Given what’s become of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, it’s easy to forget how the California Republican responded to the events of early January 2021. Four days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, for example, the GOP leader privately told his House Republican colleagues that he was prepared to tell Donald Trump he should resign the presidency.
A day later, McCarthy also told his members, “I’ve had it with this guy. What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that, and nobody should defend it.” Soon after, on Jan. 13, he said on the House floor that Trump “bears responsibility“ for the violence.
With this in mind, I was eager to see how McCarthy might respond to the special counsel’s office indicting the former president for his alleged post-defeat crimes. Has the House speaker still “had it with this guy”? Does he still believe Trump “bears responsibility”? As it turns out, McCarthy apparently doesn’t want to talk about it. The Hill reported:
Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) accused the Department of Justice (DOJ) of using the latest indictment against former President Trump — which stems from his efforts to remain in power following the 2020 election — to “distract” from recent information GOP-led committees have gathered about President Biden and his son Hunter Biden. … While pointing the finger at the DOJ and Biden, McCarthy did not engage with any specific allegations in the Trump indictment.
What the public saw, in other words, was a pitiful dynamic: A former president was charged with a series of election-related felonies, which prompted his allied House speaker, unconcerned about self-respect, to peddle a conspiracy theory about federal law enforcement.
McCarthy wasn’t the only one. House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik — recently touted by The New Republic for offering the “stupidest” reaction to Trump’s indictment in the classified documents case — also seemed interested late yesterday in trying to change the subject. The GOP congresswoman specifically accused President Joe Biden — who had nothing to do with yesterday’s developments — of trying to “weaponize his corrupt Department of Justice against his leading political opponent.”
She offered no evidence to bolster her conspiracy theory, though like McCarthy, Stefanik’s statement about Trump’s indictment referenced Hunter Biden.
Across the House and Senate, there are 271 Republican members of Congress, and it’s challenging to keep up with each of their reactions to important events, but I tried to find some examples of GOP lawmakers saying, “I believe Donald Trump is innocent and will be acquitted of these charges. He simply didn’t do what prosecutors have accused him of doing.”
But I’ve found no such statements. Republicans had plenty to say as the public learned of Trump’s latest indictment — about the Democratic president’s son, about their increasingly overt disdain for federal law enforcement, about congressional investigations they like to pretend are going well, etc. — but not about the specific allegations the former president is facing.
The same thing happened last week, when the special counsel’s office filed a superseding indictment in Trump’s classified documents scandal, and prominent Republican lawmakers responded with a defense that failed to include a defense. In fact, GOP reactions seemed to touch on everything but the allegations themselves.
It’s not that Trump’s Republican toadies read the indictment, assessed the merits, reviewed the details, and came away unpersuaded. On the contrary, there’s little to suggest GOP leaders and their members bothered to examine the indictment at all. Circling back to our earlier coverage, we’re again stuck in a frustrating discussion in which reality-based observers and Republicans defending Trump are effectively talking past one another, engaged in a conversation marked by a disconnect between the allegations and the defense. The former president’s critics are reviewing the latest developments and asking, “Can you believe the seriousness of these allegations?” to which GOP voices are responding, “Isn’t this a good time to change the subject to Hunter Biden?” It’s tempting to ask which part of the new indictment Republicans found unpersuasive, or what they’d expect prosecutors to do in response to the compiled evidence, but these are the sorts of question they have no use for. For too much of the party, the evidence is simply irrelevant. These Republicans haven’t made the case for Trump’s innocence, so much as they’ve effectively said they don’t care whether he’s guilty. It doesn’t have to be this way. GOP officials can still support and show loyalty toward Trump without suggesting that he belongs above the law, free to commit alleged felonies at his discretion. If McCarthy and his cohorts don’t want to answer questions about the former president’s indictment, perhaps they can respond to a different question: Do they believe Trump is constrained by the rule of law?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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