Republican, More Than a Name
An Appeal to Restore the GOP
That was, as it was called then, an appeal from members of Congress calling on the citizens of the United States to unite against the expansion of slavery in the United States in January 1854. Following the appeal’s publication in major newspapers across the country, former Whigs and anti-Democrat Party forces met in Ripon, Wisconsin in February 1854 to plot and strategize against this incursion into free territories. They adopted the name Republican, though it was officially coined by New York Tribune editor Horace Greely who wrote, “we think some simple name like ‘Republican’ would more fitly designate those who had united to restore the Union to its true mission of champion and promulgator of Liberty rather than propagandist of slavery.”
Months later, the Republicans held their first official nominating convention in the first capital of American liberty, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The first Republican nominee was Californian John C. Fremont but it’s the second Republican nominee who made, and shaped, history.
The Republican Party met again in May 1860 in Chicago, Illinois to nominate former Illinois Representative, Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln would, of course, go on to win the presidency and confront a nation so divided over the question of slavery, it plunged into Civil War. As Lincoln rode the train to his first inauguration, storm clouds of war hung in the horizon, and he made a quick stop for what he said was a completely unprepared speech at Independence Hall, the site where the Declaration of Independence was signed:
“that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men.
Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world, if I can help to save it. If it cannot be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.”
Ours is a republican form of government, that is one in which the people are empowered to elect representatives, also making it a representative democracy. And ours is especially a constitutional republic, that is one in which the people are empowered to elect their representatives and one in which those representatives are restrained from exercising too much power themselves.
As James Madison writes in Federalist №51, “in framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” He continues, “A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.” Those precautions? We’ve come to know them as checks and balances, veto points built into the constitutional structure to prevent any one branch of government from becoming tyrannical.
These veto points at every level are essential to the preservation of liberty from both authoritarian government and a “tyranny of the majority.” A system where “ambition was made to counteract ambition,” as Madison described it, is one that would preserve the rights of the people affirmed by the Declaration of Independence no matter who took power, and in what numbers.
Lincoln, drawing inspiration from the Bible, intuited the Declaration of Independence is “a word fitly spoken,” describing it as “the apple of gold” and “the union, and the Constitution” a “frame of silver” meant not to “conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it.”
A much longer essay could be written about the many interchangeable and essential features of government meant to preserve and protect the people’s rights but suffice to say the preservation of a republican form of government is essential to the liberty and wellbeing of the American people.
The operating principle of such a government is clearly: he who has the most votes shall be he who governs. And that brings us to modern day.
Donald Trump is not a republican in the sense of Abraham Lincoln. I’d argue Donald Trump is not a capital-R Republican, either. He was never a member of the Republican Party, gave generously to liberal Democrats, and openly asserted he would carry the Republican banner if and only if he were the party’s nominee. He may have won the presidency in 2016 but he did so by staging a hostile takeover of the Republican Party and completely subsuming it under a cult of personality. Unfortunately for him, that cult couldn’t overcome a global pandemic, his impeachment in the House of Representatives, and the chaos coming from a constant state of conscience twitter feed for four years. In 2020, 81 million American voters chose former Vice President Biden over 74 million for Trump, crucially netting the former vice president 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, the same margin of victory Trump had won over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
And, true to his word, Trump refused to concede.
History will record what happened next. When Congress convened on January 6, 2021 to officially count the legally certified electoral votes of the states, Trump insisted for months the results were fraudulent and rallied supporters in front of the White House to “stop the steal.” The president had poisoned their mind with baseless conspiracies of a stolen election, invited them to Washington for what he promised would be a “wild” day, and rallied them to action. They just filled in the rest. As Tim Miller of the Bulwark puts it, “they took the coup literally and seriously.”
They stormed the Capitol. They overpowered Capitol Hill Police, broke through closed doors and smashed through windows, to desecrate the citadel of American democracy. And here’s the harsh truth, Republicans, they are our people.
