THE SHAMING OF LIZ CHENEY IS “DE JA VU, ALL OVER AGAIN”

 

          …Senator Margaret Chase Smith was also shamed by the Republican Party

 

More proof that: “What goes around, comes around”

 

This is not the first time that a member of Congress has been shamed by the Republican Party.  The current shaming of Liz Cheney by the Republicans is very much like what occurred to another Republican member of Congress back in the early 1950’s.

Our former president’s endless flow of lies about a stolen election, that all recalls another long-running fiction in American politics.  One that also occurred when Senator Joseph McCarthy offered up his imaginary lists of American communists.

At the time, a freshman female U.S. Senator, Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Skowhegan, Maine that was elected in 1940 to fill the congressional seat vacated after the death of her husband.  Smith began a career of more than 30 years as the first woman in U.S. history to win races for both the House and the Senate.

Smith was on to McCarthy from the beginning.  In early 1950, then known as “Tail Gunner, Joe McCarthy,” that was when he made his first claim to possess a secret list of American traitors in the U.S. Congress.  Senator Smith took the Communist threat seriously and asked McCarthy for his evidence.  When months went by with no proof offered, she concluded that he was simply spreading slander.  However, at the time, being a lowly freshman senator, after moving across the Capitol from the House, she was highly reluctant to oppose McCarthy, as a well-respected U.S. Senator.

She had later recalled that, “This great psychological fear had spread to the Senate, where a considerable amount of mental paralysis and muteness set in for fear of offending McCarthy”.

This should sound very familiar to those watching the current hounding of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) by the Republican party. She has been expelled from her post in House leadership and she was censured by the Republican National Committee (RNC) for having the guts to stand up to Trump.  Last year, as a lifelong Republican and the daughter of the party’s two-time vice-presidential selection, Richard Cheney, she refused to go along with the former presidents lies.  No, she did not buy Trump’s grandstanding which was designed to undermine confidence in the election.  Cheney made the perfectly reasonable observation that Trump’s deceitful rhetoric inflamed the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters and she voted to hold Trump accountable.  She also agreed to participate in a congressional investigation into the whole shameful episode

In McCarthy’s days, as in ours, a significant percentage of Republicans supported McCarthy, just as today’s Republicans support Trump.

The lies themselves were similar and the party’s hardcore elements bought into the big lie.  The simplest explanation is the best, and McCarthy had said that the Democrats are simply hellbent on destroying the country.

But McCarthy had met his nemesis in the person of Margaret Chase Smith.

She concluded that she must take a stand, and she gathered up a half-dozen of her male colleagues to back her up

She then had to encounter McCarthy as she boarded the Senate subway. “Margaret, you look very serious,” he said. “Are you going to make a speech?” “Yes, and you will not like it!” she replied. Smith called the speech her “Declaration of Conscience.”

It was at the time called, “An artful bit of oratory”.  Smith never mentioned McCarthy by name, yet there was no mistaking, who was her subject.  She had denounced the Democrats as utter failures, yet insisted they be respected as fellow Americans.  Political discourse, she warned, had been “debased to the level of … hate and character assassination.” She said, “I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of ….Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.”

Warning of a “national suicide” through excessive partisanship, she said: “I don’t believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest.”

The reaction among McCarthy’s enablers was swift and punishing. As with Cheney, Smith was ousted from a key Senate position. “McCarthy’s allies,” the Senate history says, “took every occasion to smear Senator Smith.”

The sum of Liz Cheney’s supposed offenses now comes to this: She has spoken the truth, defended the truth, and pursued the truth during one of her party’s periodic infatuations with a demagogic liar.  Like Margaret Chase Smith before her, Cheney’s reward is a heaping dose of hatred from the party she still loyally serves.  An unknown author had it right when he wrote: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

History too, will most likely do again what it has done before.  Hopefully, it will have the same low regard for Trump that it has been for McCarthy.  Any virtues, either man might have had, will be obscured by their excesses and deceit. 

It will most likely vindicate Cheney, as it has vindicated Ms. Smith.

When their stories are told to future generations, both will be celebrated for their convictions and admired for their conscience.

We sincerely hope this will be the case.

Copyright G. Ater 2022