Abraham Lincoln was born 212 years ago today. He was the second Republican to run for President and the first to win. A lot can happen to a political party, and has, in the 160 years since he entered the White House.
The party made a critical decision about its future when it nominated him, a moderate in a time of rising radicalism, to run for President of the United States. Today’s Republicans might be facing a decision about their party’s future that is no less serious than the party’s decision in 1860. There is concern, however, about who are the people who will make that decision or who will take it in its future direction.
Sarah Longwell runs a conservative website, The Bulwark, and does a conservative podcast.
She made an interesting point this week about some people who have, by and large, escaped the spotlight that is shining on our ex-president and on the insurrectionists he is accused of spending months motivating to take actions that will put many of them in prison.
“Hold Them All Accountable,” says the headline on her website entry last Tuesday. She asks, “What of the elected officials whose months of lies agitated and radicalized the crowd, even before it was incited to insurrection?”
And who are these people she thinks are running under the radar?
“Finding 17 Republican senators to convict Trump is a Herculean task, not least because many of them joined him in feeding the lie that brought these people to the Capitol in the first place. In this regard, this trial is unique for having members of the jury who are not just not impartial, but are both witnesses and accomplices to the crime.”
Longwell reminds us to remember that more than one-fourth of Republicans in the Senate were on-record objecting to certifying the Electoral College results. She calls their demands for investigations into Trump-claimed extensive voter fraud “nothing less than hype-man interjections meant to bolster Trump’s claims that he ‘won in a landslide’ and that the election was being stolen.”
She especially targets our own Josh Hawley along with colleagues Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, and Lindsey Graham who “were happy to jump in front of every available television camera to discuss the unprecedented allegations of voter fraud no matter how discredited those allegations were.”
She also scorns some house members: Louis Gohmert who suggested “violence in the streets” was the only thing left after a federal court refused to order Vice President Mike Pence to reverse the results; Madison Cawthorn, who suggested people call their congressmen and “lightly threaten” them if they didn’t reverse the results; Mo Brooks, who said just before the insurrection, “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass.”
She recalls 126 House Republicans joined the Texas Attorney General’s lawsuit questioning the results in four swing states.
“So now, while those arrested for the Capitol attack are—rightly—facing hard time, the Republicans and members of Conservatism Inc., who filled these thugs’ heads with poison and pointed them toward the Capitol are ‘moving on,’ their campaign fund flush with the millions they raised claiming they were going to ‘stop the steal.’”
She quotes former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s observation that, “The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by their president and other powerful people.”
Longwell says that means that ‘the elected officials who fed these people lies should be held accountable in some way, too.”
Sarah Longwell finishes, “Call witnesses. Prosecute the case. And never forget who the enemies of democracy were.”
She was interviewed on NPR”s Morning Edition earlier this week and host Sacha Pfeifer asked her how penalties could be exacted against those in Congress who supported The Big Lie. She answered, “Unfortunately, the electoral process is going to take a long time to play out…So it has to be the rest of our culture. It has to be with the process of shame. You need the business community to stand up and say we draw a bright line for people who objected to this election, that that is disqualifying to hold public office for people whotold lies to voters. Fifty million people believing that the election was stolen is an existential threat to our democracy.” More specifically for the business community, “Withholding their donations, saying we are not going to donate to politicians who objected to a free and fair election.”
She thinks newspapers have a role with “editorial boards calling relentlessly for the resignations…We’ve got billboards up through our Republican Accountability Project calling for a lot of these foficials to resign. There is—needs to be a relentless public pressure that says what they did was wrong and be very clear about that becuae it was wrong.”
Longwell thinks it will be difficult for government to have a Biblical “physician, heal thyself” attitude because “so many Republicans participated in this problem that they’re not really going to hold each other accountable…Democrats essentially have to do it (but) then it looks entirely political, which is why the rest of the culture sort of has to step in here.”
She urged “as many Republican senators as possible (to) stand up and do the right thing now because it’s really going to matter, showing people that there is come accountability even within your own party.”
The entire article is at: https://thebulwark.com/hold-them-all-accountable/
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Sarah Longwell might not set well with the Trump true believers. She has a background as a Republican strategist and is a former Senior Vice-President and Communications Director for noted GOP lobbyist Richard Berman. She now runs her own communications company in DC. She was the first woman to sit on the board of Log Cabin Republicans, a Republican organization that refused to endorse Donald Trump in 2016. She resigned as chairman of the board when the organization endorsed him in 2019. Now a Never-Trumper, she leads a group called Republicans for the Rule of Law, an organization she founded with noted conservative writer Bill Kristol. The organization advocated for Trump’s impeachment and removal two years ago.