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Republicans Wonder How, And If, They Can Pull The Party Back Together
President Trump leaves fault lines in the GOP after the Capitol insurrection and his second impeachment, on top of the party having lost the White House, House and Senate on his watch.
www.npr.org
The 24-hour period between the nights of January 5 and January 6 was the worst 24-hour period of the Republican party in decades.
Before, it looked like that the Republicans would hold a narrow majority in the Senate. Georgia Democrats have a bad track record in statewide runoffs. Mitch McConnell's role would become the same as when the Republicans retook the Senate in 2014: Block everything but the most bipartisan of bills.
Before, it looked like the January 6 rally was going to be yet another dud. All the "Trump 2020" flag-waving at prior rallies amounted to nothing more than angry, entitled people that were refusing to accept the legitimate results of our legitimate elections.
Before.
On the night of January 5, Raphael Warnock clinched enough votes to win a US Senate seat. The next day, Jon Ossoff did the same. Fifty Democratic Senators, and with a Democratic VP-elect, that meant that all of a sudden, Prez-elect Biden would have a much clearer path to getting his nominations and legislative agenda through.
That would have been the talk of the town, were it not for the most serious attack on US soil since 9/11 and the first time since 1814 that the US Capitol was invaded. Five people died, including one police officer, but the death toll could have been much worse. The invaders put the Vice President and Congresspeople of both parties in grave physical danger. Some Congresspeople's panic buttons had been ripped out. By an extraordinarily fortunate sequence of events, no Congressperson was injured or killed, but that easily could have happened.
Both of these events have dealt significant blows to the Republican party, but the Capitol invasion is the one that is going to last. The Republican party is as divided as ever between sane and insane, and insane is winning. They have systematically ejected most of the few remaining sane members, settling instead for crazies such as Louie Gohmert, Josh Hawley, and donald trump.
The trouble for the Republican party is that sane Americans are not having it. It was more than enough that on top of the many, many, many errors he has made during his presidency, trump completely fumbled his COVID-19 response. Then he acted like a toddler who threw a tantrum when he got his toys taken away from him after losing the election fair and square. No matter how much he double-, triple-, quadruple-downed on his lies and baseless conspiracy claims, his angry bullshit was not enough to overcome math. The math was against him: trump had lost the election.
America might have moved on from that, just live we might have moved on from trump. But America does not just move on after literal attacks. Japan learned that lesson the hard way after Pearl Harbor. So did Al Qaeda after 9/11. But an attack incited by the president himself? How low does a president have to sink to do that? How low do those thugs who invaded our Capitol have to be to follow a president who has clearly lost his mind? The domestic terrorism of the far-right has been fomenting for years, but the insurrection blew into the open. And those domestic terrorists have embedded themselves in the Republican party.
The remaining sane Republicans have to retake the reins. They have to purge the party of the terrorist enablers. If that means throwing out scores of Congresspeople, so be it. This shouldn't be about left vs. right. This should be about saving the republic. This should be about returning the party of donald trump to the party of Abraham Lincoln. And they'd better do it, because sane Americans saw what happened and are not going to let it happen again.
Freaking moron!
