In today’s GOP, open proponents of political violence and the overturning of elections through mob insurrection are met with little to no punishment. They regularly earn celebrity treatment on the GOP’s primary propaganda channel.
Fresh off their removal of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from the House GOP leadership, some Republicans are gearing up for a new round of punishment against Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), the only members of the GOP serving on the Jan. 6 select committee.
Yet the new campaign against Cheney and Kinzinger contains a key tell. It’s this: The contrast between the accommodation of advocates of political violence and insurrection on one side — and the censure of those who want a full repudiation of both on the other — is largely a project of GOP elites.
CNN reports that the House Freedom Caucus is now calling on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to oust Cheney and Kinzinger them from the House GOP conference. As of now, it’s unclear if McCarthy will go along.
What’s striking is the rationale, which is detailed in a remarkably angry letter from Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), the Freedom Caucus chair, to McCarthy. Biggs notes that GOP conference meetings are where Republicans strategize against Democrats, and adds:
Many of the coming discussions will likely revolve around our defense against the Democrats’ perpetuation of the false narrative that January 6th was an insurrection and how to protect our own from their legally questionable investigative methods. Congresswoman Cheney and Congressman Kinzinger are two spies for the Democrats that we currently invite to our meetings, despite our inability to trust them.
This letter should go into the time capsule, for the benefit of future historians piecing together the United States’ slide toward the abyss of authoritarianism in the early 21st century.
First, note the open, unabashed commitment to a comprehensive whitewashing of Jan. 6 so it is purged of any hint of its actual underlying intention, i.e., to block a legitimately elected government from taking over in order to keep Donald Trump in power illegitimately. Forget any semantic quibbles over the meaning of the term “insurrection.” It is this underlying motive that Republicans fundamentally deny.
Second, note the idea that any Republican who supports a full factual accounting of this event — one that includes an examination of its “facts, circumstances, and causes” — can only be a “spy” for Democrats. They must be working against the interests of the GOP as a whole by definition, simply by virtue of their support for that accounting.
Indeed, the real tell here is that Republicans who actively resist and prominently work against the covering up of the insurrection’s true intent — an intent that Biggs denies — are working against the interests of the GOP.
McCarthy may or may not ultimately punish Cheney and Kinzinger. But there can be no question that he, too, sees anyone and anything who will not participate in that coverup as working against the GOP’s interests.
McCarthy, after all, backed Cheney’s removal from leadership. And he again underscored the point by threatening retribution against telecom companies that comply with lawful subpoenas, plainly because that would shed light on any participation by GOP lawmakers in the effort to overturn the election, either through sordid legal manipulation, or mob violence, or both.
Now note that Republicans who have openly endorsed political violence against the opposition and have even hailed the insurrectionists as heroes — figures like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Madison Cawthorn of North Carolina — have not faced this level of censure and clamor for expulsion.
This is in no small part at the pleasure of GOP leadership. GOP leaders see this basic straddle — this contrast in the treatment of those who want the party to unequivocally repudiate this sort of radicalization and want a true reckoning with Jan. 6, and those who want the opposite — as being in the party’s best interests.
At bottom, this is an elite project. This has corollaries elsewhere: As Rick Hasen details, the masterminds who developed the legal strategy for Trump’s effort to overturn the election are being welcomed back into polite conservative society. And Trumpian academics continue to build an authoritarian, illiberal ideological foundation for future efforts to overturn U.S. democracy that will no doubt be similar.
Most Republicans, of course, publicly condemn political violence and support some form of accountability for the rioters themselves. But as Adam Serwer has written, the rioters still “won,” in that many Republicans fundamentally “agree with the underlying ideological claim of the rioters, which is that Democratic electoral victories should not be recognized.”
Serwer wrote that three months ago. Since then, it’s gotten substantially worse. Right now, it’s plainly obvious that many Republicans have come to believe the underlying cause of the rioters was a fundamentally just and righteous one.
And whatever condemnation of Jan. 6 we hear from Republicans, there is a near party-wide consensus that the full truth about what actually drove it — the desire to thwart a legitimately elected government from taking over, to maintain Trump in power illegitimately — must be whitewashed and suppressed at all costs.
Any Republican who wants to participate in a faithful rendering of that full truth, and in a meaningful reckoning with it, is an enemy of the party.
