Lincoln Project adviser and podcaster Tara Setmayer kicked off Nicolle Wallace's exploration of the downfall of the Republican Party during her Monday show.
While she said she salutes the attempt by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) to say that the GOP is still her party, Setmayer explained that it was made clear by Rep. Kevin McCarthy's (R-CA) rush to Mar-a-Lago that the party belongs to former President Donald Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).
She recalled the 1960s effort to cast out the John Birch Society people attempting to take over the GOP and were called "unpatriotic."
"They're acquiescing to the kooks, the crackpots and the crazies," she said. "So the Republican Party needs to decide are they the party of country? Are they the party of the Constitution over cult? Or are they going to side with the kooks, the crackpots and conspiracy theorists? Liz Cheney, unfortunately, is a minor voice. She and Adam Kinzinger are about the only ones who have stepped up. It's clear she's swimming against the grain and the party is no longer the way she describes it."
Wallace agreed, but said that calling them "kooks lets them off scot-free." Instead, she explained that "they're aligned with the groups that participated in Donald Trump's call to storm the Capitol are white supremacists, racists. They're throwing down with racists."
Setmayer explained that while some are kooks and crackpots, Wallace brings up a good point about accountability. Citing the assassination of former President Abraham Lincoln, she said that mistakes were made in the aftermath that made it clear what can happen if people aren't held accountable for their crimes. She said that it allowed 100 more years of inequality and ushered in Jim Crow.
"What the Republican Party is doing, is they are falling victim to worrying about a base that is stoke in white grievance, stoked in racism, this idea of the illegitimacy of the last election is disenfranchising millions and millions of Black voters in Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta," Setmayer continued. "Let's not be naive about what's really going on here. They're questioning that. I think we do need to talk about that more. The party of Lincoln would never have stood for this. It was about equality, equality of opportunity, of freedom. The Republicans have turned into a pro-seditionist, anti-democratic party from the top down. There's a lot of unsavory things going on here that will destroy the Republican Party if they don't course correct."
See the discussion below:
ex republicans describe the downfall of their party
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After the past three months, he told CNN that "America's two-party system now has one normally functioning entity and another that appears 'insane.'"
"The Republican Party is unsalvageable as a center-right party," Sabato explained. "You can't treat the situation as normal."
Even Republicans recognize that things aren't well in the contemporary GOP.
"The broad picture of the Republican Party is really ugly," said former national GOP official Jack Pitney. "A hot mess of nuts and cowards."
While last week's far-right issues with the GOP may have more to do with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), this week, Republicans will be facing the reality created by former President Donald Trump's lawyers in the second impeachment trial. Already, a majority of Americans believe that Trump should be convicted, according to public polling. It's already more than the first impeachment.
Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti argued in a column for Politico that House impeachment managers should fight to ensure former President Donald Trump testifies at the trial, even if it means the impeachment will take longer.
Mariotti explained that the Republican Senate jury has already indicated it will acquit Trump, so House impeachment managers should "take some risks and shake things up."
"Any good trial lawyer knows that when you're behind, you have to change the dynamic of the trial," he explained. "The House managers' recent call for Trump to testify is an example of them doing just that. His unpredictable and often self-incriminating statements would create a bonanza of damaging testimony for the prosecution, which is why his team has already made clear Trump won't appear voluntarily."
The House asked Trump to testify in a polite invitation, but they haven't yet issued a subpoena. Issuing and enforcing a subpoena, however, would delay the trial. But even if it does, Mariotti argued it's worth it. "To not seek that advantage ensures the trial will play out as expected, with Senate Republicans voting in sufficient numbers to acquit Trump," he wrote.
He went on to pinpoint that the former president's legal team isn't declaring that Trump is innocent, rather they're saying the impeachment is unconstitutional and even if it wasn't unconstitutional, the First Amendment protects his right to incite a mob.
It isn't unusual, he explained. "Defense attorneys who are forced to defend the indefensible will often try to distract the jury from their client's misdeeds by focusing on minutiae or sideshows. After all, every minute jurors are focused on arcane legal questions or hair-splitting is a minute they aren't considering the defendant's conduct."
