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Kevin McCarthy
Kevin McCarthy
Anyone who thought Kevin McCarthy’s leadership of House Republicans would be in jeopardy when he was caught lying about his true feelings about the attempted overthrow of American democracy by President Trump’s violent supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, doesn’t realize what happened to the Republican Party under President Trump.
Every elected Republican is required to lie about what they really think of the violent insurrection Trump incited to destroy democracy. The only elected Republican members of Congress who have ever been banished from the party over Jan. 6 were Liz Cheney from Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger from Illinois for telling the truth about what happened that day.
There’s no question McCarthy lied publicly when he denied ever telling party leaders on conference calls he planned to call Trump and tell him he should resign the presidency for inciting the insurrection. He and the No. 2 House leader Steve Scalise also expressed their hopes Twitter would abolish the accounts of extreme House Republicans who publicly encouraged violence just like it ended Trump’s account.
“I’ve had it with this guy (Trump),” McCarthy said. “What he did was unacceptable. Nobody can defend that and nobody should defend it.”
We Know What He Said
We know McCarthy said all that because New York Times reporters Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin released the tape recordings of those calls on Jan. 8 and 10 that were included in their book This Will Not Pass after McCarthy called their reporting “totally false and wrong.”
But McCarthy’s brief flirtation with political courage after Jan. 6 when he urged Republicans to rid their party of Trump and his violent supporters didn’t last very long. Apparently, it was a fleeting thought after McCarthy had joined other elected Republicans and Democrats running for their lives through the halls of the Capitol from the howling mob threatening to hang Mike Pence and overthrow President Biden’s election. “We saw what (Trump’s) people would do in the Capitol,” McCarthy said. “These people came prepared with rope, with everything else.”
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But when Republican leaders began plotting how to regain power in November’s midterms, they quickly decided they had to do everything possible to retain the support of Trump and the violent extremists opposing democracy he attracted to the party. That’s why McCarthy spent several days frantically begging Trump’s forgiveness in three separate telephone calls for all those deplorable, unforgivable things McCarthy said about him.
McCarthy’s Shameless Groveling
Trump was delighted to keep McCarthy shamelessly groveling at his feet for days before telling the Wall Street Journal: “I think it’s all a big compliment, frankly.” Trump still didn’t explicitly endorse McCarthy for House Speaker, preferring to retain the threat of endorsing someone else for the position McCarthy desperately wants if Republicans win the House in November to make sure “My Kevin” never steps out of line again.
The danger of McCarthy becoming Trump’s puppet in the Speaker’s job should frighten every American voter, Democrat or Republican. Fear of Trump’s continued destruction of democracy produced the largest negative vote against an incumbent president in history to remove Trump from office after a single term.
Most of the national media clearly doesn’t believe protection of American democracy will even be an issue in the midterms. But the threat of the defeated president continuing his destruction of democracy by controlling congressional Republicans from behind the scenes should certainly raise the issue.
Mainstream Media Wrong Again
That won’t stop political reporters from telling voters the midterms are already over. They expect the usual historic pattern of dealing a major political setback for Biden’s presidency just as the first midterms did after the elections of President Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
But there’s nothing usual about a major American political party opposing American democracy. The nation was appalled watching the most violent, deadly attack on democracy since the Civil War on live television just a year and half ago.
The racism and hatred that fueled both of those violent clashes in our national history are still with us. But the good news is most Americans are better than that. That’s what’s really behind the violent Republican attack on democracy. The popular vote margin nationally for Democrats over George Bush and Trump grew from 500,000 more votes for Al Gore to 3 million for Hillary Clinton to 7 million for Biden.
Biden is currently leading world democracies to defend democracy in Ukraine from Russia’s horrific military invasion aimed at obliterating it. At the same time, Biden’s fighting at home to protect American democracy from Republican state legislators creating drastic voting restrictions to reduce voting by Americans who don’t support them. Some allow Republican legislators to throw out election results they don’t like.
The survival of American democracy will be the most important issue in every major national election until both Democrats and Republicans support democracy’s founding principles of equal rights and equal treatment under law for all Americans.
