The So-Called ‘Law And Order’ Party Is Now The Party That Coddles Criminals

On Saturday, the pathetic Pima County GQP hosted insurrection co-conspirator Steve Bannon for a so-called Lincoln Day Dinner, shortly after he defied a congressional subpoena from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

I’m sorry, but the GQP does not get to use Abraham Lincoln any longer. Lincoln fought to preserve the union, the Party of Trump tried to end the American experiment on January 6 in a violent seditious insurrection, which Steve Bannon helped to incite on his right-wing podcast.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorialized over the weekend, Bannon’s subpoena defiance is illegal, yet the ‘law and order’ party defends it:

For anyone who still needs it, most Republican House members last week provided more evidence that the GQP — once the “law-and-order” party — is now the party that coddles criminals. By overwhelmingly voting against holding Donald Trump crony Steve Bannon in criminal contempt for his refusal to testify in the investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, this shameful roster (including all six of Missouri’s GOP House members) is once again running interference for a lawless ex-president who tried to overthrow a valid election.

This certainly isn’t the first time congressional Republicans have sided with criminality lately. Not once but twice, most of them voted against holding Trump accountable for clearly impeachable acts (extorting a foreign ally for political support, and inciting the Capitol riot). They defended or silently tolerated Trump’s outrageous string of self-serving, swampy pardons for criminally charged or convicted supporters like Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and Bannon himself. They’re currently defending wealthy tax cheats by blocking Democratic efforts to strengthen Internal Revenue Service collection powers.

See Catherine Rampell, The GOP rebrands itself as the party of tax cheats; and Binyamin Appelbaum, The Rotten Core of the Republican Party: “Resistance to taxation is the rotten core of the modern Republican Party … They are aiding and abetting tax evasion.”

With a law-and-order party like this, who needs crooks?

The crime that Bannon committed to merit Thursday’s House vote to hold him in contempt is, like so much of the lawbreaking the GOP tries to ignore these days, pretty clear-cut: When Congress issues a subpoena, the subject of that subpoena is legally required to provide the information being sought — in this case, testimony about Bannon’s conversations with Trump before the Jan. 6 attack. Bannon’s excuse for refusing is that Trump is claiming executive privilege, which legal scholars say is nonsense because Trump is no longer president.

The strategy for protecting Bannon included a pathetic diversionary tactic by Republican Rep. Rodney Davis of Illinois, who prattled on, flush with fake outrage, about “serious security vulnerabilities that have not been addressed by this House in 11 months after Jan. 6.” As if security lapses excuse what Trump and his violent minions did that day. Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of just nine Republicans who voted to hold Bannon accountable for thumbing his nose at a legally issued congressional subpoena, saw right through Davis’ act, saying: “Don’t let my side use the security structure as the straw man.”

Republicans also argued Bannon should be out of the reach of the investigation because he is just a private citizen. Bannon’s own argument that he’s shielded by Trump’s (nonexistent) executive privilege would seem to suggest otherwise.

This really isn’t that complicated: A congressional probe to establish exactly who did what in advance of a mob attack on the seat of America’s government is not only justified but required. Congress has the legal authority to subpoena relevant witnesses for that probe. Those who defy such subpoenas are breaking the law.

And the party that tries to shield those lawbreakers should stop pretending it cherishes law and order.

One wonders why our pathetic local newspaper, the Arizona Daily Star, did not run a similar editorial opinion this weekend following the Pima County GQP honoring this criminal.

Fox News contributor Juan Williams adds at The Hill, Trump is killing American democracy (excerpt):

Trump feels he is bigger than the Republican Party. He feels free to crank up the volume.

Trump is now boldly asking followers in Congress to show their devotion to him by derailing the House investigation into the murderous assault on the Capitol by his supporters.

The “real insurrection,” he said last week, came not in the violence at the Capitol but on Election Day 2020.

Trump is also making a stir by trying to stop the facts about his behavior on Jan. 6 from becoming public. He is claiming executive privilege to keep White House records from the time of the insurrection away from Congress.

And he is advising his former aides not to testify about the Jan. 6 attempt to overthrow the government.

The House, along mostly party lines, responded by voting to hold Steve Bannon, one of Trump’s advisors, in criminal contempt for defying its subpoena.

But most House Republicans continue standing by Trump and Bannon.

According to a New York Times report last week, House Minority Leader [“Traitor“] Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has sent out word that GOP lobbyists and consultants risk blacklisting if they work with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), Trump’s most prominent critic among Capitol Hill Republicans.

Incredibly, most Republican voters still dance to the chaotic beat of Trump’s lies.

A majority, 66 percent of Republicans, told a Yahoo News/YouGov poll in August they still believe “the election was rigged and stolen from Trump.” Just 18 percent say they believe “Joe Biden won fair and square.”

This mass deception also serves as a cover for Trump loyalists to pass new state laws to suppress voter turnout and give Trump sycophants control of counting votes.

And now he is threatening to discourage his followers from voting in upcoming elections.

The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page responded by warning: “Mr. Trump may not be finished making his supporters pay for his narcissism.”

Trump’s “narcissism” requires his followers to ignore that his own attorney general concluded there was no fraud. So did more than 50 federal judges. So did Republican secretaries of state and even a series of election audits.

And there is more.

Revelations in freshly released documents show that Trump pressured his vice president to overthrow the election results. He also pushed loyalists in the Justice Department to do the same.

And he pressured Republican governors, and state legislators, even Republican secretaries of state, to find votes for him and falsely crown him the winner.

Republicans in Congress close their eyes to those facts.

Instead, they are captives — locked into an endless loop of lies run on high-speed repeat between Trump, conservative talk shows, elected officials and Republican voters.

That drumbeat of lies drowns out any counterpoint. It creates a separate reality.

Here is the proof:

A Quinnipiac University poll released last week found 66 percent of self-described Republican voters said they did not consider the January 6 Capitol insurrection to be “an attack on the government.”

That same poll found that 77 percent of Republican voters said they do not hold Trump responsible for it.

Say, what?

It is a matter of history that Trump asked the mob to come to Washington to protest Congress certifying the election. He spoke to the crowd before they attacked Congress.

Cheney is one of two Republicans willing to defy the mob-think on the right by serving on the Jan. 6 House Committee:

“All of us as elected officials must do our duty to prevent the dismantling of the rule of law,” Cheney said last week, “and to ensure that nothing like that dark day in January ever happens again.”

Trump doesn’t want an election. He wants to claim he is a victim of another stolen election.

Talk show host Bill Maher recently warned that Trump is engaged in “a slow-moving coup.” He predicts that Trump, if he runs in 2024, will claim victory no matter the final vote tally — and this time the state and local officials who stopped him will be gone.

There is only one way to stop Trump’s coup attempt. A federal law protecting voting rights.

Unless full voting-rights protections are passed by Democrats now with their slim majority in Congress, historians will look back on 2021 as the year the American democracy died.

Trump is killing it — with help from Congressional Republicans. Democrats can’t be complacent Democrats as another year goes by. [Looking at you Sens. Manchin and Sinema.]