The Republican Party Bi-Polar Disorder Continues

The worse thing the Republican Part leadership ever did was to allow a malignant narcissist and pathological liar like Donald Trump to gain the party's presidential nomination and then close it eyes to four years of endless lies and misrule. These mistakes, of course, followed on the heels of the leadership's earlier foolish decision to welcome reality denying Christofascists and evangelicals into the part fold.  These steps in turn, with Trump's constant aiding and abetting, set the stage for the embrace of white supremacists as a key element of the GOP base. Trump's last gift to the GOP was to embrace utterly insane QAnon cultists as part of the party.  The GOP now finds itself confronted with a complete shit show, if you will, where the party must decide whether it will be the party of deranged Trump cultists and QAnon crazies or a party that tries to regain some semblance of a moral compass and sanity.  Based on today's events, the congressional Republicans give the appearance of someone with bi-polar disorder who is off their medications.  First, as CNN repots, the GOP voted to keep Liz Cheney in leadership and not punish her for voting to impeach Trump (which I suspect was done for two reasons by Cheney: a view of how history will view these times and a hope to appeal to moderate voters in some future campaign).  Here are highlights from CNN:

House Republicans voted Wednesday night that Rep. Liz Cheney should keep her post in House GOP leadership after she defended her support for impeachment as a vote of conscience during a contentious closed-door GOP conference meeting, a source with knowledge of the process told CNN.

"I won't apologize for the vote," Cheney told the House Republican conference earlier Wednesday evening. . . . Cheney delivered an eight-minute speech near the beginning of the meeting, two people in the room said, offering what was described as a calm yet firm defense of the Constitution. She did not apologize during her remarks. 

Cheney also told members that she wanted a vote to be called on her leadership status, which was interpreted by some in the room as an act of confidence in her standing with a broader cross-section of Republicans, the majority of which did not air their grievances toward her.

House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise both said they support Cheney, according to a person in the room.   

Cheney also fielded several contentious questions and comments from Trump loyalists, . . . 

Yet despite these sane actions, the Washington Post reports that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy refused to take meaningful action against QAnon loony Marjorie Taylor Greene and, despite lip service to the contrary signaled that debased conspiracy theory lunatics still have a place not only in the party base but in Congress.  Here are excerpts from the Post:

The top House Republican leader on Wednesday declined to take action against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene as Democrats moved to remove her from House committees over her past extremist statements — signaling that Republicans intend to turn the issue into a partisan brawl rather than police the rhetoric inside their own ranks. . . . he said he would not bow to demands that she be removed from her committee assignments and accused Democrats of following a double standard and pursuing a “partisan power grab” by seeking to control the minority party’s internal decision-making.

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said Democrats were forced to act after McCarthy and other Republicans declined to do so on their own. Democrats acknowledged the unprecedented nature of the move but said it was necessary given the nature of Greene’s conduct.

“We have never had a member like this before,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the Rules Committee chairman. “This is truly sick stuff.”

The bottom line is that the GOP cannot have it both ways.  It has to either condemn extremism in a meaningful way or it will remain a party rapidly headed toward being the refuge of lunatics and hideous elements of society.  A column in the Washington Post argues that the GOP must make a clean break from Trump and QAnon.  Here are column excerpts:

There is a strange dynamic at work among Senate Republicans. Over the last four years, they showed utter fidelity to the ex-president, including acquitting him in the face of clear evidence of impeachable conduct. Now, Republicans such as John Thune of South Dakota intone on the fate of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).

“Do [House Republicans] want to be the party of limited government and fiscal responsibility, free markets, peace through strength and pro-life or do they want to be the party of conspiracy theories and QAnon?” Thune said on Tuesday. He admonished the House: “It’s a big distraction for them right now and not in a good way.” Has he not been paying attention for the last few years?

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) never piped up when the ex-president was suggesting quack cures for covid-19, siding with the Russian president over our intelligence community or accusing former president Obama of crimes. That was then. Now McConnell warns, “Somebody who’s suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.’s airplane is not living in reality.”

After allowing lies to displace reality and pure propaganda to take the place of problem-solving, McConnell is in a poor position to summon his colleagues back to the fact-based world. Perhaps if he had voted to convict the ex-president last year or immediately recognized President Biden’s victory or had not spent six months refusing to confront Americans’ economic suffering, McConnell would be in a better position to disown his House colleagues.

Understandably, McConnell desperately wants to define his party in a way that prevents them from being labeled the “QAnon Party.” (To borrow a construction from Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), “Not all Republicans are QAnon followers, but all QAnon followers are Republicans.”) But that will not fly so long as Senate Republicans concoct half-baked arguments to rationalize acquitting Trump.

If Republicans want to break from Greene and her fellow extremists, they should follow the lead of Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.). He started his own political action committee, Country1st PAC, to recapture the party from the MAGA crowd, understanding the need for a divorce from the loony forces that now control his caucus’s leadership. “Republicans must say enough is enough.

There is no mystery about how to dissociate themselves from white supremacists, QAnon followers, Proud Boys, anti-Semites and racists. Denounce the conspiracy theories that brought us the attack on the Capitol. Throw out the white supremacists and other anti-democratic elements. Stop screaming “fraud” as an excuse to disenfranchise voters. Start making policy arguments on the merits (decrying “socialism” does not count).

Unless they quit their dependence on a crazed MAGA base and addiction to white grievance politics, the GOP will not recover. And as anyone familiar with 12-step programs knows, the first step is admitting you have a problem.