When will enough Republicans of conscience step forward to ensure the future of our democracy? With rancor between the political parties, change can only come from within.
We need a groundswell of conservative citizens – citizens who have full faith and trust in the Constitution – to send a clear message that continuing the false narrative of a stolen election and downplaying the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol must not stand. These lies are undermining faith in the electoral process, like voracious termites eating away at the foundation of our nation.
Too many Republican citizens are content to allow the lies from their Republican leaders in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate to go unchallenged. Those leaders have demonstrated time and again since the November presidential election that the politics of the moment are more important than ensuring our democracy survives in perpetuity.
Every time we see some hope, when we see some of those leaders putting truth before fiction, that hope fades because they are outnumbered by politicians who refuse to understand that truth will win out in history.
It is ever more dismaying to seeing to see the majority of Republican representatives from the federal to the state to the local level deciding they would rather bow to the lies spread by the former president than have the courage to put their country first.
The latest example was heartbreaking.
Only 35 Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted for a bipartisan commission to study the cause of the Jan. 6 insurrection in which a mob of hundreds of the former president’s supporters stormed the Capitol to try to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election. We are dismayed to note that our own congressman, Jeff Van Drew, was not among those 35.
Since Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he wouldn’t support the commission, it will be nearly impossible to find 10 Republican senators who will have the moral willpower and conscience to break with their leader.
Republicans should be proud of those 35 House members and any senators who join with their Democratic colleagues because there is so much to learn about the riot that left five people dead and the Capitol police battered like the building they fought to protect. We can’t fathom how the majority of Republican officials can let down the very police who protected them from the mob.
Although there are many elected officials – current and former – who are complicit in the insurrection, a bipartisan probe needs to look deeper into what led this angry group of extremists to storm the Capitol. How could these Americans, including militant hate groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, become so deluded that they could perceive themselves as true patriots, believing threatening Congress and then Vice President Mike Pence were patriotic actions?
We need a bipartisan commission to get at the root causes behind the insurrection, not just at those who instigated it, but how a strain of Americans could do something so un-American. We need to know, how deep does that strain go in this country? How many others who weren’t in Washington, D.C. that day go along with the lies about a stolen election and support the actions of Jan. 6?
Without knowing what beliefs underlie the insurrection – not just the former president’s rally near the Capitol that lit the fuse to it – it will be near impossible to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.
Republicans often feel unfairly labeled as racists or bigots or deluded by the former president’s lies. To shed those labels they must evict the extremists who have tried to hijack the heart and soul of the Republican Party and turn it against the Constitution and this democracy.
Rather than point the fingers at the radical elements given cover by the Democratic Party, they must look inward first. The GOP must clean up its own house.
One critical way to do that is to have the entire body politic work together in instances like this.
Next Monday, our nation marks Memorial Day, a holiday set aside to honor the men and women who died while serving in the U.S. military, those who fought to preserve the freedoms we enjoy.
It is a day we come together as Americans, to unite in our tribute to those who made the ultimate sacrifice to ensure the promises set forth in our Constitution live on. We must tell those who would allow the politics of the moment to endanger those promises that they are endangering our collective future.