Editorial

Big Lie Republicans

Republicans just can’t quit Donald Trump. He might be a compulsive liar, a cheater in business as well as in his personal life and he’s an accused rapist, among other things, but Republicans still believe he is their guy and they won’t tolerate anyone telling the inconvenient truth about the 45th President.

Liz Cheney told the truth about the Lying Don and now his GQP loyalists say she has to go.

Trump has insisted there is no way Joe Biden could have beaten him fairly last November, despite the fact that Biden clearly beat him by seven million votes in a record turnout and “Sleepy Joe” flipped five states Trump had won in 2016. That gave Biden a 74-vote victory out of 538 in the Electoral College, but only after Trump and his Republican allies exhausted their efforts to curtail the use of voting by mail and drive-by voting by Democrats who were wary of voting in person during the pandemic.

The Trump campaign filed 62 lawsuits in state and federal courts contesting election processes, vote counting and the vote certification process in many states, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin, but most were dropped or dismissed by state and federal judges and Biden still won all those states except Texas. Recounts in Georgia and Wisconsin didn’t change Biden’s win in either state. A majority of House Republicans signed onto a Trump lawsuit seeking the Supreme Court to throw out the election results in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia, which Trump had won in 2016. The Supreme Court declined to hear the suit.

Neither Attorney General William Barr nor Republican state officials were able to find evidence of widespread voting fraud or irregularities in the election, but Trump campaign officials and attorneys continued to make baseless accusations about voting systems and election officials. Trump urged his supporters to “Stop the Steal” at a rally in Washington on Jan. 6 that turned into a riot at the US Capitol, where Congress was preparing to accept the election results that had been certified by each state.

At a rally on the Ellipse, a park near the White House, Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, endorsed the idea of a “trial by combat.” As the crowd yelled, “Fight for Trump,” Trump then told the supporters to head to the Capitol to demonstrate against Congress certifying Biden’s victory.

The storming of the Capitol followed, which forced the evacuation of the House and Senate as Capitol and Metro DC police were overwhelmed by the rioters and the Trump administration refused to send the DC National Guard to reinforce the police against the rioters who had erected a gallows on the Capitol grounds.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) called the White House Jan. 6 in an attempt to get Trump to tell the mob to end the violence, but Trump seemed unconcerned.

On Jan. 25, when asked on “Fox News Sunday” by host Chris Wallace about Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler’s (R-Wash.) claim that Trump had told McCarthy,“Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” McCarthy declined to confirm or deny it, but he did suggest Trump had responded sufficiently to his pleas for action. In fact, Trump released a video at 4:17 p.m. on Jan. 6, more than four hours into the riot, urging people to go home, but he added, “I love you, you’re very special.”

On the House floor Jan. 13, McCarthy said: “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.” He said he would support a censure resolution against Trump. Instead, McCarthy made a pilgrimage to Mar-A-Lago on Jan. 28 to seek forgiveness and pledge his loyalty to Trump. e

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, and her refusal to accept the Big Lie that Joe Biden stole the election put her in the sights of the Trump Cult. That got her ousted as Republican Conference chair, the third-ranking Republican in the House, on May 12. She was replaced by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.)

Cheney has mainly supported Trump’s policies, with the exception of his lies about the election. She tweeted on May 3, “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”

In a Washington Post column May 5, Cheney wrote that Trump’s claim that he is still the rightful president, and President Biden is illegitimate, provoked violence on Jan. 6 and “there is good reason to believe that Trump’s language can provoke violence again. Trump is seeking to unravel critical elements of our constitutional structure that make democracy work — confidence in the result of elections and the rule of law. No other American president has ever done this.

“The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution. In the immediate wake of the violence of Jan. 6, almost all of us knew the gravity and the cause of what had just happened — we had witnessed it firsthand.”

We note the irony that Rep. Cheney is one of the few elected Republicans speaking truth to power in the GQP. Her father is Dick Cheney, whose Big Lie about Iraq’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction led to the invasion that found no WMDs. Liz Cheney is a right winger who supported Trump’s election in 2016 and she enthusiastically supported his reelection in 2020.

But when Liz is right, we’ll give her credit. She has demanded accountability for the Jan. 6 insurrection and wrote that Republicans should “support the ongoing Justice Department criminal investigations of the Jan. 6 attack. Those investigations must be comprehensive and objective; neither the White House nor any member of Congress should interfere.”

Of course, when the House Republicans oust Cheney from the leadership, and the MAGA cult selects a challenger to take her out of her Wyoming seat next year, it will be a warning to other ambitious Republicans to put their principles aside, along with any sentimental attachments to democracy, and let the party complete its transition to fascism.

Greg Sargent noted in the Washington Post that Republicans are increasingly asserting a willingness to overturn election results they don’t like. In Arizona, a recount of Maricopa County ballots ordered by the Republican-dominated state Senate is plainly designed to manufacture fake evidence bolstering the fiction that the election was stolen. Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.), who tried to overturn Biden’s election, plans to challenge the Georgia secretary of state in the 2022 primary with the promise to “aggressively” pursue “voter fraud.”

If Republicans control the House after the 2024 presidential election, they will be in a position to reject state election outcomes they don’t like, and accept alternate Republican electors, which would complete the coup that was started this past Jan. 6. Even after the rioters were cleared out of the Capitol, 139 representatives and eight senators voted to overturn state election results. Their first attempt failed to make the US government part of the Trump family business. That was the practice run. Don’t let the Big Lie Republicans try another coup. — JMC

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2021

Populist.com