For GOP, apparently the only acceptable truth is a lie
As Liz Cheney’s fall from grace among her House Republican colleagues has unfolded these past few months, it has been tempting to compare the drama to the Salem witch trials.
Normally, I would never use the W-word in the context of a modern female. But then I turned to the trusty Internet and came across the following explanation of those trials: “The Salem witch trials and executions came about as the result of a combination of church politics, family feuds, and hysterical children, all of which unfolded in a vacuum of political authority.”
Well. Substitute Republican politics for “church,” intraparty squabbling for “family feuds,” and Trumplicans for “hysterical children,” and, voilà, you have yourself a GOP conference meeting called to terminate Cheney from her job as House Republican conference chair.
All of which [unfolded] Wednesday in a vacuum of political authority.
Plenty will say good riddance for her stubborn refusal to be a team player. As one Republican said to me recently: “She forgot who she works for.”
Even Cheney’s supporters acknowledge that she’s a bull when it comes to standing firm on principle. She’ll even break a few plates to make her point. And that point would be?
Several, really. First, she has the audacity to insist that Republicans accept the outcome of the 2020 election. She has called for the party to disavow Donald Trump as the GOP’s leader. She has urged that the GOP appoint a committee to investigate the Jan. 6 riot for which many
Americans blame Trump. And, of course, she voted to impeach Trump, for which there is no forgiveness, as Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, will confirm.
In repeating her objections to the party she is helping to lead, Cheney may have become hostage to her instincts. It was clear that Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., the House minority leader, wanted her gone and had someone in mind to replace her. New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Trump loyalist, recently told Steve Bannon on his online radio show that she looked forward to “working with the president and working with all of our excellent Republican members of Congress.” She was not referring to President Joe Biden.
As third in the House GOP hierarchy, Cheney might have risen to become House speaker someday. But after she survived a first no-confidence vote in February, Cheney dug her heels in even deeper. She criticized some of her fellow Republicans and promised to defend her impeachment vote “every day of the week.”
She also said that any lawmaker in Congress who tried to invalidate Biden’s victory should be disqualified from seeking the presidency. Just a hunch, but I think she was talking to you, Josh Hawley. The brash, young senator from Missouri famously saluted the Jan. 6 protesters with a raised fist just before the insurrection. I’m mesmerized by this image of him, which is so familiar to mothers of little boys. It conveys the triumphant “bad boy” vibe of a 10-year-old trying to act tough around the cool dudes.
Such as Liz Cheney, who doesn’t need to raise a fist. She IS the fist.
By now, the GOP probably has heard enough about its lack of courage, lack of diversity and its allegiance to the exurban myth that Trump won last November. Even McCarthy surely knows that his party isn’t growing in the ways it must if it is to endure. But he sealed the GOP’s fate when, shortly after the insurrection, he traveled to visit Trump at his Mar-a-Lago compound in Florida, where he made a deal with the devil.
To think that McCarthy once shared Cheney’s views and blamed Trump’s rhetoric for the riot that left six people dead. Like other hysterics who live in the GOP’s modern-day version of Salem, there is only one acceptable truth now. Even though it is false.
There are worse things than losing a job in defense of principle. If telling the truth reduces the number of one’s friends, it also exposes the depth of the cowards. Gutsy leaders like Cheney will always be outnumbered by the latter.