But the stakes are made still clearer by a
more serious controversy regarding Trump’s
records: that involving whether the former
president could stop NARA from releasing his
materials to the House January 6 Select
Committee. The courts have rejected Trump’s
claims that turning over such materials vio-
lates executive privilege. Yet all such proceed-
ings rest on the assumptions that the physical
integrity of the records will be maintained
and that they are properly created in the first
place.
A 2016 article about the transition process
in NARA’s house magazine, Prologue, empha-
sized the scale of the challenge. The Bush-
Obama transition involved moving tens of
thousands of cubic feet of materials, enough
for two Boeing 747s, a DC-8 and 25 trucks. And
that only includes properly logged and pre-
served materials. If presidential aides circum-
vent the record-keeping process, as Karl Rove
and many other George W. Bush officials did
by using Republican National Committee
emails in an alleged attempt to avoid record-
preservation protocols, then records may
never come to light at all.
Keeping track of records on that scale is a
massive challenge. Part of the problem comes
from structural and cultural issues involving
the National Archives itself. As a colleague
told me when I worked at NARA’s Richard
Nixon Presidential Library and Museum more
than a decade ago, when it comes to presiden-
tial records NARA relies to a large extent on
presidents to voluntarily cooperate becauseTRUMP FROM B1Presidential history shouldn’t be flushed down a White House toiletJABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POSTTwitter: @profmusgravePaul Musgrave is an assistant professor at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst.