Listening to Republicans’ continued support of former President Donald Trump, an unfamiliar onlooker might think the former president’s words hadn’t inspired an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. It’s like the FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Palm Beach, Florida, didn’t happen, and it didn’t end in the seizure of 11 sets of classified documents, including those related to nuclear weapons.
Only in real life, those events happened. They just haven’t led to the kind of GOP repudiation that would have followed had Trump been a Democrat. The Republican Party just keeps defending him. Rep. Nancy Mace said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press that there's “pressure” for House Republicans to act to impeach President Joe Biden, but as of Trump, she isn’t ruling out supporting another presidential run should it happen.
Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming had a hard time answering what ABC This Week host George Stephanopoulos said was a rhetorical question about whether Barrasso agreed that as president, Trump was allowed to “declassify documents by thinking about it.”
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“I’ve not heard that one before, George,” Barrasso said. “But I’ll tell you, in terms of national security documents, we have to always use extreme caution.”
He went on to say he doesn’t know about the rules regarding when a president declassifies documents. “What I do know is, and what I’d like to see from a Senate standpoint, is I’d like to see the Department of Justice come to us and show us in a classified setting what the information is, what they’ve done,” Barrasso said. “I thought this was a raid at the former president’s home, never seen anything like that before, clearly, and it’s become political.”
Stephanopoulos cut off the rambling response, to explain that his was a rhetorical question. “You know that a president can’t declassify documents by thinking about it. Why can’t you say so,” the journalist asked.
Barrasso did ultimately say so, but to Stephanopoulos’ point, it shouldn’t have been that difficult to rule out such a ridiculous notion.
For some reason, when it comes to Trump, Republicans often seem to have a difficult time simply calling a wrong a wrong.
In the same interview in which Rep. Mace spouted off her allegiance to “the future of democracy,” she also said she’s “going to support whomever Republican’s nominate in ’24,” even if that person is Trump.
She also highlighted the fact that she didn’t vote to impeach the former president because she felt “due process was stripped away.”
“I will not vote for impeachment of any president if I feel that due process was stripped away, for anyone,” Mace said. “I typically vote constitutionally, regardless of who’s in power. I want to do the right thing for the longterm because this isn’t just about today, tomorrow, this year’s election. This is about the future of democracy.”
Campaign ActionMace explained why she didn’t support new legislation introduced by Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California to protect U.S. elections.
The Presidential Election Reform Act is the only plan to reform the 135-year-old Electoral Count Act that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi backs, Daily Kos staff writer Joan McCarter wrote.
The legislation the House passed on Wednesday says:
“The Electoral Count Act of 1887 should be amended to prevent other future unlawful efforts to overturn Presidential elections and to ensure future peaceful transfers of Presidential power.”
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Pelosi called it “a historic and bipartisan legislative action to safeguard the integrity of future presidential elections.”
She asked:
“How could anyone vote against free and fair elections a cornerstone of our Constitution? How could anyone vote against our founders’ vision, placing power in the hands of the people? How could anyone vote against their own constituents allowing radical politicians to rip away their say?”
When it comes to Trump, Republicans prove time and time again that any act can be defended.
The protection the new election legislation would provide isn’t needed, according to Mace. “I was very outspoken about Jan. 6 in the days and weeks leading up to it, and thereafter for months on end. But when you look at what actually happened, the Constitution worked on January 6,” Mace said. “The vice president was not able to, was not allowed constitutionally, to overturn the results of the electoral college, and so for that reason I voted against the bill.”
For the sake of Republicans like Mace and Barrasso, who apparently feel beholden to Trump, or “Orange Jesus” for those who know him as such, it’s okay to part ways with someone in your party when they inspire an attempted coup.
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