Krull
Some Republicans are shocked, shocked, shocked that members of their party who refused to vote for U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, to be speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives face death threats.
They have a right to be surprised.
Who could have predicted something like this would happen?
Seriously, it’s not as though most of the members of this party looked the other way or offered excuses when their leader decided to summon a mob to overturn a fair and legal presidential election.
They didn’t sit quietly or ignore the actions of that mob after it stormed the U.S. Capitol by refusing to impeach the president or hold him accountable in any way for the violence that occurred. They didn’t turn a blind eye and a deaf ear when members of that mob threatened to hang the vice president of the United States — who was a member of their own party — and vowed to murder the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, a woman who was in her 80s.
Nor did they make jokes and chortle when the husband of the same speaker — who also was in his 80s — received a savage beating from an intruder who was a devotee of the president who summoned that mob. No, they didn’t laugh and treat the whole thing as a kind of comic interlude, as if sending an octogenarian who never had harmed them or anyone else to intensive care was a real thigh-slapper.
Certainly, none of them ever said the mob that wrecked offices in the Capitol, assaulted police officers and sent members of Congress running for their lives was nothing more than a group taking a tour of the temple of democracy.
I mean, who in his or her right mind would say or do things that foolish?
That dangerous?
Oh, wait, all those things happened, you say?
Well …
That still shouldn’t change things, should it?
Just because members of the House Republican caucus said, did or supported things that were stupid and irresponsible doesn’t mean they should have known they were giving license to use violence as a political tactic.
It’s not like they had a crystal ball.
There’s no way they could have foreseen that the most extreme members of their party would see the GOP’s refusal to hold the former president accountable for his transgressions as a blank check to break laws, rules and norms whenever it suited them. That they could have anticipated that letting threats of violence and violence itself go unpunished would have encouraged the radicals in their midst to push things even more.
Nor could they have projected that the campaign of former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, to hold onto her seat foretold these current threats.
Cheney voted with the former president and the chaos caucus in the House GOP more than 90% of the time. When she voted to impeach the former president for trying to steal an election and lead an insurrection, she, too, received death threats. There were so many of them that she — the daughter of a Republican former vice president of the United States — had to hire expensive security teams and cancel campaign events out of concern for her safety.
When the Republicans in the House let that slide, they could not possibly have guessed that someday, sometime, it was going to be their turn in the barrel.
That’s why this whole ugly business has caught them so off-guard.
It came completely out of the blue.
I mean, what are the chances that, if you let a rabid dog out of a cage and off its leash, the frothing, snarling beast would bite someone?
Maybe even you?
It’s just impossible to predict.
That’s why the members of the Republican caucus of the U.S. House of Representatives have every right to be shocked about the violence that now stalks their party.
Really, really, really shocked.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Send comments to [email protected].