If this were an actual trial, Mariotti explained that Trump's lawyers wouldn't be able to make that case to the jury directly. It would be fought out as part of the process to the judge. It's the jury's job to decide the guilt or innocence and the judge's role to deal with the process.
He went on to say that he expects the impeachment managers to show video after video of the attacks on the Capitol, the responses to Trump's call to "fight," and even the aftermath of MAGA followers in court saying they only did what Trump told them.
"Daniel Goldman, who was lead counsel for Trump's first impeachment, recently told me in an interview that he believes even Democratic senators do not want to call witnesses," he went on. In the first trial, House Democrats didn't call witnesses because there was a fear those like John Bolton wouldn't testify voluntarily. Once the trial reached the Senate, Republicans refused to allow any witnesses to come forward.
"In the end, that missing testimony gave GOP senators an excuse not to convict," wrote Mariotti. It's for that reason he thinks Democrats must call witnesses this time.
"For example, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is a Republican who Trump threatened with a criminal investigation because he was unwilling to break the law and overturn his state's result by helping Trump 'find 11,780 votes,'" he explained.
He noted that testimony from those who experienced the violence first hand would be "even more powerful." While Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez addressing the trauma of the attacks, what could be more compelling is to hear from one of the 140 injured Capitol Police officers who survived Jan. 6.
"If Republican senators are making intellectual calculations, they might be calculating the impact of their vote on donors and constituents back home," he said. "So House managers need to hit them in their gut, not their head. A couple of carefully chosen witnesses could do that."
Republicans have indicated that they don't plan to convict Trump or prevent him from running again in 2024, but if Democrats try Trump in the court of public opinion, it could make the lives of GOP members difficult. Ahead of the trial, 50 percent of Americans support the conviction of Trump before seeing the evidence or hearing the witnesses. That's already better than the first impeachment, which reached 47.5 percent support, according to FiveThirtyEight.
That's one of many reasons Mariotti thinks Democrats should try Trump in the court of public opinion.
"Republicans have already tried to change the narrative, and Trump has not been held accountable for his attempt to subvert our democracy," he explained. "The House Republican leader recently flew to Florida to pay his respects to Trump, and Trump acolyte Marjorie Taylor Greene survived a Republican caucus vote after attention was drawn to her advocacy of conspiracy theories and her use of threatening language."
Trumpism lives on, but the real story of Trump's attempt to overthrow the election and those who helped him must be told "to ensure that the American people understand exactly what he did. If they do so, House managers will succeed regardless of how the Senate votes," he closed.
As one faction of the GOP sought to punish Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) for her insurrectionist rhetoric and promotion of right-wing conspiracy theories, another sought to punish Liz Cheney (R-WY) for her vote to impeach former President Donald Trump -- all developments that left House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) with a choice, according to Vanity Fair's Eric Lutz: "Would he apply at least some standard of discipline to his party's members? Or would he embrace the nihilistic vision of power-for-power's sake that has defined the Donald Trump era?"
"McCarthy did not reprimand Greene over her support for conspiracy theories and unsuitable conduct, leading Democrats to remove her from her committee assignments themselves. At the same time, he allowed the wing she represents to rail against Cheney," Lutz writes, adding that McCarthy "led without leading."
McCarthy's vagueness led an influential Republican adviser to tell CNN last week that it's not clear if McCarthy wants to be a part of "Republican Party or the QAnon party." According to Lutz, McCarthy has already answered the question.
"Refusing to denounce Greene makes it clear that there is a home for that kind of extremism in the GOP. What's more, declining to take a harder stand in support of Cheney, whom he reportedly pressed to apologize for her impeachment vote, suggests that insufficient loyalty to Trump is an appropriate litmus test for members of his party to impose on one another," Lutz writes.
But McCarthy's balancing act reportedly hasn't impressed Trump, who is said to be "livid and fuming" that McCarthy "betrayed" him by not reprimanding Cheney.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was mocked on Monday after she shared a transphobic article from a satirical news website.
In a Monday morning tweet, Greene included a link from "The Babylon Bee," which bills itself as "fake news you can trust."
The article seemed intended to smear transgender athletes.
"High School Runner Not Feeling Great About Her Chances Against The Girl With The Beard," the headline stated.
Greene added a remark: "Gee, I wonder why?"
Commenters quickly pointed out that Greene had embarrassed herself by sharing a parody news article.
"LMAO. You are so good at constantly owning yourself," one commenter wrote. "It's the gift that keeps on giving."
Read some of the responses to Greene's tweet below.
Now read The Onion....... 🤦🏻♀️ — John G Hertzler (@JGHertzler) February 8, 2021
It's online it MUST be true. — Jay .... (@JayRod212) February 8, 2021
Proving once agian MTG only talks to hear her own head rattle!!🤣🤣🤣🤫🤫🤭🤭 — Paulette🙋🏽♀️🤙🌊 (@gypsie4lyfe) February 8, 2021
MTG, quoting the right-wing satire site and thinking it's real.
Hey, do the Onion next will ya? — MTGsLlama 🇺🇲🦙 (@GreenesLlama) February 8, 2021
I love when the best you can do is the Babylon bee. 😂😂😂😂 — 🇺🇸⚖️BlairLaw⚖️🏴 (@Blairlaw223) February 8, 2021
LMAO. You are so good at constantly owning yourself. It's the gift that keeps on giving. — Jeff makes podcasts (@jeffpodcasts) February 8, 2021
i see that the satire understander has logged on. — 46th President of NERV (@beeg_meesh64) February 8, 2021
Why are you citing the Babylon Bee? You know it's a satire, right? Oh wait... I forgot who I was talking to. pic.twitter.com/8skKDCBp7z — Cover to Cover (@NaptownBookClub) February 8, 2021
Holy shit! You realize that's a humor site, not actual news, right? Terrifying for Georgia. — Mark (@BamaMania123) February 8, 2021
This is a magical self own and I rate it highly likely you still don't know why — Chris (@cgkelly14) February 8, 2021
It sounds familiar, but it wasn't November 2020. It was February 2016.
Trump was just months into his presidential campaign, and was already telling a story he would tell countless times over the following five years, hinting to the world at the character of the man the U.S. Senate will soon evaluate in the impeachment trial.
Back then, Trump was seeking to nullify Ted Cruz's victory. And he was accusing Iowa of bungling the primary vote counting.
The Donald Trump Americans think of now was the same Donald Trump who entered the election in 2015 and the White House in 2016. Some of his power to rally a loyal base was based on his repetitive rhetorical style, but on Twitter he was especially potent as narrator-in-chief of his own political life.
In 2017, I began to collect all of his tweets, going back to June 16, 2015, the day he announced his candidacy. I kept at it until Jan. 8, 2021, the day Twitter permanently suspended his account. I wanted to learn more about how he used language. But in those 20,301 tweets I learned something more fundamental about how the 45th president of the United States used Twitter to tell his own story.
A storyteller president
Trump was more effusively positive and more bitingly negative than the politicians, journalists, news organizations and activists I compared him to – including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Katy Tur of NBC, pro-Trump activist Linda Suhler and Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson.
The elements were flexible. “The establishment" could be anyone – Democrats, the NFL, a media outlet, a corporation and even Vice President Mike Pence. “The invaders" were China, the coronavirus that first emerged there, people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border or Black Lives Matter protesters.
But the structure never changed: There was a danger to the nation, Trump was uniquely able to protect America and he was righteously supported by “real" Americans.
That is what he said; how it worked was equally important.
Donald Trump claims 'I alone can fix it' in his speech accepting the Republican nomination for president.
Telling a different story
In terms storytelling scholars use, Trump “rescripted" the world to fit his themes. He took elements of news articles, viral videos, other tweets and whatever else he needed to build his messages. He took storylines that were already in the public sphere and placed new meaning on them to fit his own tale.
