We have met the enemy鈥�
Three weeks ago, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) was beside himself on the floor of the U.S. House. He launched into a blistering tirade against his fellow Republicans.
“I want my Republican colleagues to give me one thing. One. That I can go campaign on and say we did it,” Roy said with the confidence of a man who knew there would be absolutely nothing on which to campaign.
What Roy did was furnish Democrats everywhere with a video they could drop into their campaign ads that could serve as examples of the Republican’s inability to govern.
Specifically, Roy’s words had been about how congressional Republicans haven’t followed through on their campaign promises to achieve fiscal belt-tightening.
That won’t matter to Democrats, who’ll use those words as an admission that Republicans are spending their time doing nothing of value.
Campaigning Democrats might also take note of the growing number of Republicans who are lining up to oppose Ex-president Trump.
So many that they’ve devoted an entire Wikipedia page to them.
I counted 118 Republicans on the page titled, “List of Republicans who oppose the Donald Trump 2024 presidential campaign.”
Trump likes to blame Democrats for his ongoing legal and political problems. Yet it’s many of his fellow Republicans who don’t want him to become the president for a second time.
Interestingly, many of them were members of his cabinet.
Among the dozen cabinet members on that list are two of Trump’s Secretaries of State (Mike Pompeo and Rex Tillerson); two of his Secretaries of Defense, (Mark Esper and Jim Mattis); two of his White House Chiefs of Staff (John Kelly and Mick Mulvaney; and his Attorney General, William Barr.
Most of them have announced publicly that they don’t believe Trump should ever occupy the White House again.
Nor do nine Senate Republicans, and 16 Republicans in the U.S. House.
There are also 15 past Republican House members listed, the most vocal of which is Liz Cheney (R-Wy).
Cheney is a staunch conservative, who found herself being vilified by her fellow Republicans after she came out in favor of impeaching Trump during his second impeachment in January 2021, then serving as the lead Republican on the House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 attack.
Cheney was eventually removed from the House Republican Conference. Then she was forced out of the Wyoming Republican Party. If that wasn’t enough, the Republican National Committee censured her in February 2022.
She failed miserably in her attempt for reelection in the Wyoming primary in August 2022. She’s been out of office since the beginning of this year.
She hasn’t been idle, though. She can write books!
Her book, “Oath and Honor,” hits bookshelves tomorrow, supercharged with lots of presale publicity.
NOTE #1: I haven’t read it.
NOTE #2: I probably never will.
I have, though, seen several of the juicier excerpts from the book on television.
According to one of them, Cheney became aware of the fact that despite Trump’s steadfast assertions that he won the 2020 presidential election, he let on a few days after the election – that he knew he’d lost.
Cheney says former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told her Trump had let him know – he had, indeed, lost the election.
Certainly, some prosecutors would like to put McCarthy on a witness stand and ask him about Trump’s feelings about the 2020 presidential election, when he’s been accused of setting off an insurrection because he thought he’d won that election.
Cheney also had a little fun at McCarthy’s expense.
There’s that now-famous picture of Trump and McCarthy with big smiles down at Mar-a-Lago, taken in January 2021.
That was just a few weeks after McCarthy said that Trump was responsible for the mayhem that took place on Jan. 6.
What changed?
According to Cheney, McCarthy says that he was told “Trump’s not eating.”
To Cheney, McCarthy had done what so many Republicans have done – become an “enabler and collaborator” – willing to do anything to bask in the glow of Donald Trump.
Al Owens is a multi-Emmy Award winner, former reporter, and anchor for Entertainment Tonight, and 50-year TV news and newspaper veteran. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net.