The Republican Performance at the Impeachment Debate Set a New High-Water Mark for Shamelessness

From Esquire

Based on Wednesday's performance from the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives, the American republic is not long for this world. Without major reform to this democracy, it's hard to see how this can all go on. 197 Republicans voted against impeaching a president who incited an attack on them at their place of work in order to overturn a democratic election based on a sprawling infrastructure of insane lies. But more than that, some of the speeches these people gave in the "debate" preceding the vote served mainly as alarming reminders that they should not be entrusted with running a minigolf course. It is only in the United States Congress, where if you're running in a gerrymandered district and the only mistake you can make is being insufficiently right-wing—or demonstrate insufficient fluency in whatever paranoid lunacy is activating The Base at any given moment—that these characters could thrive.

There was the Anti-Metal Detector Caucus, who followed up an evening where they threw tantrums when asked to go through basic airport security outside the House chamber by offering uncut lunacy on the House floor. They were led by Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-QAnon), a rising star within the rotting husk of the Republican Party, who wore a mask that read "CENSORED" as she delivered a speech in the United States House of Representatives that was broadcast live to millions of people. She was matched by fellow QAnon-curious freshman Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who delivered a fire-and-dipshit speech blaming The Left for the growing threat of political violence in this country while continuing to suggest the election was stolen. Boebert, don't forget, spent the Capitol siege tweeting out live updates on the location of the Speaker of the House. Ken Buck managed to blame Madonna and Kathy Griffin, as well as an incident where Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant three years ago, for the attack.

Yes, many of these people are completely nuts, a sign that a growing number of elected Republicans are getting high on their own supply of right-wing misinformation. But there was also the Shameless Caucus, led by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. The California Republican was one of 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the election results hours after the chambers where they were voting in were invaded by a mob attempting to overturn those results by force. This likely included a plot to take members of Congress or the vice president hostage—or worse. McCarthy was one of many right-wing luminaries who spent the months previous sowing doubt about the election's legitimacy and in some cases, as The Daily Show highlighted with a montage Wednesday night, suggesting that a failure to take the election back from Democrats would constitute the end of The America You Know and Love.

That's the thing: you don't need to, as the president did, explicitly summon your mob to Washington and sic them on the Capitol to help create the environment in which this happens. The infrastructure of this alternate reality was built by Republicans and right-wing media who almost exclusively speak in apocalyptic terms about The Radical Left's intent to tear America away from its true heirs—their own voters and listeners. If you tell people the country has been stolen from them, and it will never be the same because of it, you are laying the groundwork for them to respond with extreme action. You have built a foundation of lies on which the rationale for a violent insurrection can be built.

But you'd never know it from McCarthy's floor speech on Wednesday, in which he chameleoned into a Statesman seeking Healing and Unity after a cataclysmic event he helped to foment, and whose ideological legitimacy he buttressed by voting to delegitimize the election results after. He was joined by a parade of Republicans who insisted it was Democrats who'd put politics before the good of the country, and who implored those same Democrats to, in the words of Missouri's Jason Smith, "put the people first."

Did Jason Smith put the people first when he voted against certifying the election results, the legitimacy of which is not in doubt except in the right-wing fever swamps on the other side of the looking glass? Did Jason Smith put the people first when he lied to them about whether Donald Trump maybe truly won? Of course not. The Republicans now calling for Unity are really seeking Impunity. They want us to turn the page so nobody has the chance to look at what they did on the current one. They seem to believe that once you turn the page, the previous pages do not functionally exist.

In retrospect, we got at a big chunk of the phenomenon underlying the Trump Era back in January 2018, when we asked whether we were witnessing the Death of Shame, or the Rise of Shamelessness. Because of the siloed nature of right-wing media—which has, as historian Kevin Kruse told me then, a level of "epistemic closure" that just isn't comparable to the left—it is impossible to impose real consequences on right-wing politicians for lies or hypocrisy or flip-flopping. You can say anything, then say the opposite the next day, and there are no repercussions. What is important is that you wear the right team's jersey and sing the right tune. It is the permanent present of the reactionary impulse, one that is eroding the concept of objective reality itself. "In a new era dominated by cries that everything is fake news," Kruse added, "there can be no truth. And without truth, there can be no shame."

So that's the way it's going to go now. You can yell for months that the election was rigged and America itself has been stolen from your listeners. Then when some section of your audience responds with a violent insurrection targeting the nation's Capitol—a logical reaction within this warped reality—you can turn towards the political opponents you'd deemed Enemies of America who'd stolen the election and demand that they stop doing divisive things, like try to impose consequences on you or the president who incited the insurrection. You can even include the suggestion that Congress legally exercising its powers under the Constitution will be met with further violence, implying that the only way to stop the violence is to give those threatening it what they want. That's how it goes when everyone you need to like and support you lives in The Bubble, where self-reflection is as big a weakness as allegiance to any set principle.

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