It is truly interesting to watch the spasms and contortions of the GOP right now. It puts me in mind, unfortunately, of a sad incident I saw where an older dog was bitten by a scorpion and died — albeit quickly and that was a mercy. In this situation, the GOP is out dancing with the scorpion, who keeps biting it and the GOP keeps getting up from the floor and asking for yet another dose.
It has been argued that the most intelligent and clear thinking members of the party have decided to splinter off from it. In all events, what is left of the old factions of the party and what new factions are being formed is still yet to be determined. It’s an event in progress. But for the moment, all eyes are on January 6 and the political theater which is being staged in the joint session of congress, which in any normal day and year would be a routine formality of counting the electoral college votes. Not in 2021, it’s not. It is performance art to see who can be the most high profile rebel without a clue, trashing representative government as loudly as possible. Daily Beast:
On Wednesday, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz vaulted ahead of a crowded field with strident pledges to oppose Senate certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory on January 6. An act of desperate political theater by two leading Trumpworld bootlicks—including one whose wife and father were both the subject of vicious personal attacks by Trump—isn’t in itself surprising, and it won’t change the outcome of the election. But what still saddens, even if it no longer shocks, is the silence from Republicans with standing who believe themselves more principled than their headline-chasing colleagues but lack the courage to say that publicly with their name attached.
The Republican Party that enters 2021 is a party without a formal platform and defined by its entirely situational ethics. It is no longer interested in pursuing power under the restrictions of democracy or voting or free and fair elections. It is simply interested in obtaining, expanding and perpetuating itself, a virus on the body politic that publicity-hounds like Hawley and Cruz think they can direct and control all the way to the White House in 2024. And if 2020 has taught us anything about viruses, it is how readily they defy containment, and how deadly they become when met with silence. […]
There’s no chance Hawley, a Yale Law School graduate who taught constitutional law as an associate professor at the University of Missouri Law School, actually believes his own conspiratorial Trumpian rhetoric. Ted Cruz, a Harvard man, doesn’t believe in the moral justice of a pro-Trump coup.
But they and others are gleefully stepping in as pro-Trump megaphones. In the process, they’re amping up the adrenaline of the thousands of Proud Boys and far-right neo-Nazis descending on Washington on January 6th to put a little paramilitary muscle behind Trump’s autocratic demands.
They’re also making a mockery of our country. In their antics, Americans are witnessing a nihilistic shredding of all the pablum Republicans once professed to believe. MU Law professor Frank Bowman expressed his shock at the transparent power grab by his former colleague, Hawley, in a tweet: “I had no idea how low you would be prepared to go in pursuit of power. You call yourself a ‘constitutional lawyer.’ But you disgrace the profession & dishonor constitution daily.” […]
The Republican Party has never been shy about flirting with antidemocratic and authoritarian tactics. Witness the rise of the national security surveillance state during the Bush years, or the stunning success of the GOP’s decades-long experiments in race-based voter suppression. But never before have the senior Republicans so fully lost control of their party in such a sweeping and public way.
The Republican party right now is like a ship without a rudder, it’s just out there bouncing around on the waves, hoping that motion will find direction and that it doesn’t run aground altogether and smash on the rocks. Obviously, January 5 will be a clarion call as to the direction things are going. The GOP will retain senate control or it won’t. And January 6 will be a spectacle staged for the much vaunted Trump base.
I wonder if any of these GOPers have considered that maybe the base only wants to support Trump, because he’s the only one who is cray cray enough? Maybe Hawley and Cruz and Cotton and the rest are spinning their wheels thinking that they’re going to be inheritors of the throne? And what’s Lindsey Graham up to? He played golf on Christmas Day with Trump but was conspicuously absent from the senate vote on the defense bill today. We will find out. Stay tuned.
Just a nitpick, Ursula, but I don’t think that a scorpion’s “bite” is what causes any significant damage. It’s their STING that causes the trouble.
It’s only a matter of time before some prominent conservatives commit sedition by advocating, or praising, violent rebellion against the Biden administration. They will claim they are merely exercising their freedom of speech, or that their actions are no different than the Resistance against Trump. As citizens, we must demand that the DOJ under Biden does not show leniency to these people under the guise of “unity.”
In a sense, that is what Louie Gohmert just did by openly suggesting violence if Congress ratifies the election. The fair and fraud-free election.
tRumpers are drug addicts. The cult of personality will go through addiction withdrawal symptoms for only a few months once the “personality” is not available, if we are lucky.
I’m so glad Ted agrees with Trump! His wife is ugly and his father killed JFK!