Opinion: The End of an Era
The ousting of Liz Chaney as the chair of the House Republican Conference chair marks the end of an era in the history of the Republican Party.
This morning before The House Republican Conference before a voice vote, ousted Rep. Liz Chaney (R-WY) from her position as chair of the House Republican Conference for having the courage to denounce former President Donald Trump´s false assertions concerning the 2020 presidential election and Trump´s role in the incitement of Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol.
The ousting of Chaney, the lone dissenting voice in the Republican Party underscores the Party´s fealty to the former President, who party leaders feel is the lodestar to winning back the House majority in the 2022 midterm elections.
The ousting of Chaney also marks the denouement of a chapter in the history of the Republican Party.
Chaney was the last vestige of the Bush-Chaney neoconservative wing of the Republican Party. For decades, neoconservative figures such as Presidents, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Rep. Chaney´s own father, Fmr. Vice President Richard B. Chaney, along with Senators John McCain, Dick Lugar, Mitt Romney, Jeff Flake among many others were the face of the Republican Party and subsequently defined the party´s ideology and policies.
The Republican Party has abandoned its rich history of producing distinguished American theoreticians & leaders such as Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Charles Summer, John C. Fremont, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Barry Goldwater, John C. Danforth, Edmund Burke, C.S. Lewis, William F. Buckley, George F. Will, Irving Kristol, Bill Kristol, James Q. Wilson, David French, Ross Douthat, and Yuval Levin.
In the place of these leaders & theoreticians that have contributed to the political discourse and the conservative movement for decades — a twice impeached former President who departed the presidency ignominiously after four years of callous subversion of democracy that led to an insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on the day Congress was convening to certify President Joe Biden´s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
Donald Trump, accompanied by his spineless cohorts, the ¨leader¨ of the House Republicans, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Q-CA), insurrectionist members of the United States Senate, namely, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) whom with their Ivy League law background (Cruz attained his J.D. from Harvard Law School. Hawley from Yale Law School.) gave credence to Trump´s ¨big lie¨ that the 2020 presidential election was riddled with impropriety and thus fraudulent.
Sens. Hawley & Cruz attempted to subvert the consent of the governed to position themselves in 2024 for their shared lifelong goal — the Presidency of the United States.
The Republican Party once prided itself as being the political party that defends rudimentary democratic precepts. Chaney´s ousting as House GOP conference chair makes a mockery of that notion.
The GOP´s embrace of Trumpism and illiberalism will lead to the downfall of American democracy. The question that lingers in the minds of many including my own is, what will occur if Kevin McCarthy is the Speaker of the House and a Democrat wins the 2024 presidential election?
On January 6, 2025, Will House Republicans certify the Democratic presidential victory or will they usurp the presidency from the Democratic victor and install the losing Republican presidential candidate?