Newly-elected Freshman Congresswoman Nancy Mace explained to Fox News, “We should be calling out every single person who riots, destroys property, and threatens the lives of their fellow Americans, but this moment in time is about us…we have to take responsibility for our words and our actions.” On Twitter, Rep. Mace added, “When we speak, we aren’t speaking for just ourselves. We speak with the weight of hundreds of thousands of people who trust us to speak on their behalf. In the interview attached to the tweet, Rep. Mace lays out her point clearly: “it’s incumbent upon us [Republicans] to show some leadership here, to get our nation out of this crisis.” In another tweet the following Saturday she declares, “the lies and inflammatory rhetoric that led to Wednesday’s riots is about more than just political games. It got people killed. It threatens the democracy.”
The great irony of hundreds of Republican Members of Congress objecting to counting the electoral votes of several states is many of them were there to represent the constituents of those states. They felt they had been legitimately elected on the same ballot as Trump and Biden, but only their election was legitimate? And as my Representative, Darrell Issa of the 50th congressional district, noted, “many of them were going out of their way” to address these concerns, but because of the siege, the delayed proceedings did not afford such representatives the opportunity and attention they sought to air their concerns with the election and lay out solutions going forward. Senators shaken by the events dropped their objections and the electoral vote was announced certified by Vice President Mike Pence at just after 3:40 AM. Any debate over election reform was lost in the haze of tear gas outside the U.S. Capitol.
I don’t believe Donald Trump knew his supporters would storm the Capitol, but I believe he incited them. I don’t believe Rudy Guiliani bears responsibility for the siege of the Capitol but I believe his rhetoric — “trial by combat” — didn’t help. And I don’t believe Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz meant for a rally in Washington to amount to Insurrection Day in the nation’s capital, but I do believe their actions indicating they could object to the electoral count and force Congress to convene a review of the election helped legitimize and precipitate the eventual siege.
The sights and rhetoric at the “Stop the Steal” rally was immediately familiar to anyone who attended a TEA Party rally in 2010. Many attendees came with Betsy Ross flags adorned with thirteen stars for the thirteen original colonies and ironically tread all over the Capitol steps in hats and shirts adorned with “Don’t Tread on Me.” They insisted it was “their Capital” and that members of Congress “work for us.” So, yes, these are members of our party, possibly the very same members of the conservative movement that had invigorated the TEA Party 10 years ago. But we didn’t storm the Capitol.
The people who stormed the Capitol or simply rallied peacefully against the certification likely voted for the members of Congress objecting to the electoral vote. And they were lied to, fed conspiracies and baseless accusations. Those who engaged in that farce should repent. They don’t know the first meaning of the name, republican. What compels a self-professed “patriot” to attempt to circumvent the Constitutional process? What compels a Republican to so fully reject the fruits of a republican form of government?
Democracy is a system. It is essentially and principally the very system meant to prevent violence like that witnessed January 6, 2021. All systems depend on the good faith of its participants to ensure the institutions in which they serve function properly. That is why lawmakers take an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution of the United States, or more accurately, the principles and structure of the Constitution.
“The word ‘constitution;’ it does not mean a bill of rights, it means structure,” observed the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in a very rare appearance before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, “when you say a person has a sound constitution, you mean he has a sound structure…the real key to the distinctiveness of America is the structure of our Government.” And it is that structure that preserves liberty, that is to guarantee equal justice, and limit government to those functions it can perform well, leaving the rest up to private citizens and institutions, “to the people, and the states, respectively.”
In our elections, according to the Constitution, the people vote for their representatives, states facilitate the elections, and courts adjudicate disputes. If lawmakers believe one or more of those institutions is failing, it is incumbent on them to prove it, to reform them, and, if necessary, impeach and remove the bad faith participants. Since the allegations here are criminal, they could take it to the proper authorities, U.S. Attorneys working for the Department of Justice but as then-Attorney General William Barr attested, “there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud” in the 2020 elections.
