Republicans in 'chaotic disarray' as US faces 'difficult for years for democracy': analysis

During the 2024 presidential race, MSNBC legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Joyce White Vance repeatedly warned that if Republican Donald Trump won, it would be very bad for the rule of law.

President-elect Trump ultimately prevailed, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris by roughly 1.5 percent in the popular vote and picking up 312 electoral vote (according to the Cook Political Report). And he will return to the White House on January 20, 2025.

In a newsletter/column published on her SubStack page on December 29, the 64-year-old Vance warns that the United States can expect a "difficult four years for democracy" as well as chaotic infighting among MAGA Republicans.

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Some of that chaos, Vance argues, is showing itself with Trump's nomination of John Sauer for solicitor general.

"Trump is represented by his nominee to be solicitor general, John Sauer, who obsequiously described the president-elect in the glowing sort of terms Trump likes to see himself described with," Vance explains. "The case is ultimately about whether U.S. companies that platform TikTok can continue to do so after the date of the ban, but apparently, Trump just wants to jump in and make a deal. There's more than a smidge of kleptocracy underlying the idea — one wonders if even the Supreme Court will have the stomach for it."

The chaos, Vance predicts, will be evident in the U.S. House of Representatives when a new Congress is seated this Friday, January 3 and Republicans need to choose a new speaker.

"If it was the Democrats," the Alabama-based Vance argues, "the media would be trotting out the 'Democrats in disarray' headlines already. Perhaps there is no word that is sufficiently alliterative for Republicans — Republicans in riot is already taken from 2021. But there is chaos in the Republican Party as the infighting between the Musk/Ramaswamy branch — pro-H-1B visas that allow U.S. employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations — and the Loomer/Bannon faction, strict anti-immigrationists, makes it feel like the Biden presidency has evaporated and Trump is already back in power."

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Vance, however, notes some "good news" coming from Arkansas, where a federal judge "struck down a law that put booksellers and librarians at risk of imprisonment if they provided minors with 'harmful' material."

"Book bans are up as conservatives push on these issues," Vance explains. "Like so many other laws that aim to restrict individual liberty, book bans operate in a zone of confusion and fear that encourages people to exceed the bounds of what the law strictly requires them to do in order to protect themselves from punishment. The Arkansas law, for instance, isn't specific about how, or to what extent librarians must go, to keep children from accessing prohibited books."

Vance adds, "So, it's safer for a librarian to toss them out than it is to put them in an adult section because, given the vagueness of the law, they could face liability if a child wandered out of the children's section and found the 'objectionable' material elsewhere."

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Joyce White Vance's full newsletter/column is available at this link.