* GOPster sub-plot: If the Republicans take back the House, will House GOPsters take back Kevin McCarthy as the next Speaker? Thanks to an audio clip making the media rounds, we know that Minority Leaders McCarthy and Mitch McConnell were concerned enough about the Capitol attack to consider the need for President Trump to resign. When asked by Rep. Liz Cheney if there was any chance of Trump resigning, McCarthy said, “I’m seriously thinking of having that conversation with him tonight. … It would be my recommendation (he) should resign.” The context, of course, included Democrats pushing for impeachment. And speaking of said Dems, Sen. Elizabeth Warren summed it up: “Liar and traitor.”
BTW, McCarthy also added that he did “not want to get in any conversation about Pence pardoning.” Have to draw the dissembling line somewhere.
John Boehner and Paul Ryan never looked so good. And Kevin McCarthy deserves to share the same name as the actor who played the lead in “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
* Selective-memory update: “I don’t recall.” That’s how Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene responded–under oath–when asked (at an administrative law hearing in Atlanta) if she had urged then-President Trump to impose martial law as a way to stay in power. The case was brought by Free Speech for People, a campaign-finance reform organization. The hearing was about whether she was an “insurrectionist” disqualified from seeking re-election.
* “It’s a tragic indictment of the political process these days—and the Republican Party of late—that truth doesn’t matter, words don’t matter. … You cross lines now, and there are no longer consequences.”–Former South Carolina Republican Gov. Mark Sanford.
* “Trump and his acolytes didn’t invent this; insecure masculinity is an old phenomenon. … The negative aspects of masculinity are always lurking just beneath the surface.”–Mona Charen, Creators Syndicate.
* How naive it seems that some thought–not just hoped–that when Trump became an ex-president, truculent party loyalty and tribalism would give way to a return to old-school Republican mores and guardrails.