Dear America,
Every time I contemplate another Republican Party debacle I think, this is the party's nadir. The sinkhole into which it has fallen cannot be infinitely deep, so this must be the bottom. Then a few weeks go by and I think, well, that wasn't rock bottom, this is. Now, here I am again contemplating what looks like the bottom, but this time, I'm not going to fool myself. As long as Donald Trump is around, there will be toadies to lick his boots, and thus, there is no bottom to look forward to. That means that a change in the party's trajectory is not a prospect in any foreseeable future. The Republican Party has become our nations historical mutt, and Trump is holding it by the nape of the neck, sicking it on anyone he perceives to be an adversary, whether from within the party or from without. I have no love for either Liz Cheney or her father, whom I consider to have been one of the most despicable, diabolical figures ever to have succeeded in American politics. But while I see Liz's politics as being as abominable as her father's, it seems possible, maybe even probable, that at least her motives are pure and she is sincere, misguided or not. This Stefanik character, on the other hand, is an unpredictable hazard to all of us.
She is trying to become the number three leader of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives at the expense of the incumbent, Cheney. While I find Liz Cheney palpably indefensible in her adherence to her hyper-conservative guiding tenets, by virtue of her outright condemnation of Donald Trump, his election canard and the cognate assault on our electoral process on January 6, 2021 she is now one of my heroines. She probably shares much of Trump's and his acolyte's hateful ethos...their sub rosa nazi sentiments regarding race, chauvinism, egalitarianism and the like...she at least understands that the American democracy is sacrosanct and that Trump's willingness to cast it down in the service of his psychotic quest for demi-god status menaces all of us, even those of a conservative bent. Cheney's dogged and adamant repudiation of Trump's bizarre election fraud abject lie is admirable in light of her political ambition and the related sacrifice her confrontation with Trump constitutes. The Republican toadies who make Trump and his enduring control of their party as hard to remove as a three-day-imbedded tick are as vindictively pursuing her downfall as their patron is. Cheney crossed the boss, and now everyone around her is clearing out so as to avoid his wrath. That's easy for the two partisans ahead of her in the chain of command: Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise. If there were ever two more subornable politicians I am unaware of them. McCarthy has risen to the position of minority leader by putting party ahead of everything else, even when the welfare of the nation hangs in the balance. When he was being considered as a replacement for John Boehner as Speaker, he was interviewed on the news one night and adduced his leadership of the effort to scuttle Hilary Clinton's ambitions as a qualification for the job, apparently never considering the possibility that the Speaker has a higher duty than fending off political party adversaries. He's a shill in a perpetual search for a quid pro quo. As to Scalise, he had the misfortune to get shot by a lunatic radical assailant at a Republican party baseball practice, but he has turned that misfortune into a passport to party-political prominence and he uses it shamelessly. That's the quality of Cheney's second and third most formidable adversaries, and while that quality may be tawdry and unscrupulous self-service at anyone else's expense, it's what makes them formidable...not because of who they are but because of who can buy them.
The only ray of sunshine in this pathetic party passion play is that Stefanik may be a much more friendly other-party-foe than Cheney is. Her voting record has come up in news coverage of her ascendancy, and apparently conservative organizations have rated her disdainable rather than admirably conservative. Her voting record in Congress pales when compared to Cheney's when assessed for fealty to conservative policy goals. And ironically, her loyalty to "Trumpism" is even shakier than Cheney's given Cheney's record on votes on which Trump took a position, and substantially so. Thus, this insurgency against a staunch conservative like Cheney, who has roamed the halls of Republican power formidably for years now, serves Democrats to at least some extent. Now, when Stefanik takes over Cheney' role of chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, every time she expresses a non-conservative sentiment consistent with her previously espoused political philosophy, she will be excoriated by the party hierarchy. On the other hand, every time she espouses a conservative position contrary to her own political history in deference to that hierarchy, she will be accused of apostasy by her constituents; she may be trading today's political success for future electoral failure. Good for us.
Your friend,
Mike
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