Washington Post Editorial: The Republican Party formally declares that truth is fiction and patriots are traitors

The Republican Party on Friday took an official stand — against truth and democracy. At the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting in Salt Lake City, party leaders censured Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and moved to aid her primary opponent, Harriet Hageman, who is former president Donald Trump’s preferred candidate for Wyoming’s lone congressional seat.

The Orwellian censure resolution accuses Ms. Cheney and fellow GOP dissident Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) of engaging in behavior “destructive to the institution of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Party and our republic.” Her transgression? Co-leading the House committee investigating the Capitol invasion, an act of political violence Mr. Trump inspired when he was a sitting president charged with protecting the nation from enemies foreign and domestic. The investigation, the censure resolution claimed, is “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

When in recent memory has the House been more threatened as when members had to barricade the doors to the chamber against a dangerous mob screaming for their blood? By insisting on a full probe and accountability for one of the country’s lowest moments since the Civil War, Ms. Cheney is waging what, within her party, is an increasingly lonely battle against those seeking to pervert the U.S. system of government for personal gain.

Republicans have started their election year by revealing what they really stand for. Voters must remember this moment in November. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/04/liz-cheney-republicans-censure-orwellian/

Dana Milbank: There’s a name for someone who calls violence ‘legitimate.’ It isn’t ‘Republican.’

Trump aides had a euphemism for Trump’s laziness: “Executive time” was the item listed on his official schedule when he wanted to sit on the couch and watch Fox News. They had a euphemism for his misogyny: “locker room talk.” His fabrications were alternative facts, or “truth impressions” in the phrase of Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff. They even had a euphemism for his racism: He refused to be “politically correct.”

Now, the insurrectionists have become peaceful tourists or “political prisoners,” the Capitol Police murderers, the would-be assassins martyrs. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker now advising House Republicans, proposes jailing the members of the Jan. 6 committee. A week ago, Trump himself called for uprisings against “radical, vicious, racists prosecutors” investigating him, “because our country and our elections are corrupt.” He dangled pardons for the insurrectionists if he’s returned to power.

And this was before the Republican National Committee decided it would officially decree that violence is “legitimate political discourse.” Among the Jan. 6 activities so justified:

• Blinding police officers with bear spray.
• Throwing rocks, bottles, furniture and incendiary devices at them.
• Gouging their eyes.
• Beating them with flagpoles, sticks and bullhorns.
• Punching, kicking and dragging them down stairs.
• Tasing them and hurling a fire extinguisher at them.
• Smashing windows and doors.
• Carrying zip ties onto the Senate floor.
• Ransacking desks and offices.

And all this with murder on their lips.

Now, the Republican National Committee, the official leadership of the GOP, has embraced this unspeakable violence as legitimate discourse. It’s an absurd euphemism — and it points to another one.

To call a person who endorses violence against the duly elected government a “Republican” is itself Orwellian. More accurate words exist for such a person. One of them is “fascist.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/07/rnc-legitimate-political-discourse-insurrection/

William Saletan: Lies Are the Building Blocks of Trumpian Authoritarianism

Americans like to think our country is immune to authoritarianism. We have a culture of freedom, a tradition of elected government, and a Bill of Rights. We’re not like those European countries that fell into fascism. We’d never willingly abandon democracy, liberty, or the rule of law.

But that’s not how authoritarianism would come to America. In fact, it’s not how authoritarianism has come to America. The movement to dismantle our democracy is thriving and growing, even after the failure of the Jan. 6th coup attempt, because it isn’t spreading through overt rejection of our system of government. It’s spreading through lies.

It turns out that you don’t have to renounce any of our nation’s founding principles to betray them. All you have to do is believe lies: that real ballots are fake, that prosecutors are criminals, and that insurrectionists are political prisoners. Once you believe these things, you’re ready to disenfranchise your fellow citizens in the name of democracy. You’re ready to cover up crimes in the name of fighting corruption. You’re ready to liberate coup plotters in the name of justice.

