The GOP Just Spit in the Face of American Democracy
Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast
They know they’re a minority party. They know they’ll need to cheat again, so they choose not to punish cheating even if that means the unleashing of fascism.
Well, now we know. We know how the Republican Party wants to go down in history. They’ve made it as clear as could be.
First, two-thirds of the members of the Republican caucus of the House of Representatives voted on Jan. 6 to refuse to affirm the results of the presidential election. They continued doing so, we know, after the riot, after Capitol Hill Police Officer Brian Sicknick lay dead, after a mob had defaced the Capitol building. Denying Joe Biden the presidency was, of course, the mission of the mob. So two-thirds of House Republicans voted to condone the mob. And now, we’ve seen that 86 percent of Republican senators have voted to deny what’s in front of their noses and insist that Donald Trump bears no blame they can provide for the riot he incited.
In sum, congressional Republicans have put themselves on record saying that they are, in effect, untroubled by the worst assault on our democracy since the Civil War. The rioters were justified, said the two-thirds of House Republicans who agreed that Biden wasn’t really elected. And Senate Republicans said that the president who urged them to march on the Capitol and fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore and then sat back and watched and did nothing to stop it (and to this day has never denounced it) bore no responsibility for the assault, or at least none that they could mete out. Those 43 Republicans just spit in the face of American democracy.
