The job that the 1/6 Committee is doing in exposing Trump’s unspeakable awfulness — not only crimes, but utter human monstrousness. And that’s important.
So many people are hungering for him to be held accountable. So many disbelieve he will ever be held accountable. I have difficulty imagining that AG Garland and the DOJ won’t prosecute. After all that’s been revealed, no one who cares about “the rule of law” — and that seems to be at the heart of Garland’s value system — could be OK with just moving on, leaving such crimes, such fundamental betrayals of the nation, unaddressed by the full force of the law.
Holding Trump accountable is also important because he is such a continuing source of toxicity and danger to our democracy going forward.
But it isn’t Trump alone. Trump was from the start a symptom of the pathologies already permeating the Republican Party. He is, as I first wrote in 2015, the same Republican wolf but without the sheep’s clothing.
Even if we didn’t see how morally bankrupt the GOP had become even before Trump hijacked the Party, the conduct of the major part of the Republican Party around the whole 2020 Election would be evidence enough. All the Republican Attorneys General filing suit to help Trump overturn the election. All the Republicans in the House who, even after the Insurrection, voted against certifying Biden’s victory. All the ways that the Republican Party has sought to cover up their role in that assault on American democracy. All the ways that they are continuing to work, rather openly, for the same kind of seizure of power — through disenfranchisement, through rigging the administration of elections -- that Trump attempted with his multi-faceted scheme to steal the 2020 Election.
So as admiring as I am of what the 1/6 Committee has done so far to expose Trump’s criminality, my remaining fear is that the Republicans will escape relatively unscathed. American democracy is still endangered, and the danger is coming straight from the GOP.
I know that Liz Cheney talked about the “dishonor” that will follow her Republican colleagues in the House. I am aware that Senator Ron Johnson’s involvement with the fake elector scheme has been mentioned.
And I’m also aware that the Democrats on the Committee will rightly feel the need to avoid making the hearings look like a partisan Democratic exercise (like the Benghazi hearings were for the Republicans).
But if the ultimate purpose of the hearings can be stated as “To save American democracy,” then I hope they can find some way to get across to the American public that this wasn’t just Trump. It was Trump abetted by the Trump Party. Which is what, by and large, it still is.
It is likely a smart choice the Committee has made to have the case against Trump made through the testimony of Republicans— people from Trump’s inner circle (like the execrable former AG Barr), and Republicans who showed integrity (in a Party where integrity is punished, like with Liz Cheney). I.e. with witnesses like Brad Raffensperger and Rusty Bowers.
That is helpful for skewering Trump, because their testimony cannot be so easily dismissed as some partisan vendetta. These are people who voted for Trump!
But the danger with this approach is that it will give the public an impression of the Republican Party as something that it is not. For their integrity is not representative of what the Party, as a whole, has become.
So I wonder:
- Can the Committee find a way to show the American people what is important about how the Republican Party of today fits into the crimes they’re showing? And
- Will they do it?
The job, I expect, will largely have to be implicit. And what is explicit will likely have to be done by Liz Cheney and her fellow Republican on the Committee, Adam Kinzinger.
But the job needs to be done. The future’s market is still saying that it’s 3:1 that next year, the Republicans will control both Houses of Congress. And some very perceptive observers still fear that if the Republicans get the Congress, it will lead to “Game Over” for American democracy.
To my mind, the most fundamental measure of the effectiveness of the hearings will be not getting Donald Trump into an orange jump suit, though that would be valuable. It will be in how well it serves to awaken the American people to the need not to give more power to the Republican Party next November but to compel that Party either to transform itself or be driven into oblivion.