The actual wording of the US seditious conspiracy statute is very broad, expansive enough for anyone with the agency and bad faith to abuse it. Back in the early 1950s, alcoholic Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy did just that. Supported at all times by his own personal Iago – a soulless young lawyer named Roy Cohn – McCarthy “weaponized” the law to pander to the country’s worst civic elements and foment anti-communist hysteria. By the time his lies were recognized and his efforts disgraced, the damage his gratuitous bullying caused was extensive and lasting.
The lessons history taught us about McCarthyist persecution were good ones; common sense, really. Foremost was for the public to have more faith in essential government institutions, like the State Department. McCarthyism happened because too many were primed to accept innuendo and rumor, third-hand accounts and stray puzzle pieces to boost a narrative supported more by fear than facts. Another important moral to the Un-American Activities Committee debacle was that bad faith by lawmakers interested only in their own fortunes is far more of a threat to our way of life than the ghosts they tell us to be deathly afraid of.
Ironically, now another craven pol named McCarthy, while running interference for a criminal demagogue, who uses red scare terminology like “witch hunt” to discredit long overdue efforts to prosecute his misdeeds, is mining the depths of similar fear and ignorance to maintain the power he sold his wretched soul to attain. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy no longer leaves anything to the imagination as to whether he, like the orange monster he buoys, is willing to end the game rather than lose it.
However, unlike 70 years ago, when way too many Americans were ready to believe in an imaginary “menace” conjured up by his namesake, this McCarthy provides cover and credibility to genuine sedition, nihilist totalitarianism constantly reinforced and impelled by a multi-media juggernaut that Cold War muckrakers could only have dreamt of. This time around, in the face of an overt MAGA effort to overthrow US democracy, consequential swaths of the body politic simply don’t want to be bothered, and shrug that it’s merely now how Republicans see things.
From the start of the Trump Presidency
the critical question was twofold: would the institutions he was being entrusted to lead succeed in modifying the unprecedented ugliness of his 2016 campaign; and, if not, would he be successful in spawning a political class beholden to him and fully dedicated to normalizing his efforts to demolish the standards he inherited. McCarthy and the House caucus he leads are the ruinous answer to those questions, the priorities it pursues in full lockstep with Trump’s rabid efforts to avoid accountability for past and present transgressions.
That Kevin McCarthy has somehow avoided scrutiny for his part in permeating the Big Lie with the credibility his position enables is mystifying. It gets no more craven than the timeline of the Speaker’s positions since November of 2022.
Not 36 hours after the polls had closed, with millions of votes still to be counted, McCarthy parroted Trump’s lie that the fix was in:
“President Trump won this election so everyone who’s listening, do not be quiet. Do not be silent about this. We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes. We need to unite together. You don’t need to be a Republican. If you believe in every legal vote needs to count, you believe in the American process, join together and let’s stop this.”
In the immediate aftermath of the failed January 6th coup McCarthy figured Trump was toast. He couldn’t jump ship fast enough, telling a group of Republican leaders – including Liz Cheney – that “I’ve had it with this guy…What he did is unacceptable.” McCarthy assured all that he wanted Trump to resign in disgrace before Inauguration Day. That was until it became clear the GOP base felt very differently, and Fox/AM shifted into “blame Pelosi” mode. With the change in wind direction McCarthy flitted off to Mar-A-Lago, hat in hand, prepared to supplicate over a club sandwich.
Blasted for bending the knee to a disgraced seditionist less than a month after 1/6, McCarthy feigned incredulity and protested he was simply “in the neighborhood” and dropped by to discuss the GOP’s future. “I can talk to anyone… just as I can go talk to Joe Biden if President Biden wants to talk…I don’t quite grasp why we’re now challenging people that they can’t talk to one another.”
However, his official statement after posing with Trump more than hinted on the horse he was now prepared to bet his future relevance on. “Today, President Trump committed to helping elect Republicans in the House and Senate in 2022…For the sake of our country, the radical Democrat agenda must be stopped.” From there the greased slope led to fully opposing impeachment, and then first obstructing the formation of a House Committee to investigate 1/6 before totally disavowing and ceaselessly trying to discredit it.
Since then, McCarthy’s Twitter feed hardly differs from the rest of the MAGA zealots, except his tweets carry the legitimacy of his office. At every opportunity he employs his position in government to erode public confidence in its existence, slandering virtually every agency of note, either to protect Trump from legal accountability or burnish the Republican platform of opposing any effort by the Biden Administration to make the trains run on time.
Constantly repeated MAGA catch phrases – now one and the same with GOP essential messaging – such as “accountability is coming,” “two-tiered justice” and “socialist redistribution of wealth” translate into just what McCarthy meant after he sought Trump’s forgiveness in late January of 2021: the radical Democratic agenda justifies any and all measures, including sedition in the name of a nihilist criminal and his riffraff to destroy.
McCarthy now heads a pack of hyenas, a caucus that demands a willingness to overcome any pang of self-respect and basic human decency as a prerequisite for job security. Anyone who doubted this need only have witnessed the recent censure of Adam Schiff, carried over the finish line by Trump’s Truth Social threat to primary anyone who didn’t support the measure.
Forget “accountability,” a reckoning is coming. Almost 70 years ago, America finally came to its senses and called out McCarthyism for the empty rubbish it was. Its Senate ringleader was appropriately ostracized and rendered irrelevant. Now, the threat of sedition within our borders is very real, and propagated by a House Majority emboldened by a morally vapid Speaker, guided by the same odious objectives his namesake pursued several generations ago. If he doesn’t meet the same fate as his predecessor, democracy in America will. BC