Their squeaks and squeals must have been deafening

House Republicans used a "voice vote" to expel Liz Cheney. How brave of them.

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Well, House Republicans voted to fire their conference chair this morning by voice vote, which insures that the Master of Mar a Lago will be able to claim that it was unanimous and he “won.”  Really, really courageous of them, don’t you think?  If they had voted by secret ballot, Republicans in the House would have had to live with the uncertainty that the Feared One might suspect them of betraying him.  With a voice vote, they can all claim fealty…even the ones who whispered support of Cheney under their quivering breaths.

The irony is that it’s a Cheney we’re talking about as some sort of courageous avatar of a Republican Party that never existed.  You remember the name, Cheney, don’t you, as in Richard “Dick” Cheney, self-appointed vice president to George W. Bush, he of the likes of Scooter Libbey – pardoned for taking a bullet on behalf of his boss, the vice president, by Donald Trump, incidentally – and Valerie Plame and former ambassador Joe Wilson, who blew the whistle on the “yellowcake uranium” fiction and all the rest of it.  Those scandals came right out of the office of Liz’s daddy – and oh, I almost forgot – so did the entire Iraq war, every last lie about WMD’s of it, every last wasted trillions of dollars of it, every last dead American body of it, every last dead Iraqi civilian of it. 

Yes, the scion to that disgraced Cheney family is, even as we speak,  being lauded all over MSNBC and the predictable op-ed pages for “standing up” to Donald Trump, as if stating the obvious about what happened at the Capitol on January 6 is a blooding in battle or something.

But it’s not Liz Cheney we should be talking about today, is it?  Whoever ends up with the job of Conference Chair of the House Republicans doesn’t matter as much as the House Republicans themselves.  They have shown themselves not only as subservient to the interests of their erstwhile “leader,” Donald Trump, as they have proved themselves to be a party of elected fascists bent on bringing down the American Republic. 

Their insane-clown parroting of Trump’s lies about the election of 2020 isn’t some sort of bizarre aberration.  They are signing on to the massively discredited lie that has motivated all of the voter suppression bills currently making their way through the Republican-controlled states, including the recently passed law in Georgia which strips the Georgia secretary of state of most of his or her authority over the administering of elections and gives it instead to the Georgia state house of representatives and senate, so those political lovelies will in effect be able to police their own elections next time around – not to mention police the presidential election of 2024, so that if Donald Trump calls up and asks that Georgia “find” him ten or twenty thousand votes, thus flipping the election to his advantage, there won’t be some pampered, principled elected official like Brad Raffensperger to get in the way.

The so-called voice vote by House Republicans this morning wasn’t about Liz Cheney and her “leadership” position, or even about whether she will be reelected to the House in the state of Wyoming next year.  It was about the future of our democracy, which that gaggle of drooling, spineless fools was only too happy to hand over to the Big Mac Munching Machiavelli of Mar a Lago.

That’s where we are today.  Donald Trump is now firmly in control of the Republican conference of the House of Representatives, which conveniently is where the next presidential election might end up if all of the finagling and gaslighting being done by Republican states around the country succeeds in creating enough electoral chaos that the election of 2024 is “thrown” into the House of Representatives rather than settled in the regular way by that nettlesome Electoral College they weren’t able to manipulate last time.

Liz may be gone, but Donald Trump is still here, as wounded and resentful as ever.  Don’t lament Liz.  Get ready to turn out the vote next year and 2024, because we’re in for the fight of our lives.