And that’s where we are. Donald Trump and his party have sold these lies to more than 100 million Americans. He has built an army of authoritarian followers who think they’re saving the republic. https://www.thebulwark.com/lies-are-the-building-blocks-of-trumpian-authoritarianism/

Eugene Robinson: Republicans’ animus toward Biden’s Supreme Court pledge shows how they’re no longer veiling their racism

If the Republican Party has any sort of platform these days, it appears to involve stoking White grievance and opposing even modest steps to foster diversity.

That’s not a partisan argument; I’m just noting what Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and a few of his colleagues are saying about President Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court. On his podcast, “Verdict With Ted Cruz,” the senator recently called Biden’s pledge “offensive.”

“The fact that he’s willing to make a promise at the outset, that it must be a Black woman, I got to say that’s offensive,” Cruz said. “You know, Black women are, what, 6 percent of the U.S. population? He’s saying to 94 percent of Americans, ‘I don’t give a damn about you. You are ineligible.’”

Cruz went on to argue that promising to nominate a Black woman was, somehow, “actually an insult to Black women.” I’d like to see what data he’s relying on to support that claim. I happen to know quite a few Black women — my wife, my sister, lots of other family members, many friends, co-workers and acquaintances — and not a single one has expressed to me the slightest sense of being insulted. I’ve heard reactions of joy and pride but not a scintilla of outrage.

Eventually, Cruz got to his real point: He claimed Biden is saying that “if you’re a White guy, tough luck. If you’re a White woman, tough luck. You don’t qualify.”

And there you have it. Republicans no longer accidentally say the quiet part out loud; they shout it from the rooftops — or at least preach it on their podcasts.

I used to think the GOP had left Jesse Helms behind. Today, however, he would be proud. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/03/republican-opposition-biden-court-pick-stoking-white-grievance/

Bess Levin: Lindsey Graham Spent Six Years With His Head Up Trump’s Ass For Nothing

Graham has more than proved his servility to Trump over the last six years, and should probably be inducted into some kind of Hall of Fame for bootlicking hacks, or given a key to Mar-a-Lago. Unfortunately, Graham forgot the cardinal rule of serving at the pleasure of Trump, which is that one must vigorously and without fail agree with every single thing the guy does and says, at all times, forever and always. Instead, God help him, the Republican lawmaker expressed an independent thought, and this happened:

Yet Trump dubbed Graham, a lifelong Republican, a Republican in Name Only, in an interview with Newsmax that aired Tuesday night. That may not sound so bad to some people, but as Trump made clear in 2020, it’s among the worst things he can think to accuse someone of. (“Do you know what RINO is?” he asked a crowd in Arizona. “A RINO may be the lowest form of human life.”) Why is Graham, in Trump’s eyes, a RINO? Because Graham had claimed it was “inappropriate” for Trump to say over the weekend that he might pardon some of the January 6 rioters if reelected in 2024, a move that effectively would allow Trump supporters to get away with waging a violent insurrection.

“Lindsey Graham doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about if he says that,” Trump added to Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt.

Which is not a very nice thing to say about someone who’s basically had his head lodged inside your ass for over half a decade now! Though if we know Lindsey, and we think we do, it’ll all be water under the bridge by the end of the month. Last week, the South Carolina senator said in an interview with Fox’s Brian Kilmeade that he’d spent the “whole weekend” with Trump and suggested that the ex-president apparently has total control over the Republican Party. “He will be the nominee in 2024 if he wants it. Stay tuned,” Graham said, adding: “From my point of view, there’s nobody that’s going to beat Donald Trump if he wants to run. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/02/lindsey-graham-donald-trump-rino

 Elisabeth Anker: The Exploitation of ‘Freedom’ in America

Within hours of becoming governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order to ban the teaching of critical race theory, explaining that the state must promote “freedom of thought.” He then moved to lift mask mandates in public schools, citing “individual liberty.” In mid-January, Florida lawmakers debated an “individual freedom” bill that would limit discussions about race and discrimination in schools and businesses.