During the 2015 lead-up to the Republican primary, for example, the conservative Club for Growth spent US$1 million running negative ads against Trump. But Trump, tweeting, rescripted the story: “The phony Club For Growth, which asked me in writing for $1,000,000 (I said no), is now wanting to do negative ads on me. Total hypocrites!" The Club for Growth was a groveling and fraudulent establishment; he was effective and powerful.
Trump would also rescript characters into multiple, sometimes contradictory, messages, depending on the day's news. Consider his tweeting about China, which was first a partner, then a trade adversary and finally an invader:
2017: “The failing @nytimes hates the fact that I have developed a great relationship with World leaders like Xi Jinping, President of China….."
2018: “We are not in a trade war with China, that war was lost many years ago by the foolish, or incompetent, people who represented the U.S. Now we have a Trade Deficit of $500 Billion a year, with Intellectual Property Theft of another $300 Billion. We cannot let this continue!"
Trump most commonly tweeted about the government, media and corporate institutions, which often became fodder for news coverage. The media often framed the tweets as attacks and “counter-punching." But in a closer read, they were not merely responses to criticism or bad news. They regularly described something, the way a narrator would.
But his recasting of reality through his own lens may have also played a role in Trump's downfall. All the attacks, all the twisting of information, all the fear, may have worn out just enough people in key states to ensure his defeat.
When that defeat struck, Trump's storytelling framework did not change: It escalated and multiplied, consuming everything and everyone who did not blatantly support what many have called the Big Lie – that the election was rigged against him:
Jan. 3, 2021: “I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia. He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the 'ballots under table' scam, ballot destruction, out of state 'voters', dead voters, and more. He has no clue!"
Jan. 6, 2021: “Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!"
Donald Trump speaks at his Jan. 6, 2021 rally, before the crowd marched on the Capitol.
There is no one single line from a Trump speech or tweet that is going to be the smoking gun urging his followers to violence.
But he did help set the scene for the Capitol raid. The most famous was on Dec. 19, 2020: “Peter Navarro releases 36-page report alleging election fraud 'more than sufficient' to swing victory to Trump … A great report by Peter. Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!"
The way Trump crafted this tweet is representative of how he rescripted things to tell his own story. He took something already in the discussion, Navarro's report, and used it in a way that shaped the logic for the “stop the steal" campaign.
Trump didn't have to invent #StopTheSteal – just include it in his existing narrative structure. Other politicians, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have adopted Trump's general structure for their own tweets.
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough unloaded on his former party for embracing Donald Trump and "tyrannical thinking."
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said last week that Trump still owned control of the GOP because he'd won a record number of Republican votes, but the "Morning Joe" host agreed with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) that the party should not be embracing the former president.
"The comment of a record number of Republicans voted for President Trump, you could have said that about Hillary Clinton in 2016," Scarborough said. "A record number of Americans voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. What standard is that? She lost, Donald Trump lost. He lost by a record number. He lost to the guy who got a record number of votes from all Americans, but I hear that, quote, that it is his party and his party alone."
Scarborough said conservatives should reject that sort of thinking.
"Isn't that what we always bristled at what we heard people say that about Fidel Castro in Cuba, when we read about [Joseph] Stalin, the party was Stalin's and Stalin's alone. Isn't that what we were concerned about with Chairman Mao? It was what the chairman said it was, just like the communist party in Cuba was what Fidel Castro said it was. If it was murdering Catholics, it was murdering Catholics. If it was shutting down newspapers and jailing people because they dare to speak freely, that's what Fidel Castro would do. If it was shooting down planes, Cessnas, then that's what he would do, and so now to hear this coming from a member of Congress, no matter who the member of Congress is, it sounds very ominous that the party is Donald Trump and Donald Trump is whatever. Whatever Donald Trump says the party is, it is. This is tyrannical thinking."
My brother emailed me to make sure I knew that we Jews had space laser technology capable of starting wildfires out West. Naturally he wondered who controlled it--Orthodox or Reform? But here's the question I asked him as we corresponded about the suggestion by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene that we, the Jews, in the guise of the always convenient Rothschilds, pointed a laser from the sky to start fires in California: "If we could burn up any place in the world, why would we pick California?"
