Republican members of Congress have not shown the necessary respect for their oaths of office to be treated as the loyal opposition.
By Max Burns, Democratic strategist
After a week trying to bring Senate Republicans into a bipartisan deal, Democrats are moving unilaterally to advance President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief plan. In other words, they’re doing what they should have been doing all along.
So long as that unpunished extremism remains, Democrats owe it to the American people to shun the party.
Until congressional Republicans show accountability for their role in the inciteful rhetoric and conspiracies that led to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Democrats shouldn’t be engaging with them. For all of Biden’s laudable talk about unity, and the upsides to passing major legislation in a bipartisan manner, as of now the Republican members of Congress have not shown the necessary respect for their oaths of office to be treated as the loyal opposition.
Seeking bipartisanship with the GOP as it exists today is a threat to good government. Negotiating with the party hitches Democratic — and American — interests to a group whose members include people not only disinterested in but hostile to the workings of democracy.
It’s a far cry from the party of George H.W. Bush, who in 1991 led the GOP in booting Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke over his lifelong white supremacy and unapologetic anti-Semitism. In its place is a party willing to condemn extremism in general while Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a freshman Republican from Georgia, weaves another variation on Duke’s anti-Semitism even as she carries on the fight to undermine trust in the 2020 election. Biden is under no obligation to extend a drop of legitimacy to such demagogues.
The GOP can start the process of reform by expelling Greene from the House. Greene has harassed a teenage survivor of the Parkland mass shooting, endorsed violence against Democrats both generally and by name, and cheered on the right-wing extremists who killed a police officer and injured 140 others at the Capitol. Not only has Greene violated her oath of office, she is mocking its exhortation to protect the United States from “all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
