Opinion

The Republican National Committee's censure resolution against Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger continues to reverberate through the halls of congress. That ill-advised phrase "legitimate political discourse," referring to the Jan. 6 insurrection, has GOP officials tied up in knots, not wanting to offend their base while at the same time wanting nothing more than to change the subject.

You wouldn't know any of this by the coverage on Fox News, however. As Aaron Rupar notes in his newsletter, Public Notice, the formerly fair-and-balanced network is barely covering the story at all. Instead, Fox hosts are focusing all their attention on the anti-vax trucker protests in Canada, which they are cheering on hour after hour. Former President Donald Trump has been egging the Canadian truckers on as well, sending out a statement of support on the letterhead of his supposed new company, Trump Media Technology Group, inviting them to use his new social media company (assuming it ever gets off the ground) and announcing that "thankfully the Freedom Convoy could be coming to DC with American Truckers who want to protest Biden's ridiculous Covid policies."

U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn is having a bad week and it’s only Tuesday.

Today news broke that the North Carolina State Board of Elections filed a motion Monday declaring it indeed does have the legal authority to determine if candidates should be disqualified for violations of the Fourteenth Amendment (more on that in a moment). About the same time that news broke, Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell broke with Donald Trump and almost the entire Republican Party, declaring January 6 was a “violent insurrection” – yes, he used those very words.

Two stories straight out of Alabama this week really encapsulate how the panic over "critical race theory," the war on schools and the war on democracy itself are all a piece of a singular racist right wing movement. Last week, AL.com reported that school officials across the state say parents are freaking out over the very existence of Black History Month, accusing schools of promoting "critical race theory" by mentioning it or honoring it in any way. And on Monday, the Supreme Court declined to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act in response to a plainly racist gerrymander in Alabama, on the grounds that doing so would interfere with the state's control of their elections systems. Yes, even though federal oversight of state election systems is literally what the Voting Rights Act was designed to do.

It's been 13 months since Donald Trump incited an insurrection on the Capitol, one that was clearly driven by white supremacy and the belief that the votes of Black Americans simply shouldn't count as much as those of white people. There continues to be a struggle between various factions of the GOP over how to portray the violent insurrection itself — to call it a glorious MAGA revolution or pretend it was a random event unconnected to the larger party — but these two stories show the sentiment that drove it has now taken root in every corner of the GOP. From the school board to the Supreme Court, Republicans are determined to stomp out anything that stands in the way of white supremacy, from history to the law to democracy itself.

Donald Trump is a highly skilled white-supremacist propagandist. There's nothing natural about that skill. It has been taught, learned and internalized over many years. In all likelihood, it came from his family upbringing. Fred Trump, Donald's father, was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan riot. In the 1970s, the Trump family's real estate company was sued for housing discrimination against Black and brown people.

In 1989, Trump took out full-page ads in major New York newspapers calling for the execution of five Black and Latino young men who were accused of brutally beating and raping a white woman in Central Park. Those men were convicted based on coerced confessions and spent years in prison before being exonerated and released. Trump has refused to apologize or even admit he was wrong.

While Republican successes in blocking legislation, judges and even presidential nominations may seem like the Party is on a roll, the reality is that the GOP is in the midst of an existential crisis as severe as any party has seen since the Whigs died out in the early 19th century.

Billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is now openly calling them out in an editorial from the publication’s editorial board itself:

On Friday, the Republican party completed its journey from a normal conservative party into an outright fascist organization intent on overthrowing democracy. In censuring Republicans Rep. Adam Kinzinger and Rep. Liz Cheney for participating in the January 6 investigation, the Republican National Committee declared that the Capitol insurrection — which led to the deaths of four rioters and five police officers, as well as injuries to another 140 officers — is "legitimate political discourse." This affirms what close observers have been pointing out for a year now: Republican officials across the country are using Donald Trump's Big Lie as an excuse to rig the 2024 election, by rewriting laws to make it easier to throw out election results they don't like and running Big Lie proponents who are campaigning on unsubtle promises to steal the next election for Trump.

Democrats currently control Congress and the White House, but so far their efforts to stop the slow-moving coup have amounted to very little. To be certain, both President Joe Biden and the vast majority of congressional Democrats support legislation meant to block these Republican attacks on democracy, but their efforts to pass such bills through the narrow majority in the Senate have been blocked by two centrist Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema. Without a bigger majority in the Senate, Biden and other federal Democratic leaders have little power to stop the GOP's coup train.

The January jobs report from the Labor Department is heightening fears that a so-called “tight” labor market is fueling inflation, and therefore the Fed must put on the brakes by raising interest rates.

This line of reasoning is totally wrong.

Some of us cling to the idea of democracy being the rule of the majority. We do this, I think, because we fac the likelihood in the near term of the rule of the minority. In doing so, however, we lose sight of something bigger, wrote Paul Woodruff. Rule by and for the people.

“What is democracy?” wrote the professor of history and philosophy at the University of Texas-Austin. “Pundits have been writing recently that democracy is majority rule, but that is wrong, dangerously wrong.”

Last Friday, appearing before the Federalist Society in Florida, former Vice President Mike Pence said the words that dare not be uttered in the Republican Party: "President Trump was wrong." He was referring to Trump's recent assertion that Pence had the right to "overturn" the election. While Trump's original statement and Pence's mild rebuke both sent shock waves through the media, they really shouldn't have. Of course Trump thinks Pence had the right to overturn the election. He couldn't have been any clearer in the 5,789 times he's mentioned it.

No one should be surprised that Pence came out and said Trump was wrong, either. He has stayed pretty quiet about the whole thing, but the fact that Pence didn't actually try to throw out electoral votes, under tremendous pressure, proved long ago that he thought it was impossible and unjustified. He just didn't have the guts to come out and say it directly until now, which is typical.

In the year-plus since the events of Jan. 6, 2021, the Republican Party has morphed, like an evil insect emerging from a chrysalis, into its final form: a terrorist organization. Rather than purging from its ranks those Republicans who supported, endorsed and participated in Donald Trump's coup attempt, the party and its leaders have rallied around them, and remade the party in their image. Rather than voting to impeach and convict Donald Trump, and therefore drive him out of the party, Republican leaders, along with the bulk of their voters and their mouthpieces in the media, have chosen to support him.

Republicans are so loyal to Donald Trump that even after the attack on the Capitol, where Republican members of Congress could easily have been killed — 147 of them voted to nullify the results of the 2020 presidential election. In essence, they were completing the "legal" part of Trump's coup, even after the illegal part had failed (at least in that moment).

Last week, ex-president Karen reminded us that it’s so hard to get good help nowadays. Donald Trump asserted January 30 that Mike Pence had the power to overturn the election and lamented that he didn’t do it. “Unfortunately, [Pence] didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!” Trump wrote in a statement.

The ensuing flood of negative attention was so intoxicating Trump upped the ante. Like an aggrieved customer leaving a bad Seamless review, he proclaimed that Congress should investigate Pence for failing to steal the election for him.

The so-called “freedom convoy” has captured worldwide attention as a minority of truckers and their supporters have asserted their right to assemble and oppose COVID-19 protocols imposed by the federal, provincial and territorial governments. No problem there.

The problem lies in what’s not being said or acknowledged.