Every state legally certified the election results from the election that ended Nov. 3 2020. Every court upheld those certifications despite numerous challenges from the Trump campaign and other Republican lawyers, legislators, and elections officials. There were no disputes. No state legislature or board of elections officials legally decertified their results. There was no alternative slate of Trump electors waiting in the wings. Congress has the power to object but it has no constitutional role to play aside from officiating the electoral votes. It is only convened to witness the counting of those votes, not to challenge and thus ostensibly overrule them. They are witnesses, not judges. And were they to succeed in hijacking the ceremonial count to overrule the certified results, the Biden/Harris campaign would have sued and courts would quickly rule in their favor.
This was the truth on January 6, 2021.
Republicans, including brand new, recently elected members of Congress, faced a choice: Trump or the truth? Country or party? Principles or politics? To circumvent the ceremonial counting of votes to air grievances about the election would be appalling, but not unprecedented. Hijacking that process to overturn election results would be an act of insurrection. And insisting the vice president could claim such a power for himself that would place America among only the worst of banana republics is absurd. Fortunately for them, the real insurrectionists storming the Capitol gave us a glimpse of the anarchy that could have been unleashed before members of Congress had the chance.
They have a choice to make now. After seeing the consequences of what one Republican staff member reportedly referred to as “humoring” the president as he spread his lies, distortions, and apocalyptic rhetoric about the impending end of America, can they continue? After the death of five people, one of them a member of the U.S. Capitol Police Department, can they still appease the mob? Or can they, as Utah Senator Mitt Romney offered, choose to respect their constituents enough to tell the truth as that is “the burden, and the duty, of leadership?”
William Jennings Bryan, the famed American populist, is rumored to have said “that is where my people are, and I, as their leader, shall follow them.” Kevin McCarthy will never be confused for William Jennings Bryan or Donald Trump, for that matter, but the House Republican Leader is the most congenial man in Washington, at home negotiating with Nancy Pelosi as much as he is being affectionately referred to as “my Kevin” by the President of the United States. McCarthy, in an interview Saturday prior to the siege on Capitol Hill, asked “what would be wrong with an audit?” Instead of Senator Mitch McConnell who privately urged his colleagues not to sign onto any objections and publicly denounced the effort, McCarthy encouraged them and eventually joined them. Leader McCarthy, having seen the harm such encouragement could cause, responded with an excellent speech calling on leaders to tone down the rhetoric after the rioters had been removed from the Capitol.
Yes, it’s too late for that. A crazed gunman tried to massacre a charity baseball team because the players were Republicans in 2017, severely injuring Republican Whip Steve Scalise. Before that, a gunman shot and nearly killed Rep. Gabby Giffords, rendering her nearly incapable of speaking. Another gunman took aim at dozens of shoppers at an El Paso WalMart after posting a manifesto that approvingly quoted the president and Fox News host Tucker Carlson. And on January 6, thousands of election protesters stormed the Capitol, occupied members’ offices, and successfully delayed the certification of the 2020 election because they believed they could overturn it. It has long been past time to tone down the rhetoric.
Senator Romney said in a statement before the election that politics “had moved away from spirited debate to a vile, vituperative, hate-filled morass that is unbecoming of any free nation — let alone the birthplace of democracy,” and warned “the consequences of the crescendo of anger leads to a very bad place.”
For this talk, Romney earns the title “RINO: Republican in name only.” As Trump told Politico reporter Tim Alberta for his book, American Carnage, he saw Romney as weak. “He had too much respect for Barack Obama,” Alberta quotes Trump telling him as Trump bragged he told Romney if only he “spent the same energy” against Obama as he had against Trump, he probably could have won the presidency himself. To Trump and his supporters, his success comes from always fighting back, from lessons he learned early on from Roy Cohn — “always be counterpunching,” — and as he said in the Ellipse, “I will never concede.” My dad used to say Trump was like a pot of water over an open flame; it had to boil over eventually, and did so violently in the most shocking way.
It has long been past time to push back against this thinking, to reclaim conservatism as a defense of a particular sensibility, one oriented toward prudence and calm, not reactionary politics and radicalization. Radicalism is the rejection of republicanism. As ISIS is most threatening to their fellow Muslims, the radicalization of Americans is a direct threat to the equal rights, representation, and happiness of those who are not radicalized. We are berated online and forced to shun friends, family members, neighbors, and coworkers as they walk over the thresholds into the darkest reaches of the internet unable to find a way out. Given power, they could become unabashed autocrats out for vengeance and violence against everyone else.
