Yahoos and footnotes

Awoman posted on social media Saturday that she had become engaged in political debate with another person and, during the conflict in expressed opinion, assaulted that person with bear spray and a flagpole.

She said it was nothing more than an exercise in legitimate political discourse.

I suspect she was being sarcastic. Chances are she was seeking to make a point about the absurdity of the Republican National Committee’s vote the day before. The RNC gave a voice-vote endorsement to a resolution to censure Republican U.S. Reps. Lynn Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for working with Democrats on the House investigation of the riot and revolt of Jan. 6, 2021. The resolution called that day’s events “legitimate public discourse.”

Some of the scruffy revolutionaries inspired that day by the megalomaniacal madness of Donald Trump used bear spray against U.S. Capitol police officers. It helped them overrun the police and break into the building to try to derail the constitutional process of certifying Trump’s defeat. Video shows at least one primitive being pounding a Capitol officer with a flagpole.

It is important at times such as these to present full context for fairness.

Some RNC members said they were not excusing all that behavior that day — battery, vandalism, looting and insurrection. They said they merely were decrying the tactics of the House investigating committee. They mentioned subpoenaing the phone records of an Arizona doctor who happens to be that state’s GOP chairman and who presumed to act as an elector voting for Trump although Trump lost the state.

Complying with such a subpoena would invade the privacy of the doctor’s patients, they said.

But the resolution doesn’t limit itself to any specific investigative affront. Its phrasing dismisses as “legitimate political discourse” the entirety of activities at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

A process exists for editing proposed resolutions. An amendment might have enumerated the supposed investigative tactics of concern. That text could have replaced the clear wording excusing violence and insurrection as legitimate discourse. None was offered.

These RNC members were trying to have it both ways. They wanted to go along with phrasing that excused insurrection and thereby tossed red meat into the kook-right cage. Then they wanted to contend afterward that they personally intended a more narrow application to partisan investigative tactics.

And two more points, just for the record: It is not legitimate public discourse to sign a report to the Electoral College that Trump won your state when he didn’t. And the congressional committee doesn’t care about, and would not share or exploit, calls from patients to a doctor. The committee merely applied the common investigative concept of a dragnet.

Meantime, back in the Trump outpost called Arkansas, no member of the congressional delegation rose during the weekend to issue any statement condemning this RNC attack on congressional fact-finding, Constitution-defending, nation-protecting and law-respecting.

U.S. Rep. French Hill granted an interview on Friday to Talk Business and Politics, but the recording of the session, aired Sunday morning, preceded the RNC vote. Nonetheless, Hill’s attitude in that interview was comically telling. In the context of the committee’s investigation, he said lax security preparation by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, not Trump’s trying to undo democracy by fomenting insurrection, might have been primarily to blame. He was saying Pelosi should have locked down the place better to protect against the president Hill supported.

In the end, there is no difference between the effects of the actions of a Trump-cowed member of Congress and a Trump-worshipping yahoo. Fear is its own form of worship. Excusing insurrection is unforgivable whether from a garden-variety nut case or a good-suited scaredy-cat.

Alone among Arkansas Republican leaders in condemning the NRC resolution was, as usual, Gov. Asa Hutchinson.

He is term-limited, which relieves him of provincial fear. But he has demonstrated several times over seven years as governor that he respects pragmatism and the rule of law. There always is the possibility he is doing what he thinks is right.

When I sent the governor a message Saturday morning asking what if anything he had to say about the NRC resolution, I dreaded that he might respond with some sort of finesse — a middle ground about respecting the rule of law but not approving of over-zealous partisanship in the investigation. But Hutchinson responded decidedly without finesse, saying, “The censure resolution by the RNC is wrong; undermines respect for our rule of law, and divides our party unnecessarily. I am grateful for those courageous dissenters in the RNC vote.”

That made five major Republican officeholders publicly disapproving at that point of the pro-insurrection position of their party. Hutchinson joined Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland and Republican U.S. Senators Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

Remember those names — Hutchinson, Hogan, Romney, Murkowski and Cassidy. They’ll be needed for footnotes in history books telling about this anti-democratic and anti-American era of the Republican Party.