Around the same time, conservative politicians in Georgia created a Freedom Caucus that seeks to, among other things, keep “dangerous ideology” out of schools. And, in Iowa, a Parental Freedom in Education Act would have allowed parents to prevent children from learning anything they find objectionable, inspect teachers’ curriculum and lesson plans at any time and challenge mask mandates. (The bill was rejected in the Iowa Senate.)

Each of these actions used the language of freedom to justify anti-democratic politics. These, then, are what I call “ugly freedoms”: used to block the teaching of certain ideas, diminish employees’ ability to have power in the workplace and undermine public health.

These are not merely misunderstood freedoms, or even just a cynical use of the language of freedom to frame bigoted policies. They manifest, instead, a particular interpretation of freedom that is not expansive, but exclusionary and coercive. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/opinion/ugly-freedom-discrimination-racism-sexism.html

Erwin Chemerinsky: So much for nonpartisan. Republican Supreme Court justices are helping elect Republicans

It is hard to understand the Supreme Court’s ruling on Monday to reinstate a congressional district map drawn by the Alabama Legislature as anything other than an effort by the conservative justices to help Republicans in the midterms.

In a 5-4 decision, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joining the three liberal justices in dissent, the court ignored basic principles of law and essentially gave the Republicans another House seat.

Alabama’s population is 27% Black, but under the map drawn in November, Black voters have the power to elect their preferred candidates in only one of the state’s seven congressional districts. The district court found that the Republican-controlled Legislature could have and should have created a second district with a majority of Black voters. The court then ordered the Legislature to submit new maps by this week or it would appoint an independent expert to do so.

Not one of the nine justices denied the discriminatory effect of the Alabama Legislature’s redistricting. Nor did any of the justices claim that the district court misapplied the law in finding a violation of the Voting Rights Act. As Roberts explained in his dissent, the district court’s ruling contained no errors for correction. In such cases, there is no reason to stay the district court’s ruling because there’s no likelihood that the ruling would be reversed.

Monday’s ruling means that a map, clearly violating the Voting Rights Act, will be used in this year’s congressional primary and general election.

Now it appears that the conservatives are ready to limit the use of the Voting Rights Act to prohibit discrimination in redistricting. It is surely not coincidental that all of these rulings by Republican-appointed justices help Republicans in elections and hurt Democrats. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, this ruling allows to stand a “violation of a law this Court once knew to buttress all of American democracy.” Time and again, the court’s conservatives have shown that they are perfectly willing to ignore this principle. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-02-08/supreme-court-alabama-voting-map

Philip Bump: Almost half of Republicans say Trump bears no blame for Jan. 6 — and that he likely won in 2020

On Tuesday, the Pew Research Center released new polling that shows how the false belief that Trump actually won in 2020 overlaps with skepticism about both Trump’s role in the day’s violence and the efforts to understand fully how it occurred.

Pew found that only about 1 in 3 Republicans think Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and only about 14 percent of them say he definitely won, which he did. In other words, six out of every seven Republicans are unwilling to say that Biden definitely won. Instead, a third say Trump probably won — somehow — and almost another third say Trump definitely won. By now, this position is simply an act of faith, a rejection of all available evidence in deference to a feeling. It’s still remarkable in scale.

The polling also found that people whose views were furthest from reality on the results of the 2020 election were also those most eager to downplay what occurred at the Capitol. For example, 7 in 10 Republicans who say Trump probably won in 2020 think that too much attention has been paid to Jan. 6. That position was held by 9 in 10 of those who say Trump definitely won. (On the graphs below, the widths of the columns are scaled to the percentage of Republicans who belong to each of the groups indicated along the horizontal axis.) https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/09/poll-trump-riot-election/