Greene is absurd to publicly broadcast an idea that stupid. But many people where she lives sent her and her message to Washington. She imagines a plot reminiscent of those scary 1950s movies about some impossible bogeyman. Now the bogeywoman sits in Congress, and everybody is listening.
She is one sharp thorn on a much bigger political club wielded by American conservatives so they can run our governments. That club is the invention and propagation of weird tales of horror, often called "conspiracy theories," where the monsters are liberals, or even better, Jewish liberals.
If Jews, whatever group of humans that label might bring to mind among her fans, had so much power, why would we burn California, where one out of every six American Jews live? Explaining the central absurdity of that idea, or of the idea that mass shootings whose blood and death we all know about were actually a hoax, or of the idea that Democrats stole a national election, is where these theories fail.
Holocaust denial created a model for modern absurdity theories by focusing on facts. Millions of words and photographs and diagrams and scientific-sounding analyses have been created to explain why any particular known fact about the Holocaust is made up. David Irving, the premier Holocaust denier with historical credentials, sued Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books for libel, because she labeled him "a Holocaust denier, falsifier, and bigot," who "manipulated and distorted real documents", as Wikipedia puts it. Richard Evans, the British historian who advised Lipstadt's defense, made an official report: "Not one of [Irving's] books, speeches or articles, not one paragraph, not one sentence in any of them, can be taken on trust as an accurate representation of its historical subject."
Like most other crazies who go public, Irving was eventually unmasked, but he screwed around with facts for decades, because his political message about Jews was welcome in many corners of the Christian world. But abstracted from the slippery "facts" that dominate Holocaust deniers' writings, the most absurd part of their message is rarely addressed. For 75 years, "the Jews" enlisted millions of the most prominent and powerful people across the world to recreate history in word and location, and to promulgate in every way that impossible history as truth.
Antisemites have never underestimated our cleverness, although denying the evidence that some of us actually are smart. So how do they explain how we did that? I don't mean how we got some old man to talk about non-existent gas chambers in Auschwitz or how we forged a document enumerating the people whom Nazis had just shot. How did we bring that immense conspiracy into being and how have we maintained it all these years? We must be really powerful, beyond the imagining of Greene and her ilk, if we could create these enormous conspiracies without leaving a trace.
Where are the letters, emails, photographs, diagrams, and web pages, even self-constructed á la Irving, showing us, the Jews, creating and leading that conspiracy? Or creating the magic laser to incinerate our friends instead of our enemies? How did the libs manage to both rig elections in Republican states and then create the worldwide spectacle that Biden won?
Mike Pompeo spent two months since the election pretending that Biden's victory was not legitimate. For years, he has exercised vast control over a network of highly trained people around the world, many of whom had been sent out as emissaries of Trump's ideology. But none of them sent back a bit of evidence explaining how or why every government in the world has dismissed the stolen election fantasy. If Pompeo had anything that could be bent, twisted, chopped up and regurgitated as proof that Angela Merkel and Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin and Justin Trudeau all signed on to the plot to rig the election and defend it afterward, why hasn't he produced it? Is he waiting for his next political campaign?
No, I think there is another reason. It seems to work quite well to just assume that central absurdity without explanation. Somehow it is not important to explain how a group of people, many under constant scrutiny by all forms of media, could be so secretive, so organized, so depraved and evil, to run a vast child abuse ring underneath a pizza place in Washington DC. The original Reddit post that touched off this particular conservative flight into absurdity, claimed in fact the abuse was easy to spot: "Everyone associated with the business is making semi-overt, semi-tongue-in-cheek, and semi-sarcastic inferences towards sex with minors. The artists that work for and with the business also generate nothing but cultish imagery of disembodiment, blood, beheadings, sex, and of course pizza."
