In an ideal world, it wouldn’t be hard for the Republican Party to do two things. The first is to acknowledge that former President Donald Trump’s claims of widespread, result-altering election fraud are false and corrosive to public confidence in elections. The second is that what happened on Jan. 6 was an inexcusable outburst of violence, fueled by the lies (or delusions) of the then-president, for which people need to be held accountable if they are indeed culpable.
One can believe the above lines of thought and still be a Republican, still be a conservative and still think the Democratic Party has the wrong ideas for America. One can even believe there are weaknesses in the integrity of America’s elections and still believe those things.
Yet here the Republican Party is today: The former president is continuing to make patently false claims about the 2020 election, while the Republican National Committee is trying to make political martyrs out of people involved in the riotous events of Jan. 6.
The former president recently declared that former Vice President Mike Pence had the power “to overturn the election,” implicitly blaming him for not exercising this non-existent authority.
Let’s pause for a moment and think about that. A former president is claiming that a vice president had the authority to overturn a presidential election. All one needs to do is review the Constitution’s straightforward explanation of the ceremonial counting of certified electoral votes to know this is nonsense.
Republicans need to be honest with themselves. If this were a Democratic president, they would be denouncing such a president as an authoritarian threat to our constitutional republic,
Fortunately, Trump’s nonsensical claim drew a needed rebuke from Pence. “President Trump is wrong,” said Pence in remarks to the Federalist Society last week. “I had no right to overturn the election.”
The Republican Party needs more adults in the room to call things as they should be.
Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee censured Republican Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois for daring to participate in a House investigation into the events of Jan. 6.
“Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger are participating in Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate public discourse, and they are both utilizing their past professed political affiliation to mask Democrat abuse of prosecutorial power for partisan purposes,” the censure statement read.
By conflating the effort to overturn a legitimate election with “legitimate public discourse,” the RNC is displaying an absurd lack of judgment about an event that isn’t difficult to condemn and see for what it was.
Locally, San Bernardino County Supervisor Janice Rutherford, a staunch conservative, had an understandable response to this statement. “‘Legitimate political discourse’ does not describe what I saw on January 6th. I’ve been [a member of the GOP] since the day I turned 18, but I’m out today. I love my country & liberty too much to abide either of the major parties’ nonsense,” tweeted Rutherford.
Kudos to Rutherford for speaking out.
So long as Americans remain limited to a two-party political system, it is essential that the two parties be encouraged to be as reasonable as possible. Clearly, the national GOP is experiencing an ongoing internal fight over whether or not to double down on the erratic populism of Donald Trump. It isn’t yet clear which direction the GOP will go, but the current trajectory isn’t promising.