Republicans don’t believe in the American experiment
The Jan. 6 committee, which held its ninth and likely final hearing recently, has lionized the figure of the Decent Republican. Liz Cheney, vice chair of the committee, was its obvious star, imbued with moral authority by the fact that she’d sacrificed her position in Republican leadership, and possibly her political career, to stand up to Donald Trump.
But there were many others. “When you look back at what has come out through this committee’s work, the most striking fact is that all this evidence comes almost entirely from Republicans,” the committee’s Democratic chair, Bennie Thompson, said Thursday.
But the committee’s emphasis on Republican valor meant that the story the committee told was incomplete. The threat to the American experiment comes not just from Mr. Trump, but from the Republican base.
The problem for Decent Republicans is that their party’s internal democracy makes a commitment to democracy writ large impossible. For decades, prominent right-wing politicians, pastors and pundits — Ms. Cheney very much included — cultivated in their base the belief that Democrats represent totalitarian evil.
Not surprisingly, the base came to see Democratic victories as intolerable and rejected candidates who would respect the results of general elections. As The Washington Post reported, a majority of Republican nominees for House, Senate and important statewide offices either doubt or deny that Joe Biden won in 2020.
Queen of the election deniers is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. In his engrossing new book “Weapons of Mass Delusion,” Robert Draper chronicles Ms. Greene’s rise in parallel with Ms. Cheney’s fall.
Plenty of Republican officials, and ex-officials, wish it were the reverse. Mr. Draper has a detailed re-creation of the Feb. 3, 2021, meeting where House Republicans first voted on removing Mr. Cheney from her position as Republican conference chair, a vote she survived. “How is it going to look if we kick out Liz Cheney and keep Marjorie Taylor Greene?” asked Tom Reed, a moderate Republican from upstate New York.
Initially, Kevin McCarthy, House minority leader, persuaded the party to close ranks behind both Ms. Cheney and Ms. Greene. “I’m not letting Dems pick us off one by one,” he said, adding: “You elected me leader. Let. Me. Lead.”
But Mr. McCarthy is, fundamentally, a follower. By May, Mr. Draper writes, House Republicans were telling him that “Cheney was becoming a major distraction and a problem for their voters back home.” Ms. Greene, meanwhile, had a deep connection to those voters, who considered Democrats demonic and the elections they win fake. This gave her power that Mr. McCarthy deferred to.
According to Mr. Draper, Mr. McCarthy invited Ms. Greene “to high-level conferences in his office, making a show of sitting next to her and soliciting her opinions.” Last year Democrats stripped Ms. Greene of her committee assignments for promoting conspiracy theories and suggesting that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, should be executed. If Republicans win the House, Mr. McCarthy has promised to put Ms. Greene on more powerful committees than she was on before. A source told Mr. Draper that Mr. McCarthy even offered Ms. Greene a leadership position.
The truth is, if Republicans win — a recent New York Times/ Siena College poll shows them ahead by 3 points among likely voters — Ms. Greene will be a leader no matter what Mr. McCarthy does. Chances are she’ll be at the forefront of an expanding Make America Great Again squad, with at least one Republican who was at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and maybe more. A Georgia Republican who has promised to be a “great teammate” for Ms. Greene, Mike Collins, has a campaign video in which he shoots a gun at what looks like a garbage can full of explosives marked “Voting Machine.”
It goes without saying that these Republicans will disband the Jan. 6 committee and impeach President Biden. They’ll probably seek vengeance for Ms. Greene — and Paul Gosar, who lost his committee assignments for tweeting an animé video altered to show him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y — by stripping Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and other progressives of their committee assignments.
Expect them to shut down the government more than once and to launch investigations into the Department of Justice over its investigation of Mr. Trump. If the 2024 election is disputed, they’ll do all they can to swing it to Republicans. It’s what their voters are sending them to Congress to do.
“Our institutions only hold when men and women of good faith make them hold, regardless of the political cost,” Ms. Cheney said at the most recent Jan. 6 hearing. “We have no guarantee that these men and women will be in place next time.” Indeed, we have a guarantee that many of them won’t be.