The
G.O.P. Can No Longer Be Relied On to Protect Democracy
By John Cassidy
December 12, 2020
The gall of Kevin McCarthy and his fellow-backers
of Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the election is only surpassed
by their irresponsibility and fecklessness.
How low has the Party of
Lincoln fallen? In answering this question, it is instructive to look at the
example of Kevin McCarthy, a seven-term California congressman who, since 2019,
has served as the House Minority Leader. Until Donald
Trump appeared on the scene, McCarthy wasn’t regarded as
particularly conservative—at least by the standards of today’s Republican
Party. When, in 2015, he abandoned a bid to become Speaker of the House,
some Tea Party activists celebrated.
In
the summer of 2016, McCarthy endorsed Trump for President, but only after the
interloper from New York had sewn up the nomination. A year later, it emerged
that, in June of 2016, McCarthy had told some of his fellow-members of the
House Republican leadership that he believed—“swear to God”—that Trump was in
the pay of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. When the Washington Post eventually reported about these
comments, McCarthy tried to laugh them off as a joke.
The
nature of the accommodation that McCarthy made with his conscience, when he
jumped onto the Trump train, can only be speculated upon. It’s perhaps fair to
assume that he didn’t realize exactly where the tracks would lead, but, given
his comments in 2016, it’s also clear that he didn’t harbor any illusions about
the man he was endorsing.
In
any case, after McCarthy took over as House Minority Leader, he followed
Trump’s wishes so slavishly that the President started to refer to him as “my Kevin.” On Friday,
McCarthy took the ultimate Trump-loyalist move and threw his backing behind the
President’s outlandish bid to overthrow the 2020 election result. Along with a
hundred and twenty-five other Republican representatives, McCarthy added his
name to an amicus brief supporting the lawsuit filed by Ken Paxton, the
attorney general of Texas, and backed by seventeen other
Republican state attorneys general, that requested the Supreme Court throw out
the duly certified election results from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and
Michigan.
On
Friday night, the Court dismissed this scurrilous lawsuit on the grounds that
Texas had no standing to challenge election results in other states. (My
colleague Amy Davidson Sorkin has more on the Supreme Court ruling.) And how
did McCarthy respond to this rebuke from the Court? On Friday night, he said
nothing. On Saturday morning, he maintained his silence, but tweeted out a video of himself talking to
Senator Tim Scott, of South Carolina, the lone Black Republican senator. “The
Republican Party is the Party of Lincoln, grounded in the values of freedom and
equality for all people,” McCarthy said in the tweet.
The
gall of McCarthy and his fellow Trump toadies in the Republican Party is only
surpassed by their irresponsibility and fecklessness. In taking their oaths of
office as members of Congress, they swore that they would “support and defend
the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and
domestic.” And, yet, here they were, supporting a Trump venture that the
attorney general of Pennsylvania, in a brief opposing the Texas lawsuit, described as a
“seditious abuse of the judicial process.” The gambit amounted to a flagrant
effort to overturn the most basic liberty enshrined in the Constitution: the
right of the people to choose their leaders. In the unlikely event that the
lawsuit had succeeded, the country would have been plunged into chaos, and
Trump would have succeeded in his reckless effort to defy the rules of
democracy.
The
only conceivable defense for the actions of the Republican signatories is that
they supported the Texas lawsuit in the sure knowledge that it would fail.
Terrified of incurring the wrath of an enraged Bully-in-Chief, they postured
for him, and for the maga mob.
But what sort of defense is this for politicians elected to a body that likes
to see itself as a model for the world? A pitiful one at best, and not one that
would stand up in any court of law or any court of history. One lesson of
failed democracies is that when officials or institutions genuflect before
would-be authoritarians, in the hope that somebody else will head them off, or
control them, the results can be disastrous.
After
the events of the past few weeks, it is easy to sympathize with the editorial
writers of the Orlando Sentinel, who published a column on
Friday expressing regret to their readers for the support they afforded one of
the Trump minions, Representative Michael Waltz, of Florida’s Sixth District,
going into November 3rd. “We apologize to our readers for endorsing Michael
Waltz in the 2020 general election for Congress,” the editorial said. “We had
no idea, had no way of knowing at the time, that Waltz was not committed to
democracy.”
A
fair reading of the G.O.P.’s record of gerrymandering and voter suppression
over the past couple of decades, and its abject servility toward Trump during
the past four years, is that its commitment to democracy has long been
subservient to its desire to retain power. But even for an organization as
tarnished as this one, the decision by so many Republican congressmen, and so many
state attorneys general, to support the Texas lawsuit marked a new low.
And
it’s not over yet—it never is when you put your lot in with a pathological
narcissist who has no regard for you, your party, or democracy, beyond the
services that they can render to him. On Saturday morning, Trump tweeted, “WE
HAVE JUST BEGUN TO FIGHT!!!” Later in the day, en route to the Army-Navy
football game, the President’s Marine One helicopter flew over Freedom Plaza, at
Pennsylvania Avenue and Fourteenth Street, where thousands of alt-right
activists were holding a “Stop the Steal” rally, demanding that the results of
the election be overturned.
On
Monday, the Electoral College will meet and officially cast its votes to elect
Joe Biden, who won by three hundred and six votes to two hundred and
thirty-two. But Trump isn’t quite done. His eyes are on January 6th, when
Congress will hold a joint session to ratify the work of the Electoral College.
In the coming days and weeks, he will, doubtless, demand that Republicans in
Congress reject the vote counts from a number of states, which could cause
bedlam. How will McCarthy and his colleagues react to Trump’s next entreaties?
Anyone hoping for a belated display of character and commitment to democracy is
likely to be disappointed.
