Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent remind readers that the Democrats’ House impeachment managers have made a strategic decision not to focus on Republicans’ complicity in events leading to the Trump Insurrection of January 6th. The likelihood they can persuade 17 Republicans to vote to convict Donald John Trump of inciting it is slim. Even slimmer if they insist (or even imply) Republican senators accept their share of responsibility:
But the result is this: At the highest-profile reckoning we’ll ever see into this months-long effort to overthrow U.S. democracy, a large part of the story simply isn’t being told. The role in this whole saga of the GOP’s ongoing radicalization, and its increasing comfort with anti-democratic tactics, openly authoritarian conduct and even political violence, is largely going unmentioned.
During Trump’s pre-election efforts to undermine confidence in the 2020 election outcome, his enablers remained silent. Republicans in the states attempted to block efforts to enable voting by mail, once a G.O.P. election mainstay. Republicans in Congress watched as Trump’s postmaster general instituted service changes that slowed mail delivery across the country. They said nothing as Trump predicted he would lead in the vote count on Election Day but fall behind in vote counting as states processed mailed-in ballots that take more time.
Then, when Biden did win, most of them wouldn’t even say explicitly that Biden won for many weeks. It wasn’t until six weeks after the election that Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) finally admitted Biden was the victor. He and other Republicans delayed for the cynical purpose of keeping GOP voters energized for the Senate runoff elections in Georgia.
On top of that, large swaths of the GOP supported a lawsuit designed to invalidate millions of votes based on fictions to pave the way for state legislators to send separate electors, swinging the election to Trump. A few GOP senators pointed out that this was a direct assault on democracy and self-rule. But only a few.
And then, even after the attack, more than 130 House Republicans voted to invalidate Biden electors, carrying forward Trump’s effort to overturn the election and keep himself in power illegitimately.
E.J. Dionne argues conversely that House impeachment managers “quietly but passionately” have sealed the off ramps for Republican senators:
Those who vote to acquit the former president will now own it all: The incendiary speech that made the nation’s capital a killing ground but also the months of incitement and lying that built up to the violence.
“His words became their actions,” Rep. Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas, said of the Trump-insurrectionist axis. The riot occurred because Trump “ran out of nonviolent options to maintain power,” said Democrats’ lead impeachment manager Rep. Ted Lieu of California.
Dionne may be convinced those arguments are persuasive, but Waldman and Sargent judge Republicans by their actions and inaction, not by Democrats’ legal arguments.
“It doesn’t matter that Trump castigated them for not doing enough,” the pair write. “They did do an extraordinary amount — through sins of commission and omission alike.” They are unlikely to own them now.
There is no “come to Constitution” moment in their future even if impeachment managers manage to coax a few more G.O.P. senators from the dark side. They have been radicalized. They have welcomed it. They cannot separate themselves from Trump or white nationalist radicals without risking their offices or even their lives. If Republican electeds did not know it before Jan. 6, they know it now.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who voted for impeachment writes, “If the GOP doesn’t take a stand, the chaos of the past few months, and the past four years, could quickly return. The future of our party and our country depends on confronting what happened — so it doesn’t happen again.” Kinzinger warns, “The further down this road we go, the closer we come to the end of America as we know it.”
They eschewed every chance to take the off ramps. Besides, accountability is not their style is it?