Just How Big is the Republican Tent?
A tent with room for Marjorie Taylor Greene but not Liz Cheney is not worth pitching.
There is once again talk of booting Liz Cheney from her position as Conference Chair. Why? She doesn’t buy Donald Trump’s B.S. and isn’t willing to shut up about it. Kevin McCarthy and his feckless band of loyalists have no use for someone who is a persistent reminder of their servility to the buffoon in Mar-a-Lago.
When Liz Cheney easily rebuffed the Gaetz-led effort to boot her from leadership, McCarthy commented that “this Republican Party’s a very big tent, everyone’s invited in.” It seems the tent has gotten smaller in intervening weeks.
Maybe McCarthy thought, having held onto her position, that Liz Cheney would embrace a more McCarthian strategy – which is to say cowardice. He was mistaken.
I have an entire album side riffing on Yuval Levin’s argument that members of institutions have an obligation to those institutions. And perhaps it could be argued that Cheney should stifle her objections in deference to the institution. But if it’s the case that merely telling the truth about the 2020 election and January 6 disqualifies a person from leading the House Republicans, it is a damning indictment of the state of the Republican Party.
Lance Gooden – a Texas Republican with the spine of a banana – said that Cheney is “totally unaligned with the majority of our party.” Which says a hell of a lot more about Gooden and his caucus than it does about Liz Cheney.
In the special election to fill Texas' Sixth Congressional District – vacated when Ron Wright died of COVID-19 — Susan Wright and Jake Ellzey have advanced to the runoff from a field made up mostly of rodeo clowns. But the race did include one sane voice.
Michael Wood ran on a platform whose defining feature was a firm grip on reality. “I want to serve in elected office,” he recently told Kevin Williamson, “but I don’t want to go to Congress if that means I have to act like Madison Cawthorn or Lindsey Graham. If the cost of entry into Republican politics is that you have to pretend to buy into lies, then I don’t want to do that.”
That kind of candor isn’t welcome in the Republican Party in 2021.
Marjorie Taylor Greene – the conspiracy kook who, presumably Lance Gooden would consider much better “aligned” with the Republican Party – tweeted about Wood that he and Adam Kinzinger “aren’t fighting for the soul of the GOP, you sold your soul & sold out the GOP bc you are clueless about what Republican voters think and feel, which is America First and loyalty to Trump.”
Let’s be clear about one thing: no one here is “clueless about what Republican voters think and feel.” The job of leaders isn’t to act as a mirror for voters' emotional incontinence. Their job is to lead. That requires you to tell your votes truths they don’t want to hear from time to time.
It seems the Republican tent isn’t big enough to include Liz Cheney and Michael Wood and Adam Kinzinger but it is big enough to fit Marjorie Taylor Green. Which, quite frankly, makes it a tent I don’t want to be inside.