The Big Lie becomes official policy of the Republican Party

It’s official. The Republican Party is the party of the Big Lie.

They made it official Wednesday when they bounced Rep. Liz Cheney from a GOP House leadership position for having the temerity to call out the Big Lie.

And they lied even about that — about why they were giving Cheney the boot. They said she had become a “distraction” from the party’s efforts to “move on” and “look forward.” They think the American people are fools.

As if anybody couldn’t see that Cheney’s unforgivable sin has been to insist on calling out the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election and was denied victory only due to massive vote fraud.

“If you want leaders who will enable and spread his destructive lies, I’m not your person, you have plenty of others to choose from,” Cheney told her House Republican colleagues on Wednesday morning, as they booed. “That will be their legacy.”

Cheney, with whom we probably agree on little when it comes to public policy, understands to the marrow: The Big Lie threatens to destroy the very foundation of our American democracy, which is a justified confidence in the integrity of our electoral process.

There can be no looking forward for the Republican Party until it abandons the lie of Trump’s victory and, better yet, quits pushing the lie. But with every Republican state legislature’s effort to rewrite election laws to restrict voting in future races — supposedly to protect against a massive level of fraud, which never happened — they are proactively selling the Big Lie.

Republican leaders say they’re just trying to create a “big tent” for the party. They say there should be room in the party for people who hold all kinds of different views as to the legitimacy of the 2020 election because, after all, they’re all Republicans and share traditional conservative values.

What nonsense. What an admission of moral bankruptcy.

There should be no room in any American political party for anybody who attacks our democracy by aiding and abetting — or simply refusing to call out — Trump’s massively dangerous lies.

“The Republican Party is at a turning point,” Cheney wrote in the Washington Post last week. “Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.”

On Wednesday, the party chose Trump instead.

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