Republicans declared Jan. 6 ‘legitimate political discourse.’ Here’s what that really means

This nation’s accumulation of days of infamy has accelerated since Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the first one, amounting to weeks’ worth of infamy in just the past few years. Feb. 4, 2022, easily ranks among them.

That was the day the Republican National Committee formally declared the events of another infamous day — Jan. 6, 2021 — “legitimate political discourse.”

The most catastrophic attack on the U.S. Capitol not carried out in the name of King George III was thereby cosigned not by some office-seeking Sacramento Proud Boy. No, that armed and deadly assault on American democracy was endorsed by the organization’s duly elected national leadership: the Republican Party itself.

It’s one measure of the enormity of this position that a fair number of prominent Republicans — people who have plenty of recent practice abandoning their heretofore core principles — were not entirely comfortable being included in the warm embrace of violent sedition.

The resolution in question was issued to “formally censure” two actual Republicans for investigating the insurrection, among them Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, a daughter of a former vice president and until recently a member of the House Republican leadership. But reservations about its content went beyond those apostates.

Nor was it limited to habitual dissenters such as Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, who called the resolution “stupid” and a “shame” on his party — the party that made him one of its past two presidential nominees and is now led by Ronna Romney McDaniel, his niece. The RNC chairwoman herself, the recipient of some no doubt less-than-avuncular texts on the subject from her uncle, was one of several party leaders engaged in a frantic effort to downgrade the formally worded resolution — which repeatedly uses the word “formally” — to a press release slapped together by an intern.

Even Mitch McConnell, who was instrumental in acquitting former President Donald Trump of launching the attack on his workplace, staff, colleagues and country, decided it was time to distance himself from his party lest it lose its remaining foothold in ostensibly polite plutocratic society.

But the most poignant and pusillanimous performance in the aftermath of his party’s new nadir belonged, as it often does in these moments, to California’s own Kevin McCarthy, the House minority’s so-called leader. The Bakersfield Republican spent much of the past week all but running from reporters interested in his analysis of the GOP’s newly expansive understanding of the limits of legitimate political discourse, pausing only to explain that the party’s resolution didn’t say what it said.

Because the document does in fact say what it says, however, let’s review the full gamut of expressive acts the Republican Party now includes under the rubric of legitimate political discourse:

▪ Assaulting police officers: Some 140 police officers from the Capitol and Washington, D.C., forces were injured during the GOP-endorsed attack, according to police union officials and federal prosecutors.

▪ Wielding deadly weapons: More than 80 rioters have been charged with carrying and using weapons, including firearms, explosives, stun guns, axes, flagpoles and chemical sprays.

▪ Manslaughter: The attack caused or contributed to at least six untimely deaths, including those of at least three police officers.

▪ Lynching and assassination: The mob erected a gallows and called for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence, and one rioter said she and her comrades were looking for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in order “to shoot her in the friggin’ brain.”

▪ Vandalism, burglary and other property crimes: The Capitol architect has estimated that the rioters caused $1.5 million in damage, and more than 600 have been charged with illegally entering or remaining in a restricted federal building.

▪ Illegal drug use: One rioter’s death was attributed to acute amphetamine intoxication, and at least one other has blamed drug and alcohol use for his participation.

▪ Public urination and defecation: Multiple accounts have the rioters desecrating the Capitol with, on top of everything else, their urine and feces.

▪ Antifa: Several Republicans, among them members of Congress, blamed the riot on left-wing “Antifa” agitators. While that’s not true, the party’s endorsement of the riot puts it in cahoots, according to its own members, with one of its favorite bugaboos.

▪ Terrorism: According to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (at one point) and plenty of more credible sources, the riot fits the legal definition of domestic terrorism, which encompasses criminal “acts dangerous to human life” that “appear to be intended ... to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.”

▪ Civil war: In case anyone missed the implications of a violent attack on the national legislature to prevent it from completing a publicly ordained transfer of executive power, there was that prominently paraded Confederate battle flag.

At the outset of a year featuring a more traditionally legitimate facet of our political discourse — an election — this new Republican platform is certainly unorthodox and, one can only hope, unacceptable.