Well, now we know. We know how the Republican Party wants to go down in history. They’ve made it as clear as could be.
First, two-thirds of the members of the Republican caucus of the House of Representatives voted on Jan. 6 to refuse to affirm the results of the presidential election. They continued doing so, we know, after the riot, after Capitol Hill Police Officer Brian Sicknick lay dead, after a mob had defaced the Capitol building. Denying Joe Biden the presidency was, of course, the mission of the mob. So two-thirds of House Republicans voted to condone the mob. And now, we’ve seen that 86 percent of Republican senators have voted to deny what’s in front of their noses and insist that Donald Trump bears no blame they can provide for the riot he incited.
In sum, congressional Republicans have put themselves on record saying that they are, in effect, untroubled by the worst assault on our democracy since the Civil War. The rioters were justified, said the two-thirds of House Republicans who agreed that Biden wasn’t really elected. And Senate Republicans said that the president who urged them to march on the Capitol and fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore and then sat back and watched and did nothing to stop it (and to this day has never denounced it) bore no responsibility for the assault, or at least none that they could mete out. Those 43 Republicans just spit in the face of American democracy.
Why? It’s often observed that it’s because they’re cowards, and yes, that’s true. But as I point out frequently, it’s not only that. It’s also that most of them don’t disapprove of what Trump did. If Trump had been able to steal the election, they’d have been fine with it. It was only when they saw that he was out of options that some of them started to acknowledge that Biden won.
It’s a historic disgrace. The Congress of the United States is supposed to advance democracy. That was the supposition of the founders: that opinions and mores would change, and that Congress would adapt to those changes and broaden the meaning of democracy, the meaning of freedom. At its best moments, it has done that.
It has often thwarted democracy and freedom in small ways. But every so often, it has thwarted democracy and freedom in very big ways. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The blockage of civil rights bills.
And now, this. The bloc of House members who refused to certify Biden’s electors, and the 43 senators who acquitted Trump of incitement, take their place along those reactionary enemies of democracy and freedom. This is one of the darkest episodes in our history, and there is no doubt that historians will mark it as such.
That’s for historians to worry about. For us… well, our worry is that this episode reinforces the party’s descent into authoritarianism. What they’ve done here is blatantly obvious. It’s just about power, now and in the future. They know they’re a minority party. They know that in popular vote terms, they’ve won only one presidential election in the 21st century. They know they’ll probably need to cheat again in the future, so they choose in the here and now not to punish cheating, even if it means the unleashing of fascism. I just heard Chuck Schumer say Republicans chose party over country. That’s true. But a harsher way to put it is that they’ve chosen fascism over democracy. And they’ll pay no penalty and will keep doing it.
And leave it to Mitch McConnell to smirkingly acknowledge the truth after the deed is done. In his post-vote floor remarks, he said, after voting moments earlier to acquit, that “there's no question—none—that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.” In other words, yes, he was guilty, but you are never going to see us Republicans give the liberals the satisfaction of admitting it officially.
So this is where we stand. In the middle of a long, hard… if I may use the word, fight to protect democracy from a party that uses its trappings to try to destroy it. They use election law to try to prevent fair elections. They use voting rights laws to limit voting rights. They use Senate procedure to block items that large majorities in this country support. And now they’ve used the impeachment process to pervert the impeachment process, to acquit a man they know is guilty.
This is what they have become. They wail about the tyranny of the majority. They have become a tyrannical minority.
I hope every Democrat from AOC to Krysten Sinema knows this. This will be the fight of a decade, at least, to save democracy from these people. Having Trump sidelined by conviction might have made that fight easier; although, a small part of me suspects that an acquitted Trump will prove to be much more the Republicans’ problem than the Democrats.
We’ll see about that. But Trump or no Trump, the stakes are the same. We have to keep Jan. 6 and how the Republican Party responded to it in our hearts and minds for a long time to come and make sure historians will not mark it as the beginning of the end, but as the low point from which we arose.
