The irony and hypocrisy in a couple of news stories last night caught my eye. As you may recall, Liz Cheney, the Republican Representative from Wyoming, and the third most powerful Republican House member crossed party lines and voted in favor of impeaching Trump following the insurrection at the Capitol. That was her ‘sin’. For that, she became the target of an effort by some Trump loyalists to oust her from her position. Some members of the House far-right Freedom Caucus even accused Cheney of ‘aiding the enemy’. Really?
Matt Gaetz, a representative from Florida, travelled all the way to Cheney’s home state of Wyoming to hold a MAGA rally aimed solely at Cheney. This has been building ever since she had the audacity to vote to impeach Trump and it finally came to a head last night when the House GOP conducted a vote which resulted in Cheney being able to keep her powerful position. However, that was not until after a few fireworks, some of which were the result of Montana’s own sole representative. “Rep. Matt Rosendale of Montana engaged in a fiery exchange with her, a person in the room said, speaking loudly and angrily at Cheney.”1 (We who live here in Montana should be so proud that our elected representative is working so diligently to address all of the problems facing Montana.)
Trump’s impeachment trial will begin on Monday. His first legal team consisting of five attorneys abruptly walked out after they refused to mount a defense based upon the voter fraud ‘big lie’ which has been repeatedly debunked in court rooms around the country. The two lawyers that now constitute his defense team apparently will construct their defense of the former president based upon two basic arguments: 1) when he addressed the crowd on Jan 6th and implored them to march to the Capitol, he was exercising his First Amendment rights of free speech and 2) that the whole effort to have an impeachment trial after he has left office is unconstitutional.
What I find ironic is that part of Trump’s defense will revolve around a First Amendment argument but that apparently doesn’t apply to Liz Cheney. She has stated that her vote to impeach Trump was a vote of conscious. She should, under the constitution, have the right to cast her vote however she chooses. How is it that Trump’s defense team is arguing that he was just exercising his constitutional rights (which resulted in an insurrection!) but Cheney gets chastised for doing the exact same thing? It’s even more interesting (and depressing) that the GOP seems to think that Liz Cheney is a bigger problem than Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon supporting representative from Georgia, who has spouted some remarkable things.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has supported posts calling for the execution of Democrats. She has stated that a number of school mass shootings were staged. She accused one of the student survivors of the Parkland shooting of being a paid actor. And that is not to mention all of the anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic and racists things she has said. So, after attacking Liz Cheney, a number of Republicans are kind of circling the wagons around MTG.
Some Republicans are trying to draw an equivalency between MTG and the Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota to ‘justify’ MTG’s behavior. It is true that Representative Omar did make some anti-Semitic remarks. However, Speaker Pelosi and the other Democratic leadership immediately condemned those remarks and forced her to issue an apology, which she did. And, by the way, Representative Omar, never made any remarks even close to supporting the execution of people. Nor were her comments based upon conspiracy theories that are provably false, e.g., the school shootings were staged.
House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, finally issued a statement condemning MTG’s statements. However, he refused to remove her from her committee assignments. Representative Steve King, a Republican from Kansas, was removed from his committee assignments for a series of racist comments but McCarthy has refused the same sanction against MTG whose remarks are even more egregious. Since the GOP leadership has failed to act, the issue will go to the floor of the House where a vote will be taken to strip MTG of her committee assignments.
If the Republican Party believes that Liz Cheney’s decision to vote to impeach Trump is a bigger problem than all of the crap spouted by Marjorie Taylor Greene, then the party is truly lost in the swamp of Trumpism, QAnon and whatever the latest ‘conspiracy du jour’ is. I certainly don’t agree with Liz Cheney on a lot of things but she has certainly shown that she has the courage to stand up to the Trumpist extremism that has become a pandemic within the Republican party – and for that, she commands my respect.
Our country hasn’t been this crazy and divided since the Civil War. It looks like it is going in that direction like a run away train. I see no hope that war can be avoided because half of our country has fallen victim to the Trump cult and cults are one of the hardest things to deprogram. Trump will go down in infamy as the worst, most destructible, President our country ever had.