A Party of Cowards
What makes the modern Republican Party so uniquely frightening is not they are wedded to principle. It’s that they have no principles at all.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If someone sent you this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
This morning the House Republican caucus voted to remove Rep. Liz Cheney from her leadership position. In a move befitting the cowardice of the moment, the ballot was not recorded but instead conducted by voice vote.
Cheney’s departure was, of course, a foregone conclusion. Her refusal to embrace Donald Trump’s lie about the 2020 election — and stay quiet about it — made her position in the House leadership simply untenable. Congressional Republicans have made the strategic decision that keeping Trump happy is their most important political priority and their best path back to winning back control of the House and Senate. If that means accepting his false claims about the 2020 election, then so be it.
What is particularly depressing about this episode (and there’s a lot here to be depressed about) is that this stands in stark contrast to what happened after the November election. As I wrote back in January, “Trump’s attempted theft of the election failed miserably because the overwhelming number of GOP officials put fealty to democracy ahead of fealty to Trump.”
“Officials in a number of states had the option of going along with Trump and chose not to. Trump brought state GOP legislators from Michigan to the White House to apparently convince them not to certify the state’s election results for President Biden. They said no. He phoned the Republican speaker of Pennsylvania’s House of Representatives for help in reversing his defeat there. He said no. Trump made repeated efforts to coax Republican state officials in Georgia, including the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, and Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, to undo the state’s electoral results. That effort was stymied as well.
Trump’s campaign team filed 62 campaign lawsuits, including many that were adjudicated by judges appointed by Trump and came before Election Day. Sixty-one of them failed. Attorney General Bill Barr and Vice President Mike Pence refused to help Trump … Over and over again, when given the choice to help Trump steal the election, Republican officials refused to go along.”
Of course, as we know, a majority of House Republicans DID support Trump and voted not to certify the 2020 election results. But they did so, in large part, because they knew the effort would fail. This was fundamentally a political decision - a signal to Trump and his supporters that they were on their side.
In the weeks after January 6 and the Senate impeachment trial, Republicans had a choice to make. They could follow the path of Brad Raffensperger in Georgia and other Republican state officials, including the former Vice President, who stood up for the rule of law. Or they could embrace Trump’s lies. With Cheney’s departure, their choice is clear.
In a revealing interview this week with the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of a handful of House Republicans who voted to impeach President Trump, made clear that cowardice and cynicism are the two biggest drivers of Republican behavior today. Kinzinger, reports Milbank, “thinks that only about 10 House Republicans are dumb enough to genuinely believe that Trump won the election. The rest simply fear primary challenges and therefore accept McCarthy’s belief that ‘winning a majority was more important than a clear-eyed recognition of what happened on January 6.’”
It was a point further highlighted last week by Eliana Johnson in Politico, who argued that the annoyance with Cheney, among House Republicans, had less to do with what she was saying about Trump and the 2020 election and more that she wouldn’t stop talking about it.
The GOP’s refusal to push back on Trump and their enabling of his lies about 2020 is almost entirely transactional. It has less to do with a concerted, strategic effort to steal future elections and more to do with the fact that congressional Republicans are a bunch of craven, cynical, and pathetic cowards who are more than willing to surrender every last fiber of their integrity to keep their jobs and get back into the majority in Congress.
We’ve seen this for more than a decade now. When Republicans winked and nodded at birtherism, it was not because they necessarily believed that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. It was because they knew it would be politically beneficial to play to the racist beliefs of their most committed supporters. When so many embraced Donald Trump after initially expressing horror at his presidential candidacy, they were simply following the lead of their party’s increasingly extremist rank-and-file voters.
Over and over, during the Trump presidency, they refused to stand up and speak out against an authoritarian, corrupt, and law-breaking president. As Kinzinger notes, “I have watched us compromise with crazy basically every two years. All that becomes is the starting position for the next iteration towards crazy.”
The GOP’s collective cowardice reached a crescendo earlier this year when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell condemned Trump for his actions during the January 6 insurrection but still made clear he’d support the former president if he was the party nominee in 2024. For the modern GOP, the pursuit of political power is the only principle that matters.
It’s part of the reason why so many non-crazy congressional Republicans have checked out and not run for reelection. The cost of remaining in Republican politics is to enable Trump, and that’s a price that many are not willing to pay. I am reminded of the warning issued by former Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake in 2017 when he announced that he would not seek reelection. He said at the time, “too often we rush … not to salvage principle, but to forgive and excuse our failures so that we might accommodate them and go right on failing until the accommodation itself becomes our principle. In that way and over time, we can justify almost any behavior and sacrifice any principle. I am afraid that this is where we now find ourselves.”
As Flake warned, the defining principle of the modern GOP has become not simply an embrace of authoritarianism but a refusal to stand up to it. Cowardice and cynicism in the face of assault after assault on our democratic institutions are the way to political success, and a frighteningly large number of Republicans are happy to walk that path. It’s how you get from courageous truth-telling offered by Liz Cheney to the pathetic toadying of Rep. Elise Stefanik, the woman who will likely replace her in the GOP leadership. A party that embraces the language of Christianity has decided that gaining the whole world and losing their soul is a price they are willing to pay.
The thing is, just because Republicans are embracing Trump’s lies for purely cynical reasons, it doesn't make it any less insidious than if they are doing it because they believe those lies are true. A political party that refuses to stand firm on any democratic principle and willingly, even enthusiastically, embraces a dishonest and authoritarian leader is a party that simply can’t be trusted to ever draw a line in the sand. They are a party that will continue to lower the bar until they no longer can tell the difference between right and wrong - and will run out any member who stands up and says, “we’ve gone too far.” Pushing out Cheney has much to do with the fact that she won’t be a team player, but make no mistake it’s also an effort to swat away their conscience - and the voice telling them that they must stop what they are doing. What makes the modern Republican Party so uniquely frightening is not they are wedded to principle. It’s that they have no principles at all.
What’s Going On?
Kudos to Katha Pollitt for this excellent column on the media’s rush to judgment on New York mayoral candidate Scott Stringer and the unsubstantiated allegations of sexual impropriety lodged against him.
Very smart discussion from the folks at fivethirtyeight.com on the chances the GOP takes back the House in 2022.
It’s behind a paywall, but this is a great piece by Jesse Singal on how baseless media narratives become accepted and embraced. I’ll be talking to Jesse this week about his new book, “The Quick Fix.”
An interesting read from David Leonhardt on outdoor mask-wearing.
Tweet of the Day
This tweet from freshman Republican Madison Cawthorn is the perfect description of the modern Republican Party. It belongs in a time capsule.
Musical Interlude and This Week In History
Bob Marley passed away 40 years ago this week, and on what is a particularly depressing day in American politics, here’s a pretty great song to cheer you up.
I’m not sure if this is my favorite Bob Marley song, but it definitely contains my favorite Bob Marley lyric, “One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain.”
I'm trying to imagine what a post-Trump Republican Party would look like at this point. This would probably require his passing away (Heaven forbid), because even if he is on trial or in prison his sycophants would still follow him.
But if we think this situation is insane with Trunp leading it, the aftermath would probably be much worse. Rather than having one amoral, criminally motivated (or monetarily motivated), 'fearless leader', the Republican party would have hundreds of aspirants to Nero's throne, all screaming "I'm the Trumpiest!". And attempting to demonstrate how Trumpy they are. What a nightmare.