The Republican Party is deeply divided. On one side are the Trumpsters. While they are united in their support for former president Trump, they actually fall into two separate camps.
On the one hand, we have the true believers, like Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who led the fight to overturn the election and return Trump to the White House. Millions of Trump faithful are in this bloc as well. Brooks claimed that Americans “have been victims of the largest voter fraud and election theft scheme in American history,”[1] without providing any evidence.
On the other hand, we have the shameless sheep. These are the Republican officials who are too afraid of Trump’s base to stand up for the truth. Since 55% of Republicans still believe the election was stolen[2] and 60% want Trump to run for president in 2024,[3] they fear being primaried by a true Trump supporter. Holding on to power is more important to them than the future of our democracy.
According to Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who voted to impeach Trump, most of his colleagues are thinking: “I need to continue to exist in this job so that I can make an impact. I don’t have the courage or the strength or the ability to swing this party, so I’m going to just kinda put my head down and go along.”[4]
There is, however, a third group. A small minority of Republicans who do not support Trump and his lies and are willing to speak truth to power. Most prominent among them is Rep. Liz Cheney, currently the 3rd ranking Republican in the House. She recently explained, “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”[5]
Equally striking were the comments of Michael Wood, a Texas Republican congressional candidate and former Trump backer who lost a recent U.S. House runoff with just 3% of the vote. A former Trump backer, Wood noted that the Republican Party has “lost its way”:
I don’t know what we stand for…We don’t like baseball. We don’t like Coke. We don’t like NASCAR. We don’t like Hollywood. We don’t like academia. We don’t like anything. We’re just a grievance party that hates a good hunk of America and then we call ourselves patriots, and this is just a dead end.[6]
Then, to effectively prove Wood’s point, Republican Senate minority leader and Obstructer-in-chief, Mitch McConnell, declared, “One-hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration.”[7] For McConnell and the majority of Republicans, it’s all about obstruction and regaining power. To hell with controlling the pandemic or improving the lives of the American people.
Our democracy is floundering in large part because the Republican Party is rotting away. And because Democratic Sens. Manchin and Sinema are demanding unrealistic bipartisanship before they will support critical bills that can save our democracy from Republicans’ relentless obstructionism and their boundless craving for all-embracing power. These Democrats are standing firm despite the fact that McConnell, Hawley, Brooks and their colleagues have made it clear that they will have none of it.
Cheney and Wood are voices in the wilderness. There are no Republican leaders able and willing to heed their warnings. The critical question then becomes: Will Manchin and Sinema grasp the deadly peril our democracy faces and put the needs of the country ahead of their idealistic bipartisan principles? We must do whatever we can to help these senators see the light and do the right thing.
Bruce Berlin, J.D.
A retired, public sector ethics attorney, Berlin is the author of Breaking Big Money’s Grip on America (See breakingbigmoneysgrip.com.), the founder of New Mexicans for Money Out of Politics (now RepresentUs New Mexico), a former U.S. Institute of Peace fellow, and the founder and former executive director of The Trinity Forum for International Security and Conflict Resolution. He can be reached at breakingbigmoneysgrip@gmail.com.
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[1] https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-TRUMP/LAWMAKERS/xegpbedzdvq/
[2] https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/majority-republicans-still-believe-2020-election-was-stolen-donald-trump
[3] https://www.newsweek.com/6-10-republicans-want-trump-run-2024-think-2020-election-stolen-1581031
[4] https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/adam-kinzinger-trump-election-conspiracy-092610348.html
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/03/liz-cheney-republican-trump-election-big-lie
[6] https://www.yahoo.com/huffpost/michael-wood-congressional-candidate-republican-party-nicolle-wallace-000443441.html
[7] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/mcconnell-says-he-s-100-percent-focused-stopping-biden-s-n1266443
Breaking Big Money's Grip on America 