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“The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” said Rep. Liz Cheney late Tuesday afternoon. “Everything that followed was his doing.” This week, our hosts discuss the brewing showdown over impeachment between Cheney—the House’s No.3 Republican—and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. How does one party accommodate vastly different levels of acquiescence to a rogue president? What is the value of impeachment and conviction over censure? Should the president be pardoned after conviction in a concession to Republicans? To David, one thing is clear: “He needs to be so thoroughly defeated in the here and now that there is no possibility of a later,” he says. “He has to be deplatformed, he has to be defeated, and he has to be discredited.”
Show Notes:
-Take our podcast survey
-Amazon filing in response to Parler’s lawsuit, citing violent content
-Rep. Liz Cheney’s statement in support of impeachment
-Video from Capitol Hill riot
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David at 1:08:10 - "There's actually a Supreme Court case involving someone" - end of podcast. :-(
I have to risk repeating notes I sung elsewhere because I had this thought when Sarah talked about the GOP splintering last week and I think it again listening to this, with some vehemence.
Within the last week, Justin Amash and Erick Erickson bemoaned the lack of existence of the kind of party most Dispatch readers likely want. The Dispatch podcast last week and this week again wondered aloud how the GOP could lurch on without splitting. Kevin Williamson said it should be put down. The desperate need for a third (fourth, fifth, etc.) party has been front and center since at very least early 2016. So why, if we all want one, and if we are all, with Sarah, finding it increasingly hard to understand how the GOP can lurch on, why doesn't it exist?
And the answer's actually very simple. You can't beat someone with no one. Parties, like the titular terminator, can't self-terminate. The GOP isn't going to implode or be put to sleep by some vague hand of history. It requires what _no one_, so far, in the five years since it became urgently necessary, has been willing to do: Actually found a new party, raid the GOP of whatever's valuable, and abandon ship to the crazies.
And yes, as the team talked about last week: Maybe someone like Romney will say, "why should I leave? I was here first!" And the answer is "get over it." It no longer matters who was there first or who ought to have it; they've got it. They're not letting go until they've burned it down to the water. There's no point in fighting them any more; the ship is too damaged to ever sail again, the only choice is stay with it to the bottom or get out now.
But SOMEONE has to throw the first rock. If there's one lesson that The Good Place should have taught us, it's this: No one's coming to save us. Someone with the resources (audience, connections, credibility, access to money) has to be the one to say not only "why isn't there a new party," but "I've founded this new party and everyone who isn't completely corrupted should leave the GOP and join." The folks mentioned above have tens of thousands of followers, HUNDREDS of thousands of followers; Lisa Murkowski has half a million followers and has been in politics a good part of her life, wants a third party. So why do they keep talking about how someone should do it instead of just doing it?
We can talk about it, and we can offer desiderata; for example, the party must be credal not tribal, and that creed must be Liberal and Reaganite; no trumpets, no populists, no Lincon Projects, no stalking-horses for the Democrats. And it must be lustrated, wholly free of Trump and his enablers and supporters. It must be both able and willing and able to laugh out Josh Hawley’s membership application. But it won't magically come into being because people wish someone else would do it. There has to be a seed crystal. This is not an arena in which spontaneous ordering works. It has to be created by someone (or someones) with the oomph to make it a real, serious, living, breathing party, otherwise it's just another Evan McMullin. (No offense to Evan, noble try, but he was just a dude.)
Listen: No one us coming to save us. There will not be a third party, and the GOP will not die, until someone stops talking about it and DOES it. THAT's how the GOP can lumber on, even as it's inconceivable that it can, Sarah: Because no one's jumping until there's somewhere to jump TO. And so far, NO ONE has stepped up and actually done that.