There’s No Gravity in Washington

Max Miller beat his wife and daughter — and virtually no one in his party will say a word.

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I remain utterly flummoxed and angry that virtually no one in the Republican Party has called for Ohio Congressman Max Miller to resign and drop out of his race.

Miller is credibly accused of beating his ex-wife — holding a gun to her head, pushing her against a wall and hitting her head, and fracturing their young daughter’s collarbone. He is a disgusting human being and should not be representing anybody in the United States Congress. Full stop.

Miller felt comfortable putting his hands on his wife and his child because he knows there’s no accountability — he’s never going to see the inside of a prison cell, and his relationship with Donald Trump keeps him safe and the rest of the party in line. This isn’t even his first public accusation of domestic abuse, yet the entire GOP supporting his initial run for Congress. He knew then what he knows now: none of it would ever touch him. That is gross.

Worse still, the woman making these latest allegations, Emily Moreno, is the daughter of a sitting Republican senator, Bernie Moreno — and even her own father has been largely silent. Miller ran unopposed in his primary and is on the ballot again this November, and the entire party has decided the smart play is to look away and hope you don’t notice.

And remember how brazen this has always been. Years ago, on the floor of the House — during his own expulsion, of all things — George Santos, of all people, called Max Miller an accused woman beater to his face. “We all have pasts,” Santos said. Nobody batted an eye. Maybe because Santos was a joke. Either way, the party shrugged and moved on — and it’s still shrugging.

I want to be clear about my own record, because it matters. I was one of the first to say Eric Swalwell should resign over the allegations against him. I was one of the first to say Graham Platner should drop out of the Maine Senate race — and frankly, I wish I’d said it sooner. A lot of Democrats do, given that he was a living, breathing red flag.

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That’s the whole point. The Democratic Party lives by an entirely different set of rules. We are still tethered to reality; we still care about removing predators from our own party. The Republicans simply don’t, and they can’t, because the top of the food chain in their party is a predator. Donald Trump was found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, ordered to pay her millions, and still owes her a fortune. That’s before the Epstein files, or the thousands of times he went on the Howard Stern show and said creepy, disgusting things about young women, including his own daughter.

You can’t demand accountability from Max Miller when the man at the head of your party is the walking example of everything you’d be condemning. So they say nothing. “The key word there is allegation,” they tell you, and they move on.

And make no mistake about why. For them it’s party over principle, party over country, every single time. They won’t police their own because all they care about is winning and owning the libs, and they’re reflexively loyal to everyone in the party no matter what he’s done. Here’s the tell: they can see it perfectly well when the accused is a Democrat. They were happy to spend weeks hammering Graham Platner, demanding he get out of his race. But Max Miller — their guy? Suddenly the outrage evaporates and everybody’s very interested in due process. The standard was never the conduct. It’s the letter next to your name.

And if you think Miller is somehow the exception, look at how many Republicans are falling over themselves for the Tate brothers — Andrew and Tristan — sitting in a Florida jail cell fighting extradition to the U.K. on rape and sex-trafficking charges brought by women who say they were abused and coerced. A whole ecosystem on the right is openly campaigning to spring them, working every connection it can find into Trump’s orbit. The rest are just praying nobody asks, because they don’t want their base screaming at them for admitting an accused sex trafficker maybe shouldn’t be their guy. That’s how broken this is — unfathomably, unforgivably disgusting.

But this is bigger than Max Miller. The wealthy and well-connected never face accountability for their crimes or their corruption, because they built the system that way. They draw their own districts, so they don’t answer to voters. They’ve got tens of millions in super-PAC money waiting, from AIPAC and shit like that. And they know Trump’s DOJ won’t touch them. So when a president launches an illegal war and nobody cares, when a sitting United States senator vanishes for six weeks and nobody in Washington blinks, when the Epstein files can’t and won’t be released in violation of the law — it’s always the same answer. There’s no gravity in Washington anymore. They protect one another across every scandal, because the only bipartisan consensus left in that town is that none of them should ever pay a price.

So here’s where I land. The gravity in this country isn’t coming back from Washington — they’ve spent decades engineering it out. It has to come from us — from people who still believe a man who holds a gun to his wife’s head has no business writing our laws, who refuse to accept allegation as a magic word that makes accountability disappear. It angers the hell out of me, all of it, because it just isn’t right. So no, I’m not going to let it go — not with Miller, not with the Tates, not with any of them. Demand it loudly. Demand it until it costs them something. Because the day we stop demanding it is the day the last ounce of the gravity leaves the country.