For Trump's GOP, misdeeds barely matter
WASHINGTON » There was a time in the nation’s capital when lines mattered, and when they were crossed, the consequences were swift and severe.
House Speaker Jim Wright, a Democrat, lost his job in 1989 amid charges of corruption and profiteering. Almost a decade later, Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican, lost his after disappointing midterm elections.
Gingrich’s expected successor, Robert Livingston, then admitted he had violated the public’s trust by having an extramarital affair — even as he demanded President Bill Clinton’s resignation for having an affair with a White House intern — and bowed out on his own.
Forced exits
More recently, in rapid succession, Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota and Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, both Democrats, were forced to exit Congress amid charges of sexual harassment during the #MeToo era. On the Republican side, Reps. Blake Farenthold of Texas, Patrick Meehan of Pennsylvania and Trent Franks of Arizona also were driven out by allegations of sexual impropriety.
Yet when the House Republican leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield, was shown to have lied about his response to the deadliest assault on the Capitol in centuries and President Donald Trump’s culpability for it, there was little expectation that the consequences would be swift or severe — or that there would be any at all.
Dissembling is not a crime, but doing so to conceal a wholesale reversal on a matter as serious as an attack on the citadel of democracy and the possible resignation of a president once would have been considered career-ending for a politician, particularly one who aspires to the highest position in the House.
Not so for a Republican in the age of Trump, when McCarthy’s brand of lie was nothing particularly new; maybe it was just a Thursday. On Friday, another House member, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said under oath at an administrative law hearing in Atlanta that she could “not recall” having advocated Trump imposing martial law to stop the transfer of power to Joe Biden, a position that would seem difficult to forget.
`No consequences'
“It’s a tragic indictment of the political process these days — and the Republican Party of late — that truth doesn’t matter, words don’t matter, everybody can be elastic in areas that were once viewed as concrete,” said Mark Sanford, a former Republican governor of South Carolina who lied to the public about his whereabouts when he was pursuing an extramarital affair in South America and was censured by the state House of Representatives. “You cross lines now, and there are no longer consequences.”
Sanford’s political comeback as a Republican member of the House ended when he crossed the one line that does still matter in his party: He condemned Trump as intolerant and untrustworthy. Trump called him “nothing but trouble,” and Sanford
was defeated in a primary in 2018.
It was Trump who showed just how few consequences there could be for transgressions that once seemed beyond the pale for the nation’s leaders in 2016, when he survived the release of leaked audio in which he boasted of sexually assaulting women — then went on to win the presidency. In the years afterward, he survived two impeachment trials.
Those episodes were vivid proof, if any more were needed, that tribalism and party loyalty now outweigh any notion of integrity, or even steadfast policy beliefs. But if there were any questions about whether the end of Trump’s presidency would begin to restore old mores and guardrails, the past months have put those to rest.
Last month, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., angered fellow Republicans by saying lawmakers he “looked up to” had invited him to parties involving sex and cocaine. The allegations drew condemnation from McCarthy, who told Republican lawmakers that Cawthorn had later admitted they were untrue, though the House Republican leader stopped short of punishing him.
Cawthorn’s troubles seemed to get worse Friday when Politico published photos of him in women’s lingerie, undercutting the image he presents of himself as a social conservative. Hardly chastened, Cawthorn responded on Twitter: “I guess the left thinks goofy vacation photos during a game on a cruise (taken waaay before I ran for Congress) is going to somehow hurt me? They’re running out of things to throw at me.”