Leo Amery was a Conservative Member of the British Parliament on Sept. 2, 1939. He’d fought in the Great War and served as First Lord of the Admiralty. Tory Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, in his remarks to the House of Commons that day, appeared to backtrack on Britain’s commitment to go to war if Hitler invaded Poland. An opposition politician rose and began by saying he would speak for the anti-Nazi Labour Party. Amery called over his own party leader’s shoulder and shouted that his party opponent should instead “Speak for England!” Amery was quite right: Britain would have been permanently disgraced if it backtracked on its promise.
We need more of Amery’s kind of patriotism among today’s House and Senate members, especially Republicans, and less grasping self-advancement.
To state the obvious, there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the outcome of the presidential election, as recognized by the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice, despite nearly 60 opportunities to present such proof to judges, many of whom are Republican and even Trump appointees. Many conservative outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Fox News, National Review, this paper, and responsible senior Republican officials all recognize the insanity of claims to the contrary. On the other hand, there is taped evidence of President Trump, his staff, and his counsel extorting Georgia’s secretary of state with a threat of criminal investigation if he does not fraudulently flip that state’s votes to Trump.
Meanwhile, at least 150 Republican senators and representatives pledged to challenge the Jan. 6 certification of electoral votes of several states whose citizens have been confirmed in multiple recounts to have voted for Biden. (They claim fraud in the lost presidential election but mysteriously, not in the election of Republican senators, congressmen, and state officials in the same jurisdictions on those same ballots.) The vice president, whose duty is to count electoral votes in a neutral fashion, welcomes their attempt. This is after the Supreme Court appropriately flicked away a specious legal challenge by Texas’s indicted attorney general to Pennsylvania’s electoral votes, in a filing that over 125 House members joined as amici curiae.
Simultaneously, the president called for supporters to join “wild” protests by right-wing groups in Washington that same day. Rep. Louie Gohmert has called for violence in response to his own lawsuit being summarily dismissed. Demonstrators are encouraged by online fanatics to bring illegal weapons to these protests, set up armed encampments on the Mall, and dress in the black garb of their putative adversaries, so-called “antifa.” (Real anti-fascists are the kinds of men who landed on Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima, not a contemporary, disorganized bunch of collegiate left-wing vandals.)
When right-wing thugs gathered in Washington for protests last month, downtown passersby, including an off-duty soldier, were assaulted on the putative, mistaken assumption that they might be antifa. Trump will likely call on Wednesday, as he did unsuccessfully last June, for his new, dubiously appointed and unconfirmed acting secretary of Defense to misuse the military to put down any resulting “insurrection” in yet a further illegal attempt to retain power, a possibility that likely led to the extraordinary rebuke by every living former secretary of defense.
Altogether, Wednesday’s vote will be a historic one. The question before Congress really is, can a party holding the presidency maintain executive power, even after it loses at the polls, if only it has sufficient congressional support to reverse the election result? Those who answer “yes” will forever bear the mark of Cain as having, and I use this phrase carefully, betrayed our country’s first principles.
Our service members fought to establish and sustain a democratic republic, first in the Revolution, the War of 1812, and then in the Civil War, based upon the premise of popular sovereignty as opposed to either a foreign monarchy or domestic racial supremacy. The world wars and our defenses of South Korea and South Vietnam may proudly be described as fights for democracy against militarism, fascism, and communism abroad, while suffragettes and civil rights activists struggled to extend the franchise here at home. This century’s campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq were grounded in counterterrorism but also established fledgling, if flawed, democracies in Kabul and Baghdad. Those who would play to the cheap seats to overturn the 2020 election results, absent any legally admissible evidence of fraud, and only on the basis of memes, tweets, and conspiracies, soil the legacies of those far better men who nobly gave their lives to protect democracy.
The better educated of those backing Trump, for example, Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, do so with the certain knowledge that their quest is a charade. They go forth only in the service of unholy personal ambition, and in unmanly fear that Trump, as he rages against the fading of the light, might marginally impede their future presidential campaigns.
The Constitution’s speech and debate clause protects these kinds of unscrupulous men from any legal sanction for what they may say and do in Congress on Wednesday. But as a political and, more importantly, a moral matter, remember their names.
Their better Republican colleagues should put partisanship aside and, to paraphrase Emery, speak for America.
Kevin Carroll served as senior counselor to the secretary of homeland security (2017-18) and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee (2011-13), as well as a CIA and Army officer. He is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
