California Republican Kevin McCarthy, minority leader in the House of Representatives, has already vowed to remove three prominent Democrats – Eric Swalwell, Adam Schiff and Ilhan Omar – from important committee duties, simply – it appears – out of revenge.
“The Democrats have created a new thing where they choose who could be on the committee. Never in history has the majority of the minority said who might be on the committee, ”said McCarthy told the right Breitbart News.
This would be a radical step under almost any circumstance, but it comes at a critical moment when American democracy has been its weakest in generations. A party tries to uphold our democratic system of government and the institutions and norms that make it possible. Another was constantly trying to undermine it.
This latest threat is another warning sign: the GOP is on its way to becoming an anti-democratic party. We miss this fact at the risk of our nation.
McCarthy’s threat is in retaliation for the Democrats to remove two Republican Congressmen, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona, from their committees after Greene and Gosar made a series of inflammatory and disturbing comments demonstrating their general incapacity.
Gosar posted an anime video online showing him attacking President Joe Biden with a sword and apparently murdering his New York colleague, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Greene’s forays into violent and conspiratorial rhetoric are too numerous list in their entirety, but they do add credibility to the QAnon conspiracy that promotes the theory that Democrats are tied to a child sex ring (it has since distant even by QAnon); make several anti-Semitic comments, including comparing vaccination regulations against Covid-19 with Nazism (for which she later apologized) and accuse California forest fires on Jewish space lasers; and showed their support for the execution of several prominent Democrats before they even ran for Congress (in a tweet, Greene said, “Over the years I’ve had teams of people managing my sites … some disagreed with my views that CNN is about to spread over the Internet. “).
In a more sane democracy, comments like Gosar and Greene’s would make them personas non grata within their party. Instead, the GOP leadership largely made sure that weak convictions of her comments and then continued to accept them. McCarthy, for example said that Greene’s comments “do not represent the values or beliefs of the House Republican Conference” and claimed that “these comments clearly condemn”. But while he liked to pay lip service to the concept of condemnation, he refused to actually do anything against Greene or Gosar, and refused the bipartisan movement to remove them from their committee roles.
And instead of just dropping these chips, he is now taking revenge on Democrats who have done nothing like Greene or Gosar – and have certainly not suggested supporting violence against their colleagues.
It is not just McCarthy and his retaliatory threats that signal the demise of the GOP in anti-democratic obscurity. Very many Republican elected officials have buried about the big lie that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 elections; 147 of them voted upset the result of a free and fair election simply because her husband lost.
Some Republican Congressmen have justified or downplayed the January 6th events. They have received no consequences from their party, and some are now running for re-election despite the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution conditions that no one “who has previously taken an oath as a member of Congress in support of the United States Constitution, has participated in any insurrection or rebellion against it”.
Some Democrats and voters are finally saying “enough”. In North Carolina, a group of voters is calling for Rep. Madison Cawthorn be disqualified to run for his association with the insurrection. Speaking to the crowd in Washington, DC on January 6, Cawthorn claimed Trump really won the election after tweeting “it’s time to fight” the days before. Later that day, Trump supporters stormed the Capitol complex, which housed five people were killed.
Cawthorn did not learn his lesson and appears to have no remorse for his actions. “When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes your duty,” he said said in September, when he also warned of “bloodshed” because Trump did not win. Those arrested on January 6 for their insurgent acts were “political prisoners” and there should be plans to “exterminate them”. A spokesman for the representative said this week that “over 245,000 patriots from western North Carolina elected Congressman Cawthorn to serve them in Washington.”
Republican Congressmen openly encourage violence and trying undermine American democracy. Republicans could clean up and declare that no one trying to undermine a free and fair election – let alone the American democratic system itself – should serve in Congress with an R next to their name. Instead, the party’s leaders are taking revengeful revenge on the Democrats by threatening to remove them from the committees.
This is not a question of the split between parties. It is a fundamental question of what America should be like. And the behavior of many Republicans, including some of their leaders, suggests that the GOP’s response is something other than “a free democratic nation”.
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