Ronald Brownstein writes:

The silence of congressional Republican leaders as President Donald Trump’s unfounded claims of election fraud grow wilder and more venomous increasingly resembles the party’s deference to Sen. Joe McCarthy during the worst excesses of his anti-Communist crusade in the early 1950s.

In McCarthy’s era, most of the GOP’s leaders found excuses to avoid challenging conspiracy theories that they knew to be implausible, even as evidence of their costs to the nation steadily mounted. For years, despite their private doubts about his charges and methods alike, the top GOP leadership — particularly Senate Republican leader Robert A. Taft, the Mitch McConnell of his day — either passively abetted or actively supported McCarthy’s scattershot claims of treason and Communist infiltration. A significant faction of Senate Republicans didn’t join with Democrats to curb McCarthy’s power until the senator immolated himself with his accusations, in highly publicized 1953 and 1954 hearings, that the Army was riddled with Communists during the presidency of fellow Republican Dwight Eisenhower.

In many respects, the congressional GOP response to Trump has paralleled the party’s response to McCarthy. Whatever their private concerns about Trump’s behavior or values, the vast majority of congressional Republicans have supported Trump since his 2017 inauguration at almost every turn, brushing aside concerns about everything from openly racist language to his efforts to extort the government of Ukraine to manufacture dirt on the eventual Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden.

That pattern of deference has continued since the election as Trump has raised unfounded claims that he lost only because of massive voter fraud; as an array of state and federal courts have rejected those claims as lacking any supporting evidence, Trump has only heightened his allegations. [Continue reading…]