Abuse isn't partisan. Protecting abusers is.

Abuse against women is not a partisan problem, it is a men problem. Pretending otherwise is both dishonest and strategically stupid, because the moment you claim your men are safer, you hand the other side a gotcha it will use forever.

I have spent my career inside Democratic politics and watched my party reach for that gotcha within an hour of the first alert, as if the useful fact about a man who hurt a woman is which party he belonged to. Al Franken was ours. Andrew Cuomo was ours. Eric Swalwell was ours. Graham Platner was ours, and I said so here in July when he was still our nominee and plenty of people in my party wanted me to wait. No voting record explains any of it, because they did it for the reason men have always done it, which is that they believed they could.

The question was never which party has abusive men in it, since both do and both always have. The question is what the party does next, which is where we stop resembling each other in any meaningful way. On my side it is swift and costly. Franken was gone in weeks. Cuomo was pushed out while he still had a national future. Swalwell gave up a run for California governor and resigned from Congress this spring, days after a pressure campaign from his own colleagues, and we all know what happened in Maine. We have handed back seats we badly needed rather than support abusers, and I would rather be in the party that keeps making that trade than the one that has never once had to make it.

This week in Ohio we are getting an unusually clean look at how Republicans handle abuse. Rep. Max Miller, Republican of Ohio, is refusing to leave his reelection race despite court filings from his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, alleging he threw hot water on her, held a gun to her head, and that their two-year-old daughter's collar-bone was fractured in his custody. Miller denies everything, faces no criminal charges, and is suing his accusers for defamation, and with Wednesday's deadline to replace him on the ballot approaching, neither Trump nor House Republican leadership has asked him to step aside.

On Sunday a reporter asked President Trump whether Miller should resign, and Trump said he was going to look at it, that so far these were only accusations. By Monday he had decided Miller is "a good person" and that he would "let the families figure that out." Nothing happened in those twenty-four hours, no new filing and no retraction, so the only thing that moved was the political math.

None of which surprises anyone. This is a president a jury found liable for sexual abuse, who by Stephanie Grisham's account was told, while she still worked for him, that her relationship with Miller had turned violent, and who endorsed Miller anyway and reaffirmed the endorsement once she went public.

Plus the family had already figured it out in public. Shortly after Miller went live on X to announce he was staying in his race, Sen. Bernie Moreno, Republican of Ohio, wrote that his former son-in-law is a danger to his daughter, that he holds his breath every minute Miller has custody of his granddaughter, that Miller needs serious psychological help and, by Moreno's account, has privately admitted as much, and that he should not serve in the House. That is a sitting Republican senator saying that about a sitting Republican congressman, using his own daughter and granddaughter as the evidence, and the president handed the matter back to the family it had already wrecked.

Bernie Moreno owes his seat to Trump's endorsement. Three weeks into his term, he voted to put Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon despite sexual assault allegations, in a fifty to fifty vote JD Vance had to break because three of Moreno's Republican colleagues said no. One more no would have ended it. The standard he wants for Max Miller is the one he had the chance to set for Pete Hegseth.

Accountability in a democracy requires somebody to actually do something. A party has to be willing to lose a seat, its leaders have to say the words out loud, or its voters have to be handed a real alternative on the ballot. Republicans have declined all three for months. No one in leadership asked him to go, the president called him a good person, and the deadline to give their own voters another choice is Wednesday. If Miller does leave before then it will not be because his party decided abuse was disqualifying. It will be that the math finally turned. Either way, this is a party where the winning move, when you are credibly accused, is to attack her mental health, publish her address, and wait.

Republicans have not built a party that occasionally fails women, they have built one where failing them is the playbook, and every operative knows the play. Bernie Moreno knew it before anyone, because he voted for it back when it was still pointed at somebody else's daughter.