Republicans brook no resistance to Trump’s election lies | Editorial

Liz Cheney, the congresswoman from Wyoming, is a conservative in the original sense of that word. Her respect for our democracy and its Constitution distinguishes her from most other Republicans in current party leadership and public office. So does her integrity. The others have sold their souls to the megalomaniac Donald Trump, whose stupendous lies about the 2020 election pose a clear and present danger to the nation.

After voting to impeach Trump for inciting the seditious riot at the Capitol Jan. 6, Cheney survived a first attempt to remove her as chair of the Republican conference in the House, the caucus’s third highest position.

But she is now likely to be ousted, perhaps this week, in punishment for her refusal to be silent as Trump continues to propagate the subversive falsehoods that he won the election and that Joe Biden’s presidency is illegitimate.

“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,” she tweeted last Monday in response to another noxious eruption from Mar-a-Lago.

Cheney’s removal seems foretold now that Trump, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California and Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the second in command, have openly supported Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York as her replacement.

Of the two women now cast as historic rivals, Cheney has the much more conservative record. In an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate, she came out against gay marriage despite her sister, Mary, being a lesbian married to another woman. In the House, she voted against Trump’s first impeachment. In the present crisis, some liberals can’t accept that her defiance of Trump is nobly motivated.

But Stefanik, 36, originally a moderate, has become yet another pathetic Trump cultist. Along with most House Republicans, she supported a junk lawsuit that asked the Supreme Court to overturn Biden’s election and voted against certifying some of Biden’s electors. Last week, she was echoing Trump’s baseless attacks on the election and endorsing the farcical “audit’' under way in Arizona.

Her vote against the electors was a victory for the mob that had invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6 demanding nothing less than the overthrow of our constitutional government.

Stefanik the opportunist is now the figurehead of another disloyal mob: The Republican politicians who are uncritically subservient to Trump no matter the danger to the Constitution and their oaths to uphold it.

Writing in the Washington Post Thursday, Cheney clearly defined what’s at stake.

“I am a conservative Republican,” she explained, “and the most conservative of conservative values is reverence for the rule of law. Each of us swears an oath before God to uphold our Constitution. The electoral college has spoken. More than 60 state and federal courts, including multiple Trump-appointed judges, have rejected the former president’s arguments and refused to overturn election results. That is the rule of law; that is our constitutional system for resolving claims of election fraud.

“The question before us now is whether we will join Trump’s crusade to delegitimize and undo the legal outcome of the 2020 election, with all the consequences that might have.”

She called for a bipartisan commission with subpoena power to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection and urged her party to “stand for genuinely conservative principles and steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.”

It is difficult to believe that McCarthy, Scalise and so many other Republican officeholders really believe Trump’s lies or relish how he has turned them into servile lapdogs. But if avarice, ideology or opportunism are their excuses, they’re poorer ones by far than even ignorance or gullibility. Those entrusted with leadership in our democracy are supposed to know from history what happens when leaders lie about fundamental truths.

External attacks such as the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor or Al Qaeda’s terrorism on 9/11 have always united virtually all Americans in defense of our nation.

Trump’s homegrown malice is more sinister. It is dividing us, deluding a substantial minority of citizens into disbelieving that our elections are honest and fair. According to a CNN poll announced April 30, only 23% of Republicans think Biden won legitimately. That is entirely Trump’s fault, and the record reveals no other candidate who ever dabbled in such subversion.

Republican lawmakers in nearly all the states as well as in Congress have become his accomplices, introducing more than 360 voter suppression bills in 47 states, going to such vicious extremes as criminalizing the gifting of food or water to voters waiting in long lines. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed one of these outrageous bills into law last week.

Arizona’s Republican legislature commissioned an “audit” by an unqualified Florida firm known as Cyber Ninja, entrusting 2020 ballots to untrained hands unsupervised by legitimate election officials. At last word, they were laboriously scanning them for evidence of paper made from bamboo, all on account of a lunatic theory that 40,000 marked ballots had been smuggled in from Asia.

The purpose goes beyond simply suppressing the next vote. It is a scheme to deny the legitimacy of the next presidential election should Trump, or any other Republican, lose again. It is nothing less than a coup against the Constitution.

That is the background and the purpose of purging Liz Cheney. No one who participates can truthfully claim to be a patriot.

Patriotism does not consist of saluting the flag and sneering at those who don’t. It demands genuine allegiance to the republic for which it stands.

Liz Cheney can say those words with a clear conscience. None of her detractors can.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of consists of Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email letters@sunsentinel.com .