What compels a man to angrily chase a beleaguered Capitol Hill Police officer through the halls of the U.S. Capitol? The sweatshirt he was wearing says it all: “Trust The Process” emblazoned over the image of an eagle bearing the American flag flying through a golden Q. QAnon is rote radicalization. “Trust the process,” a mantra for a belief system that holds all political opponents are really part of a “global cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles” as newly elected Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene describes it, and only Donald Trump can stop them. A sitting member of Congress spreading conspiracy theories.
But we know how Trump feels about her, tweeting she is a “future Republican star” and saying of QAnon devotees, “I understand they like me” without a hint of denunciation. At a rally in Georgia the day before the end of runoff elections to control the U.S. Senate, Trump invited Rep. Taylor-Greene on stage, insisting the appointed incumbent Senator for whom he was ostensibly there to rally, Kelly Loeffler, wanted her there. Sen. Kelly Loeffler would probably be the type of Republican I would whole-heartedly support: a businesswoman, backed by the establishment, that could appeal to disaffected suburban voters. But Loeffler was quick to campaign with Taylor-Greene and ran an atrocious campaign, matched only by her uninspiring political talent. Loeffler lost, ushering in a Senator she repeatedly refers to as “radical liberal Raphael Warnock.”
Loeffler isn’t likely to challenge Warnock in 2022 but Georgia’s Republican Lieutenant Governor, Geoff Duncan, might. Unfortunately for him, he has been a loyal deputy to Governor Brian Kemp, also up for reelection, and could face Trump’s wrath for refusing to accede to the president’s demand to decertify Georgia’s election results. For the good of the Republican Party, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Governor Kemp, and Lt. Governor Geoff Duncan need to stand for reelection, and they need to win.
Now is not the time to abandon Republicans who do the right thing. If we don’t reward leaders of principle, we will be saddled with unprincipled, undisciplined demagogues. There is no better guarantee of the dissolution of the Republican Party into total irrelevance.
It’s more than a name; Lowercase-r republicans are all those, Democrats, independents, and Republicans, who are committed to the preservation of a republican form of government. Republicans proudly wear the title of the anti-slavery coalition, the radicals that emancipated the slaves and then guaranteed to all Americans equality under the law.
I believe as Senator Marco Rubio wrote, “the Republican Party is best equipped to reclaim the promise of America in our time. “The party of Lincoln, built on the belief that equal opportunity and equal rights under God are ideas so powerful they can unite people of every culture, tongue, race, and creed.”
The Republican Party can still stand for those ideals, a home for all those united to restore America, and the Constitution, as champion and promulgator of Liberty and opportunity instead of a conduit for conspiracy and a propagandist for socialism.
It’s time to take back our party, back to its roots, so that we may advance republicanism and meet the challenges of the twenty-first century with the principles of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence first and foremost in our mind.
I am nobody. I am just a delegate to the California Republican Party who has had the honor of serving as Campaign Manager and Communications Director for a few great candidates who came up short. I don’t know what the future holds for me but I know I joined a fraternity with a proud history of fighting for the small and vulnerable, for liberty, justice, and opportunity for all. The roots of resentment that allowed Donald Trump to so consume and subsume the Republican Party run deep and will need to be addressed soon, but the events of January 6 leaves us no choice but to warn our fellow Americans, “whenever imminent danger menaces the freedom of our institutions or the permanency of the Union.”
Republicans, now is the time to rally to the defense of our treasured institutions. Now is the time to reclaim our mantle as the Party of Lincoln and Reagan. Now is the time to champion our Founding principles and defend them at all costs. Those who have taken the oath to protect the Constitution and the republic from all enemies foreign and domestic, the enemy is domestic and it’s a product of our own creation. Republicans, we have to show we are better than this. We have to show the world America is still the beacon and the light of Liberty and opportunity you heard so much about. Still a shining city on a hill, still an apple made of gold.
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.” — Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address
