How many Rusty Bowers Republicans are out there?

Note to every politician in the GOP: You have to decide. You can be a Rusty Bowers Republican.

Or you can be a Donald Trump Republican.

You can be someone who says to Rudy Giuliani: “’Look, you are asking me to do something that is counter to my oath, when I swore to the Constitution to uphold it. And I also swore to the Constitution and the laws of the state of Arizona. And this is totally foreign as an idea or a theory to me.” That’s the road Arizona House Speaker Bowers took when he refused to set aside the decision of his state’s voters to support Democrat Joe Biden — even though Bowers had supported and campaigned for Trump.

Or you can be someone for whom it is oaths, laws, the Constitution and the preservation of democracy that are entirely foreign to his worldview. For former President Donald Trump, power and selfinterest are all.

And so Trump encouraged violence against election workers, asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” for him that didn’t exist, and encouraged his campaign to support fake Electoral College slates that would back him.

Many moments in the Jan. 6 committee hearings have underscored that there is a moral vacuum where Trump’s conscience should be. But there is something even worse than the attempted cheating and lawbreaking and lying. It is the former president’s willingness to target public servants who do their duty and egg on supporters to threaten them with violence.

Every Republican officeholder should listen to Ruby Freeman, a Georgia election worker falsely accused of wrongdoing by Trump and his cronies: “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?” Her daughter Shaye Moss, who also served as an election worker, testified about Trump supporters breaking into her grandmother’s home to perform a “citizen’s arrest” and inundating her with hateful, racist threats.

GOP politicians have been stunningly quiet about the big doings at the Jan. 6 hearings. Their reticence speaks to the success of the committee. It has put forward so much convincing evidence of Trump’s wrongdoing — with most of the testimony coming from Republicans — that GOP leaders are finding few ways of either defending him or discrediting the work of the committee. But silence is not the right response.

Refusing to break with Trump now, forcefully and definitively, is to demonstrate a complete indifference to what the ethics of a constitutional republic and democracy require.

They should let Bowers set them free to reason and act. A solid conservative, he stood up for his oath and the demands of his faith when doing so was hard, when he was besieged by Trump and his henchmen.

They should let Raffensperger, who beat a Trump-backed candidate this year, set them free. He offered a simple but weighty reason that Trump’s election fabrications and manipulations must be rejected: “The numbers are the numbers,” Raffensperger said. “The numbers don’t lie.”

And the testimony of Freeman and Moss cries out to Republicans: Turn back from Trump’s path once and for all. He was willing to use threats and lies to destroy the lives of two grassroots citizens dedicated to the most basic work of democracy. Can any Republican in good conscience defend what Trump did?

The Jan. 6 committee has done Republicans a great service. It has lifted up members of their party who showed integrity and courage. And it has laid out in lurid detail exactly how egregious Trump’s behavior was.

This is the moment for Republicans to rid themselves of Trump. I wish I had more confidence that the party would seize the opportunity.