On “The Daily Show” Monday night, Jon Stewart urged Democrats to act more like Republicans by “exploit[ing] the loopholes” if they want to get anything done.
“We’ve learned nothing! Even those putting up resistance to Trump’s agenda don’t seem to understand who they’re dealing with,” Stewart said during his opening monologue. The late-night show then played a report on Sen. Elizabeth Warren accusing the president-elect of breaking the law after failing to sign an ethics pledge by its deadline.
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Republicans are playing chess, and the Democrats are in the nurse’s office because they glued their balls to their thigh. That is what is happening,” Stewart said. “The election that we just had was a repudiation of the status quo, an overly-regulated system that is no longer responsive or delivering for the needs of the people or their beloved behatted squirrels. Oh, RIP, Peanut.”
He continued, “Government is theoretically a constitutional system of checks and balances between equally powerful branches. But what government actually is, is an overly-complicated, Byzantine, bureaucratic maze of rules, loopholes to those rules, and norms. Complex enough that, A, if you want to find a rule that keeps you from doing something, you’ll find it. And B, if you actually want to do something, you can find a loophole to get around said rule. And then the norms are just how often you’ve had to pull any of this shit.”
Stewart noted Trump’s “provocative and unorthodox” Cabinet picks, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., former Rep. Matt Gaetz and Fox News host Pete Hegseth.
“Democrats are positive that the vaunted constitutional rules of the Senate shall be the guardrail to this madness,” Stewart said of Trump’s Cabinet nominees. Trump, however, can bypass that confirmation process by adjourning Congress and installing his picks via recess appointments.
“That is our government in a nutshell: The rules say ‘We can stop it.’ The loophole says, ‘Fuck that!’” Stewart said. “So what are you left with? The last refuge of losers: The norms.”
The late-night host added, “Republicans exploit the loopholes. Democrats complain about the norms over and over and over, and it has ghastly consequences.”
Stewart recalled that, in March 2016, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court because it was too close to the election.
“You can make a case that Obama could violate the norm, say the Senate failed their advice and consent, and appoint him anyway and see whatever the fuck happens. Fight!” Stewart said. “But they just went, ‘Oh we never heard of that rule, but, uh OK.’”
Four years later, towards the end of Trump’s first term as president, Republicans filled a Supreme Court vacancy despite the next election being less than two months away. “They didn’t give a fuck!” Stewart pointed out.
“Let this show be the utterly ineffective hypocrisy finders. I can tell you from experience, it does nothing. You guys be the loophole guys that figure out how to get shit done because [Republicans] don’t give a fuck about your norms. They will exploit any loophole, even if they have to go through clearly closed windows to do it,” Stewart said next to an image from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. “You would think after Trump’s presidency, Democrats would have learned. But they doubled down.”
Stewart provided a visual demonstration of the Democrats’ current actions by struggling to thread a needle.
“To get anything done, the Democrats feel like they must thread the needle to make sure — oh, we have to make sure each norm follows the overly complex, bureaucratic process that we created ourselves,” Stewart explained.
“Meanwhile, the Republicans come in, and all they have to do is finger-bang a donut. That’s all they have to do.” The late-night host then obliterated a donut by shoving one of his hands through the hole.
