Over the weekend, Newt Gingrich went on to Maria Bartiromo’s show and almost nonchalantly told the audience what was about to happen in retribution to the Select Committee:
“And all these people who have been so tough, and so mean, and so nasty are going to be delivered subpoenas for every document, every conversation, every tweet, every e-mail. I think when you have a Republican Congress, this is all going to come crashing down.
“And the wolves are going to find out that they’re now sheep and they’re the ones who are in fact, I think, face a real risk of jail for the kinds of laws they’re breaking.”
Here is the video and then we pick up Wilson below:
Gingrich never got around to citing a law they were breaking.
There was never any doubt that, should the Republicans take the House in 2022, Biden will be impeached, more than once, and we haven’t seen the definition of “nasty” yet. Gingrich has forgotten who arrests who, though, in our system of government. There will not be any arrests in 2023, but they might need to wait only two years, at least under our system of government.
But does “our” system of government matter anymore? If in 2024, the GOP takes the presidency, whether it’s Trump (I seriously doubt he will run, he could lose and cannot take it), or DeSantis, do we think we’ll have “our” system of government anymore? Or do we think that the members of the committee that are currently serving do, actually, face prison/jail, or at least civil suits? I think it is the latter because there’s no reason to believe in GOP restraint anymore. Remember Amy Coney-Barett? The refusal to investigate January 6th?
Rick Wilson knows this and awoke this morning wanting to address the reality that he saw over the weekend with Newt and others. We cannot set out the entire Tweet thread here, but we can hit some highlights that reinforce the message above about what is to come should the Republicans grab power:
1/ I took a light weekend on the social media front, but let me say a few words about Newt’s not-so-subtle threats this weekend. He’s right. He’s just saying the quiet part out loud.
3/ Speaker Jordan (and no, Kevin, he didn’t take your deal and he is going to shank you) and the MAGAe will comprise a clear majority of the GOP caucus in 2022 and they are Trump’s political vergeltungswaffe.
They don’t care about policy. They care about power.
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) January 24, 2022
Other highlights:
6/ Next, pleasing their god-king. He demands they “investigate” the Big Lie and they will create a wave of scandals where none exists because the purpose of the Big Lie is corrode and undermine faith in elections. Undermining faith in elections is central.
7/ Because if the election of 2020 is illegitimate to their base, anything goes. I warned in 2019 that they’d mainstream political violence because the acquisition and retention of political power is the only ideological underpinning.
And thus fulfilling the endgame in Putin’s original plan, because – yes, I do believe that all of this began in Eastern Europe and the banks of the Volga River. I cannot prove it, but anyone that wants to argue is going to have to explain the peculiar number of Russians in and around the Trump campaign, the NRA funding, the 2018 trip to Moscow (By only GOP Sens, not a single Democrat invited), Tucker Carlson taking Putin’s position all last week (Never mind Madison Cawthorn’s very peculiar marriage), John Bolton predicting Trump would pull us out of NATO in a second term… it goes on and on.
KGB doctrine has always been the same as Lincoln’s, the only way to defeat this country, one with blue water ports on both sides and bases scattered throughout the entire 50 states, would be from within and it always involved undermining faith in democracy, the vote. The most outrageous and horrifying aspect of all of this is that I believe that some of the most powerful Republicans know exactly what’s happening and believe that a more “Russian-type” of government in the U.S., where minority rule would be consolidated around money and entrenched power is the best long term plan and are convinced a more “Putin-like” government is best for the United States.
We will not abandon our Constitution, there will still be a Congress and SCOTUS, all the accouterments of democracy will still be around. The problem is that none of it will really mean anything as the GOP solidifies its controls of the mechanisms of government, namely – the vote, and faith in any vote that they lose. They have already shown they’re willing to resort to violence and if they lose again in 2024 (which I see as doubtful given Jim Crowe 2.0), we’ll see the practice they put into play in 2020 used to better effect.
Wilson is right. The GOP and MAGAs (There is no real difference now) don’t have a platform. They didn’t bother with one in 2020. So symbolic. Their platform is power, period. It is regaining power and it is not beyond the imagination that they would imprison those members of the committee exposing their abuses of power right now.
Democrats had (have) their one last shot. Clean this up through prosecutions and solidify the vote, or suffer what becomes of it. It is one or the other and it’s hard to believe that the two Democrats standing in the way fear the result of what’s to come.
Jason Miciak is a political writer, features writer, author, and attorney. He is originally from Canada but grew up in the Pacific Northwest as a dual Canadian-American citizen, which he grows increasingly thankful for every day. He now enjoys life as a single dad, writing from the beaches of the Gulf Coast, getting advice from his beloved daughter and teammate. He is very much the dreamy mystic that cannot add and loves dogs more than most people. He also likes studying cooking, theoretical physics, cosmology, and quantum mechanics. He likes pizza.
Please visit his Substack Newsletter, get the first month free: Much Ado About Everything: By Jason Miciak
