‘The Republicans are the problem’
The essay described congressional extremists, their rejection of truth, a party turning into authoritarians or “an apocalyptic cult.” It bore a striking headline:
“Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.”
It didn’t mention Marjorie Taylor Greene, the deadly January 6 insurrection or Donald Trump’s Big Lie. In fact, the words “Donald Trump” did not appear at all.
Published in 2012, that Washington Post piece demonstrates more than the foresight of its political scientist authors, Tom Mann of the center-left Brookings Institution and Norm Ornstein of the center-right American Enterprise Institute. It shows the disease within the Republican Party had spread long before Trump metastasized it.
Their conclusions — that the GOP had become “ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition” — did not gain wide acceptance then. Many journalists joined leading Republicans in dismissing them.
“Ultra, ultra liberals” whose views “carry no weight with me,” sneered Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell.
“I thought they overstated things,” Republican Charlie Dent, then serving his fourth term in the House from Pennsylvania, recalls now.
“People like me were thinking, ‘Yeah, there are some kooky people around, but c’mon,'” says William Kristol, who was then editing the conservative Weekly Standard magazine. With John Boehner as House speaker and Mitt Romney winning the GOP presidential nomination, Kristol saw the Republican mainstream still in command.
All have since gotten slugged by reality. What ailed the party in 2012 has worsened. [Continue reading…]
Robert Gates, the former Defense secretary under both the Bush and Obama administrations, said in an interview that aired Sunday that of the five Republican U.S. presidents he worked for, “I don’t think any of them would recognize the Republican Party today.” [Continue reading…]
A former Republican senator and member of Donald Trump’s administration said Sunday that he thinks the ex-President bears some responsibility for the Capitol insurrection and that his presidency was “diminished” as a result of the deadly attack.
“Absolutely, I mean he bears responsibility. I think his presidency was diminished as a result of this, and I think he’s paying a price. He’s been impeached twice. He was impeached for those actions,” said former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, who served as Trump’s ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, of his former boss to CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”
Brown, who said some of Trump’s foreign policy accomplishments and his response to the coronavirus pandemic “are by the wayside now” following the riot, told Bash that he supports an independent commission to investigate the events surrounding the attack.
“To have a commission like this to find out who was responsible, what went wrong, to make sure it never happens again, it should be a no-brainer,” he said. [Continue reading…]
Washington’s Metropolitan police department recorded threats to lawmakers and public facilities in the wake of the 6 January attack on the Capitol, according to documents made public in a ransomware hack on their systems this month.
The documents also show how, in the month following the Capitol attack, police stepped up surveillance efforts, monitoring hotel bookings, protests in other jurisdictions, and social media for signs of another attack by far-right groups on targets in the capital, including events surrounding the inauguration of Joe Biden as president.
The revelation of the seriousness of the threats comes amid Republican opposition to forming a 9/11-style commission to investigate the January attack, which saw the Capitol roamed by looting mobs hunting for politicians and involved the deaths of five people.
The police documents were stolen and published by the ransomware attack group Babuk, and some were redistributed by the transparency organization Distributed Denial of Secrets, from whom they were obtained by the Guardian. Various outlets last week published stories based on the data showing intelligence indicating that far-right Boogaloo groups planned to attack various targets in the capital.
But another collection of documents labeled “chiefs intelligence briefings” shows a broad, cross-agency effort in the days following the attack on the Capitol to identify suspects, monitor and apprehend far-right actors, and anticipate further attacks on Washington around events like the inauguration of Joe Biden and the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. [Continue reading…]