Soon after he was censured Wednesday for posting a deranged murder fantasy about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Republican Rep. Paul Gosar—whose own family members describe him as “unhinged” and a “sociopath”—retweeted the offending video and a “Gosar life” meme depicting him in a gold chain and sunglasses. In doing so, the Arizona congressman embodied the essence of Donald Trump’s GOP: a party both dangerous in its extremism and pitiable in its idiocy, united not around a serious governing philosophy but around trolling and the accumulation of power.
If there was a time when this sickness was limited to fringe radicals like Gosar, it has long since passed; this pestilence has infected the whole of the GOP. You can excise Gosar, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert, who on the House floor Wednesday accused one of her colleagues of marrying her brother and another of sleeping with a Chinese spy, but it won’t remove the rot. The inane posting and antidemocratic plotting and childish loyalty screening—these are not “self-inflicted injuries” that distract from the GOP project, as one Republican congressman put it to Politico following the Gosar debacle. This is the GOP project. “This nihilism runs deep,” Ocasio-Cortez said in her floor speech Wednesday. “It conveys and betrays a certain contempt for the meaning and importance of our work here, that what we do, so long as we claim that it is a joke, doesn’t matter; that what we say here doesn’t matter; that our actions everyday as elected leaders in the United States of America doesn’t matter; that this chamber and what happens in it doesn’t matter.”
This GOP—so lacking in convictions, in moral leadership, in respect for the institutions they purport to serve, in everything but their own empty, id-driven ambition—is already plenty dangerous working from the minority; you don’t need to control Congress or the White House to erode democratic norms, egg on vigilantes, and spread toxic conspiracy theories. But the party is sure to become even more destructive if they are rewarded for their shameful antics with a return to power in upcoming election cycles. Remember: This doubling-down on the most noxious aspects of Trumpism came after the former president lost reelection and Mitch McConnell lost the Senate. Think of what they’ll do if they are emboldened by actually winning in the 2022 midterms. This actually doesn’t require much imagination, as they’ve explicitly said what’s at the top of their agenda: Petty acts of revenge against Democrats. Indeed, each time Democrats have tried to hold Republicans accountable for flagrant transgressions, their counterparts have responded with threats to return the favor, regardless of whether or not it’s actually warranted.
As Trump earlier this year was being impeached for the second time, over his role in inciting a violent attack on the Capitol, Republicans warned that they could retaliate in 2022, not only against the current president, but “former Democratic presidents.” “Think about it,” GOP Senator John Cornyn said in January, the same month Greene first began calling for Joe Biden’s impeachment. Later in the winter, when Greene deservedly lost her committee assignments, Republicans backed the QAnon-promoting congresswoman and called for Representative Ilhan Omar to be punished instead. (Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Thursday suggested that Gosar and Greene could get even “better committee assignments” if Republicans take the majority.) And, after former Trump advisor Steve Bannon was indicted last week for defying a subpoena from the select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, GOP lawmakers again responded with promises of retribution. “Now that Democrats have started these politically-motivated indictments for Contempt of Congress,” Boebert tweeted, “I look forward to seeing their reactions when we keep that same energy as we take back the House next year.”
After the Gosar censure and committee removal Wednesday, the cycle of payback threats is repeating. In her outrageous remarks on the House floor, Boebert vowed action against Eric Swalwell and Omar, who she accused of being part of a “Jihad squad.” Madison Cawthorn, another of the GOP’s most radical members, tweeted to “get ready for 2022.” “The Biden Administration won’t know what hit them,” he wrote. It wasn’t only the “fringe” of the party. Rep. Don Bacon, one of only 37 Republicans who openly acknowledged Biden’s 2020 victory in the month after the election, told Axios that Republican efforts to strip Democrats’ committee assignments “will happen” if they take back the House in 2022. McCarthy, who has designs on Nancy Pelosi’s gavel next year, accused her of “burning down the House on the way out the door” and explicitly threatened to wield his prospective majority against Democrats, singling out Omar, Swalwell, and Maxine Waters as members he could strip of their committee positions. “Democrats want to change the rules,” he said, “but refuse to apply them to their own caucus.” (Meanwhile, former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows floated the idea Thursday that Trump become speaker if Republicans take the House.)
In their smug floor speeches Wednesday, McCarthy and other Republicans lamented that Pelosi’s “broken” congress was not addressing the “serious” challenges facing the country. “Today, we’re critiquing Paul Gosar’s anime. Next week, we might be indicting the Wile E. Coyote,” Matt Gaetz cracked, decrying that lawmakers were “reviewing meme tweets.” But who is really failing to be “serious” here? The people who have replaced serious discourse and governance with memes and trolling? Or the people suggesting that maybe—just maybe—we should expect more from our leaders that tweeting out murder fantasies involving their colleagues? “Not just [McCarthy], but I have seen other members of this party advance the argument, including Representative Gosar himself, the illusion that this was just a joke, that what we say and what we do does not matter so long as we claim a lack of meaning,” Ocasio-Cortez said in her remarks Wednesday. “I am here to rise to say that it does. Our work here matters. Our example matters. There is meaning in our service. And as leaders in this country, when we incite violence…that trickles down to violence in this country. And that is where we must draw the line.”
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