Courage, not Bluster

An unexpected blessing of the January 6 hearings is that it gave young people two shining examples of political courage, Congressmember Liz Cheney who co-chaired the Committee and White House Assistant Cassidy Hutchinson, age 27, who testified before it. Both Republicans, they were fully aware of what they could expect from the fury of Trump Republicans, including the onslaught of hate mail and death threats that they were about to receive.

These two patriots were especially valuable for young conservatives who had been trying, without success, to reconcile the idea of a stolen “landslide” election with the continuing absence of any credible evidence. Young conservatives could now learn, not only the truth, but how genuine honesty, integrity, and courage looked and sounded.

It is, after all, astonishing that it requires backbone for so many Congressional Republicans to acknowledge that the stolen election is a Big Lie, or to acknowledge that what they experienced, and what we all saw, and what Trump thoroughly enjoyed as he watched it unfold on TV, was an insurrection.

History will not be kind to these moral failures. They will be remembered as politicians who sacrificed their integrity and their patriotism to appease a bully. They’ve forgotten that bullies reserve their greatest contempt for the grovelers they control. The people bullies fear are the ones who don’t grovel and whom they cannot control — people like Liz Cheney and Cassidy Hutchinson.