Members-Only Article
One of the little-remarked-on dynamics of the 2020 post-election is how many Republicans, mostly at the state level, didn’t go along with The Big Lie or efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election. The key in most cases was that it’s one thing to mouth off or make a protest vote. It’s another to break the law or specifically refuse a legal responsibility of office. Would Brad Raffensperger have stood his ground against overturning a free in fair election if he’d been a Republican member of Congress rather than Georgia’s top election administrator? I tend to doubt it. The same applies to Gov. Kemp, though he took much less of a clear stand.
But since January Republicans who don’t sign on to The Big Lie are being purged from office across the country. We’re seeing the Liz Cheney drama front and center. But comparable things are happening across the country. It’s the personnel component of the wave of voting restriction bills we’re seeing passing in numerous Republican states.
Earlier this week, I heard from one reader who described a situation in California with a proposed recall for a local school board, trying to eject school board members who hadn’t reopened schools quickly enough. Obviously, schools having been a very contentious issue for the last year. So on its face that’s just the pull and tussle of democratic action – a feature of civic vitality rather than a bug. But when I looked into the story it showed an intensity – and a level of extreme agitation out of sync with public opinion – that I was inclined to agree with the reader who said he felt like the community was headed toward a local version of the Capitol Insurrection.
This is all speculative of course. We’re barely three months out from the events of the insurrection and Joe Biden’s inauguration. But we should start seriously thinking about scenarios in 2024 where the local officials who by and large didn’t agree to falsify election returns in 2020 – even when they were standard variety partisan Republicans – will agree to do so in 2024.
Let’s think of Congress. It’s more likely than not that Republicans will recapture the House next year. If that happens, will the House agree to certify Electoral College results if Joe Biden is reelected? I don’t think we can take that for granted – to put it mildly.
As odious as her politics may be in general, Liz Cheney is in the process of being ejected from the House GOP leadership because she won’t embrace The Big Lie and continues to see the Capitol insurrection as a development which presents an existential threat to the future of the democratic order. That is incompatible with being a Republican. The Big Lie and the insurrection aren’t about 2020. It’s about 2024.
