The Republicans Need a Reckoning

As the new Special Counsel investigating Donald Trump and the January 6., 2021, insurrection issues numerous subpoenas and reports surge that 34 Republican members of Congress sent texts to Trump chief of staff, Mark Meadows seeking the overthrow of the 2020 presidential election, it is shocking to see what has become of theRepublican Party.  Staying in power is all that motivates the majority of Republicans and there is literally nothing they won't stoop to to further that end.  Nothing else matters, and no amount of lunacy or outright sedition - treason by another name - seems to be beyond the pale.  Some will argue that the party always harbored crazies and violent elements, but even if true those elements did not control the party.  Now, they do an loyalty to the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law have been thrown by the wayside and rather than respect knowledge and modern scientific knowledge, ignorance is celebrated and conspiracy theories no matter how wild are embraced.   Today's Republican Party is a domestic threat and the party of sedition.  A serious reckoning is needed - one can only hope Americans quickly come to this realization.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the debasement of the GOP.  Here are excerpts:

The pretense that the seditionists in the GOP are limited to a handful of kooks who worship Donald Trump is no longer sustainable. If there are any Republicans left who care about the Constitution, the time to speak up is now.

The near miss of the midterms, in which almost all of the most extreme Republicans were defeated, seems to have generated a certain amount of complacency about the ongoing threat to the American system of government. I know, of course, that many of our fellow citizens are well aware of the dangers posed by conspiracy theorists, election deniers, and other assorted enemies of the Constitution. And I cannot blame people for becoming numb: You can watch a Paul Gosar or a Marjorie Taylor Greene spouting off like pinwheels of paranoia only so many times.

But we cannot ignore recent developments. Only a few days ago, Greene took the stage in formal attire at the New York Young Republican Club gala and said, “I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that”—the January 6 insurrection—“we would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve been armed.” A few days before that, Gosar posted and then deleted a tweet supporting Trump’s call for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution.

These are not examples from the fringe. Dozens of Republicans contacted then–White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows after the 2020 election and right through to Trump’s last days in office with wild theories and desperate ideas about how to keep the 45th president in power. The Meadows texts were obtained by the House January 6 committee and then published by Talking Points Memo. The messages are alternately stomach-turning and comical, in some cases at the same time.

[O]nly 11 days after the insurrection and roughly 72 hours before Joe Biden was to be sworn in, Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina pleaded with Meadows:

Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of  no return  in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!

This is a member of the U.S. Congress insisting, in a jumble of exclamation points and capital letters, that a sitting president call out the men and women of the United States military to nullify an election and prevent, by force of arms, the constitutional transfer of power. This is sedition, and it is madness. It is also evidence of a shocking inability to spell; if you’re going to advocate for a coup, the least we might expect is that you first learn how to spell martial law.

What Norman is probably counting on, of course, is that people will forget about his behavior and that of his colleagues. We are all prone to “normalcy bias,” the human inclination to disregard the danger that things could change dramatically in a short time. Normalcy bias is why our minds sometimes refuse to grasp threats that range from natural disasters to nuclear war; we assume that tomorrow will always look something like today.

But this unwillingness to think about danger should not stop us from confronting the undeniable fact, as the TPM report put it, that we now have a record of “Republican members of Congress strategizing in real time to reverse the results” of the 2020 election.

[T]hese election deniers and seditionists are still in Congress—Norman won reelection with nearly 65 percent of the vote in his district—and they have faced no real repercussions for their disloyalty to the Constitution.

Indeed, these same people will be sworn back into office in January, making a mockery of their oath. Worse, they will be the majority. Representative Jim Jordan is expected to become the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Conservatives bristling at this as a selective focus on the fringe might argue that there are still loyal Republicans out there who will defend the Constitution, and that it is a mistake to describe the entire party as a dangerous movement based on lies and sedition. But we must ask when those Republicans are going to rise up and oppose the enemy in their midst. What conclusion can we reach about the GOP when a supposed centrist such as Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin campaigned for Trump’s would-be clone in Arizona, Kari Lake? How much fidelity to the Constitution can we presume from Ohio Senator-elect J. D. Vance (a Yale Law School graduate) when he gladly accepts Greene’s endorsement and support?

What will it take for prominent Republican leaders to say that they will not share a party or a platform with the likes of Norman, Gosar, and Greene? Who will stay, and who will go? If there was ever a time for the last sensible Republicans to remember that they are the party of Lincoln, the man who saved the Union and its Constitution, and to declare a war against their seditionist wing, this is it. And if they won’t—or can’t—then that should tell Americans everything they need to know about the party and its base.