While I think this is a move that is long overdue…someone who has decided to wage war on her own caucus is hardly someone who can be trusted to lead its ‘messaging’ efforts (pardon me as I guffaw at the idea of the House GOP staying on message)…I believe that the commentary that declares this is a symptom of GOP disunity at the worst possible time is not accurate. In the short- and long-run, purging cynical opportunists like Cheney from GOP leadership ranks and from the GOP, in general, is a good and necessary thing if we are going to compete and win in the future. As someone famous once said, “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand.” Cheney is the poster child for the elitist, wealthy Congressional Republicans who have sucked up to Democrats and the media while holding their voters in utter contempt to which President Trump’s election was a reaction. She won’t fight the Democrats. She has no ideas th
This article originally appeared at FAIR.org. Used by permission.
Major media outlets have largely come around a day late and a dollar short to calling out Donald Trump s extremism and lies, particularly the Big Lie that the election was stolen (FAIR.org, 1/7/21). But this rejection of Trumpism and the Big Lie goes hand in hand with the elevation of a reasonable or admirable wing of the GOP, whose own extremism and undermining of democracy are thereby whitewashed.
Exhibit A is Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who jumped on the Trump bandwagon early and was only kicked off it when he rebuffed Trump s infamous demand to find 11,780 votes in order to overturn the state s election result.
Cheney is in the Number Three leadership position in the House GOP Caucus. Her vote to impeach a president of her own party is unprecedented by any measure but particularly when the grounds were so obviously contrived and wrong. The challenge to Kevin McCarthy is very much an in-your-face one. It signals to the GOP caucus that if McCarthy can’t hold his own leadership team together on a vote of this magnitude that the GOP caucus is now a gathering of free agents who can do whatever the hell they want to do.
This is just one of the acts that Cheney has taken to raise her own national profile at the expense of McCarthy and Scalise and her colleagues. Shortly before the vote to certify the Electoral College votes, a vote on which 120 of her colleagues decided to challenge the votes of several states with “peculiar” election results, she circulated a lengthy letter informing anyone who cared to read it that such a vote is un-Constitutional (SPOILER ALERT: it isn’t). It wasn’t
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
One of the stories roiling the waters yesterday came from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin of the New York Times.
That story, which my colleague bonchie covered in his post Mitch McConnell Reportedly Sees Impeachment as a Chance to ‘Purge’ Trump From the Party, says that Mitch McConnell is happy about the impeachment of President Trump on the grounds of “inciting insurrection” because McConnell believes that Trump committed impeachable acts and because he sees impeachment as a way of returning the GOP to its corporatist, internationalist roots where McConnell can hold Failure Theater matinees daily and never really do anything but play the role of Marshal Petain. Like virtually any other story in the New York Times, there are no on-the-record sources, only the nebulous, trust us because our sources are so good.