The absence of any explanation of the origins and inner workings of these great conspiracies, the successful veil of utter secrecy that the world's official bodies have cast over their diabolical plans, implies a much larger conspiratorial network. Pizzagate and Holocaust denial and our space laser require full participation from police and security forces at all levels. Recent conservative absurdity theories have thus transformed the FBI from heroes of the fight against crime into co-conspirators. Trump had no choice but to include denunciations of the FBI in his flights into the absurd.
Holocaust denial is co-terminous with antisemitism. The people whom the deniers reach already believe that Jews are capable of unimagined evil, that we are all in it together, that we exercise unbounded but secret power. They don't have to be convinced by some sleight of hand of the theorists. Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn't have to explain to her voters why we Jews would dream up a remarkable plan to burn out our own. Her followers are already there. They just want to know the details. In this case, Greene may be up a creek. No "space expert" has jumped in to explain our technological blueprints. She might have to walk away from that one entirely. She can blame this one on her "team" of social media producers, probably the same people who shared a video on her Facebook page where Nick Griffin, a well-known British Holocaust denier, says an "unholy alliance of leftists, capitalists and Zionist supremacists have schemed to promote immigration and miscegenation."
The seemingly less absurd absurdity theories that are twisting our national politics, "Stop the Steal" or "I wasn't defeated, I am really President," have just enough details to obscure the more potent, unspoken, and fundamentally preposterous idea behind them. The Dems stole the election, they created a Disney spectacle of victory in an endless loop, and they convinced tens of millions of ordinary Americans, everyone's neighbors and relatives, to go along. I swear this is true, because some people I don't know, with no inside knowledge, say it's true, and I share their hatreds.
The believers in new undetectable conspiracies by vast numbers of satanic people overlap with the generations of promoters of Holocaust denial. That denial began with the perpetrators themselves as they were killing millions of satanic Jews, who were trying to take over the world. Without lasers.
Steve Hochstadt is a writer and an emeritus professor of history at Illinois College.
In a commentary during his weekend show, CNN host Fareed Zakaria quoted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who referred to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and her "loony lies."
"Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country," McConnell said on the Senate floor. "Somebody who's suggested that perhaps no airplane hit the Pentagon on 9/11, that horrifying school shootings were pre-staged, and that the Clintons crashed JFK Jr.'s airplane is not living in reality."
But conspiracies are what the GOP has been clinging to for a generation.
He began by explaining that since the 1930s, Republicans have promised their voters that they would repeal Medicare, Social Security and the other programs created by The New Deal. While they've changed their reasons and their talking points, the party still wants to repeal the "socialist" programs that continue to help older Americans today.
The same thing happened with former President Lyndon B. Johnson when he created "The Great Society," conservatives said they'd tear it down. They never did.
Even former President Ronald Reagan proclaimed that Medicare was sending America on the path to "socialism."
"You and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free," Reagan said in 1961. After eight years, Medicare was not only still intact, Reagan expanded it.
Zakaria noted that Speaker Newt Gingrich, who still appears on Fox News, promised "revolution" against Democrats in the 1990s. He called Democrats "the embodiment of evil who win only because they lie and cheat."
It's the same thing the GOP is doing today. Zakaria specifically cited Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has lied that he'll abolish Obamacare, get rid of the IRS and balance the budget. All things that will never happen and Cruz knew it.
He, like many Republicans, "whip" his followers "into hysteria," said Zakaria, "and sends them into battle."
Republicans have spent more than 10 years chanting "repeal and replace Obamacare," only to fail because in those ten years they didn't think to come up with the "replace" part.
"This entire decades' long strategy has led millions of Republicans to feel cheated and lied to by their leaders, creating an atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion toward anyone who is not utterly extreme," he explained. "It also feeds the notion that true conservatism fails because of treason, betrayal or collusion. It is a short and direct line from the tactics of Newt Gingrich to the Jan. 6th Capitol riot. If you are looking for an alternative path for a conservative leader, one who knows how to appeal to populist and national settlement, look at Boris Johnson. Johnson who initially and badly bungled COVID-19 is now tackling the pandemic with much greater seriousness, and he gradually emerged as the most consequential conservative politician since Margaret Thatcher. He has been reshaping his party to make it more compatible with modern-day Britain."
