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Gosar and Rittenhouse are the Republican Party of 2021

In a sick and twisted sense, it’s fitting that white supremacists celebrate the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict the same week that House Republicans stood with Representative Paul Gosar for fantasizing about murdering AOC.

If you haven’t been following the news recently, you may not have heard that far-right Congressman Paul Gosar tweeted a doctored video of him murdering Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and striking President Joe Biden. While both of those points have rightly gotten considerable media attention, the video also featured undocumented immigrants crossing the border. The not-too-subtle suggestion from the video is that immigrants crossing the border should be treated with violence.

Apparently, those messages are A-OK with Gosar’s Republican colleagues in the House. After all, only two Republicans voted to censure him: Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL). Cheney and Kinzinger are the same Republican representatives who voted to impeach Donald Trump for his coup attempt and currently sit on the 1/6 Committee investigating the insurrection.

The kid-glove approach to Gosar contrasts sharply with how House Republicans are treating other members of their conference. They have already punished Liz Cheney (formerly the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives) for daring to tell the truth about 1/6. They are threatening to punish the 13 moderate Republicans who voted for Biden’s infrastructure bill. (Those same members are also receiving death threats.) Yet all but two House Republicans stood with Representative Gosar when he all-but-encouraged violence against a colleague.

Gosar – who has already been implicated in the insurrection and whose six siblings were featured in an extraordinary ad opposing his re-election – took note of that support. After initially deleting the tweet, he retweeted the video after the censure vote in an act of defiance. The lesson that he apparently learned was that his Republican colleagues had his back and that he should double down.

To be sure, not all of his Republican colleagues agree with Gosar’s extremism; some have mildly condemned it while opposing the censure on weak procedural grounds, arguing that it went too far in stripping him of committee assignments. Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) expressed concern with the precedent that the censure would set. Oddly, he had less concern about the precedent set from doing little to nothing when a member of Congress threatens another member.

Aside from Cheney and Kinzinger, everyone else in the House Republican conference is either sympathetic to Gosar or too cowardly to stand up to him. They either outwardly support violence or refuse to condemn it in a meaningful way.

What does that tell us? The fascist takeover of the House Republican conference is all but complete.

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore, Flickr

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Cheney removed from House Republican leadership

Republicans in the House of Representatives followed through with their expected removal of Representative Liz Cheney from party leadership over her refusal to embrace the Big Lie.

The AP reports:

House Republicans ousted Rep. Liz Cheney from her post as the chamber’s No. 3 GOP leader on Wednesday, punishing her after she repeatedly rebuked former President Donald Trump for his false claims of election fraud and his role in inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

Meeting behind closed doors for less than 20 minutes, GOP lawmakers used a voice vote to remove the Wyoming congresswoman from her leadership post, the latest evidence that challenging Trump can be career-threatening.

We do not have a roll call of who voted to remove her because it was a voice vote, although Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Minority Whip Steve Scalise both publicly supported her removal. If Republicans were to regain control of the House after next year’s elections, McCarthy would likely become Speaker of the House and Scalise Majority Leader.

The vote was expected, but the result is nonetheless startling. One of America’s two major political parties just instituted a litmus test requiring its members to either advance Donald Trump’s lie that the election was stolen or else remain silent. If they speak the truth, they will be punished.

In a floor speech before the vote, Cheney warned her party about the danger to American democracy.

“Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar,” she said. “I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy.”

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Liz Cheney: Republican Party at ‘turning point’ as Trump and GOP leaders seek retribution

Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming has drawn the ire of Trump supporters since she strongly condemned the violent insurrection and coup attempt at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Cheney was among a handful of House Republicans to support impeachment in the days after the Trump-inspired mob killed and injured Capitol police officers and came painstakingly close to massacring members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence, who was performing his constitutional duty overseeing the counting of electoral votes against the wishes of Trump.

Now Donald Trump, his supporters, and his enablers in the Republican Party are seeking retribution against Cheney and others who dared to hold the former president accountable for his actions perpetuating the lie that the election was stolen, rallying his supporters immediately before the attack on the Capitol, and refusing to call his supporters off after violence broke out. They want to strip Cheney of her leadership position in the House Republican caucus.

That effort would be fruitless without the backing of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California. But McCarthy has turned on Cheney, essentially guaranteeing her removal from the party’s leadership. Both the highest-ranking and second-highest-ranking Republicans in the House back replacing Cheney as House GOP conference chair.

Rather than fight the inevitable behind the scenes, Cheney has penned an op-ed in the Washington Post in which she desperately warns that the “Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.”

Here is an excerpt from the op-ed:

In public statements again this week, former president Donald Trump has repeated his claims that the 2020 election was a fraud and was stolen. His message: I am still the rightful president, and President Biden is illegitimate. Trump repeats these words now with full knowledge that exactly this type of language provoked violence on Jan. 6. And, as the Justice Department and multiple federal judges have suggested, there is good reason to believe that Trump’s language can provoke violence again. Trump is seeking to unravel critical elements of our constitutional structure that make democracy work — confidence in the result of elections and the rule of law. No other American president has ever done this.

The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution. In the immediate wake of the violence of Jan. 6, almost all of us knew the gravity and the cause of what had just happened — we had witnessed it firsthand.

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) left no doubt in his public remarks. On the floor of the House on Jan. 13, McCarthy said: “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.” Now, McCarthy has changed his story.

I am a conservative Republican, and the most conservative of conservative values is reverence for the rule of law. Each of us swears an oath before God to uphold our Constitution. The electoral college has spoken. More than 60 state and federal courts, including multiple Trump-appointed judges, have rejected the former president’s arguments, and refused to overturn election results. That is the rule of law; that is our constitutional system for resolving claims of election fraud.

Image Credit: Tyler Merbler, FlickrCC BY 2.0

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Liz Cheney, number three House Republican, backs impeachment

Liz Cheney dramatically became the highest-ranking House Republican to back the impeachment of President Donald Trump nearly a week after a deadly Trump-inspired insurrection at the US Capitol.

Cheney serves as Chair of the House Republican Caucus, which makes her the third-highest ranking Republican in the House of Representatives. She represents one of the most Republican states in the country: Wyoming. In fact, Donald Trump performed better in Wyoming than any other state during the 2020 presidential election. And if you are wondering, yes, she is the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Here is Cheney’s full statement:

On January 6, 2021 a violent mob attacked the United States Capitol to obstruct the process of our democracy and stop the counting of presidential electoral votes. This insurrection caused injury, death and destruction in the most sacred space in our Republic.

Much more will become clear in coming days and weeks, but what we know now is enough. The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.

“I will vote to impeach the President.”

Photo Credit: Milonica, CC BY-SA 3.0