Kevin McCarthy has plenty of motives to cater to Trump and keep the congressional party united behind the Big Lie. But this report focuses on one of the most fascinating ones. McCarthy is apparently highly worried about being compelled to testify before any possible Jan 6th Commission. He should be, for two key reasons.

Aaron Blake of the Post dug up these statements from Elise Stefanik, the representative from New York State who is likely to replace Liz Cheney once she’s ejected from the House GOP leadership. Stefanik was a garden variety Upstate New York Republican before she hitched her wagon to Trump around 2018 and went all in with the Trump personality cult.

In the lead-up to the January 6th insurrection most congressional Republicans were careful to avoid repeating Trump’s most outrageous lies about a stolen election. They focused on the purported unconstitutionality of pandemic-related changes to election regulations. In other words, they weren’t directly claiming a stolen election in the sense of stuffed ballot boxes or dead voters or other similar stuff. They were arguing that states had exceeded their constitutional authority in doing things that making voting by mail easier. So those votes were illegitimate though not ‘fraudulent’ in the way most of us understand the term. This allowed them to back Trump’s claims of an illegitimate election by hanging their hat on a very weak constitutional argument rather than racist lies about ‘inner city’ vote fraud and other conspiracy theories.

But Stefanik wasn’t so careful.

From TPM Reader JS …

Strongly disagree. Science is science. You can’t wrap yourself in it to justify the shutdowns and then appeal to “trauma” to be for them.

And from TPM Reader MH …

Thank you, Josh, for your humane defense of people feeling cautious and traumatized, and for pointing out that most of the country is still not vaccinated.

The case numbers didn’t start dropping in New York until the first week of April. I didn’t get my “fully vaccinated” card until a month ago, and the data on variants and vaccine escape was also slow to arrive. We didn’t know *what* was keeping the cases up, but if you listened to the epidemiologists, they said “variants” a lot.

I’m not sure what the analogy is. But a new Post OpEd from Liz Cheney makes crystal clear that she is making her political fate – certainly her role in the Republican House leadership, which seems doomed – a test case for the future of the Republican party. Here’s the piece.

As I said in the podcast today, it would be simple enough for Cheney to ‘look forward and not back’ as they say. Not change her position on the disgraceful legacy of last winter but point to where she and her conference agree on opposing the Biden agenda. Rather she has deepened and sharpened her critique.

Some of Trump’s closest “Big Lie” allies along with one of his former lawyers are launching a new advocacy group to try to further cement former President Trump’s false claims about a stolen election into reality.

I publish many great TPM Reader emails here. They’re one of the best things we offer as a site. But it’s seldom that I publish one that captures so palpably something I’m feeling or states more resonantly what I had, less coherently, had in my mind. As TPM Reader JG notes here I mentioned on Twitter yesterday that The Atlantic seems to have cornered the market on these tut-tutting articles about liberals or blue staters who apparently aren’t letting down their COVID guards quick enough.

From TPM Reader JG …

I saw your tweets re: the Emma Green article in The Atlantic earlier and wanted to contribute some brief thoughts as a long-time resident of Somerville, Massachusetts. Specifically, I wanted to push back on the idea that it’s progressive politics and not the experience in the region that is the main reason for the attitudes of many COVID behavior.