It's unknown if the Republican Party is capable of doing something similar.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) was harshly criticized by a newspaper editorial board in her district for refusing to go beyond condemning Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) for her violent and anti-Semitic rhetoric in a scathing editorial on Sunday.
While Stefanik called the controversial Greene's comments "inexcusable," she also defended her Republican colleague by not voting to strip her of her committee assignments. Additionally she said kicking Greene out of the House would be dismissing the will of the voters who just sent her to D.C.
As the editors of the Post Star claimed, that was hypocritical of the lawmaker who wanted to contest the Electoral College votes that, in turn, led to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan 6th.
"Our congresswoman, Elise Stefanik, has condemned as "inexcusable" statements made by her fellow Republican congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Greene. But she has refused to do anything about them, because, she says, Congress has no right to overturn the decision of the people of Georgia, who elected Greene," the editorial stated. "We're tempted to end this editorial right here, and let that paragraph, which takes irony to its peak, speak for itself."
Noting, "A month ago, Stefanik was abetting an effort to overturn the decision of the people in several swing states, including Georgia, in the November election. She stood up in Congress during its certification of state electors and objected to the results in Pennsylvania," the editorial continued, "Stefanik pushed ahead, however, making a speech that mixed false and true statements."
That led to a comparison to the claims made by Rep. Taylor Greene.
"Lies almost always include some true elements — otherwise, they're just fantasy, like saying the California wildfires were started by beams from solar generators in space as part of a conspiracy involving the Rothschild family, former California Gov. Jerry Brown and Sen. Dianne Feinstein's husband," the editors noted. "The 'space beams' story is one of the tales woven by Greene, a clever fabulist who pretends she is just raising questions while speculating, for example, on whether the mass shooting in Las Vegas was carried out by gun control advocates, not a lone shooter. Isn't it vicious and heartless to peddle such a lie in public, so it will reach the ears of family members who lost loved ones that night?"
Turning back to Stefanik, they added, "All the Democrats in the House of Representatives and 11 Republicans (including three from New York — Chris Jacobs, John Katko and Nicole Malliotakis) were appalled enough by Greene's statements they voted to strip her of her committee assignments. But Stefanik said Congress had no right to act, because Georgia's voters had spoken."
"Stefanik's excuse for taking Greene's side is so full of holes, it's invisible. It is amusing, however, that she would point to the will of the voters, considering it was she who, a month ago, was doing her best to undermine the election results in Georgia," they concluded.
On CNN Saturday, former Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA), a Trump-skeptic conservative who endorsed President Joe Biden, said that Republicans in his circle are debating forming an entirely new conservative party and abandoning the GOP to the far right.
"What are Republican leaders telling you about the trajectory of the party?" asked anchor Fredricka Whitfield.
"It's not good right now. I think everybody understands that," said Dent. "In fact, just yesterday I participated in a forum or a summit where we talked about the future of the party, should there be a new party or a new faction. A new faction within the party or one that operates independently of the party? That's the conversation that many Republicans are having, and we're united around core principles like democracy, rule of law, measured statements, and we're against cronyism and this type of ugly populism that we've witnessed the last four years under President Trump and folks like [Rep.]Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)."
"So it sounds like there's a consideration of surrendering the party to a fringe element?" said Whitfield.
"Well, I think that's a real fear," said Dent. "You just led with Marjorie Taylor Greene's comments. And let's be honest, the Democrats now have a recorded vote of 199 Republicans basically defending her right to serve on a committee. I mean, Republicans would, say, pick on AOC or the Squad and use her to define other Democrats. Now it's going to be a fair turn of events. Democrats are going to do the same thing with Marjorie Taylor Greene, except they have a recorded vote. And that is a very big deal. So I think Republicans right now have to — should have never put themselves in a position where the Democrats did what Republicans should have done themselves, which was remove her from the committees and also, frankly, disinvite her from the Republican conference."
