Thursday, June 30, 2022 | 2 a.m.
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One of the things we love most about the early summer is the opportunity it brings to be intentional about celebrating and reflecting on the heroes who helped create, build and defend this country.
During the six-week period from Memorial Day through Independence Day, there are four federal holidays that celebrate American heroes ranging from U.S. military personnel to the Founding Fathers. No other period of the calendar is so exclusively focused on who we are as a country and the heroes that instill pride in our hearts.
Yet this year feels different. With mass shootings now a daily occurrence; the ongoing Jan. 6 hearings revealing details of the first violent assault on the U.S. Capitol since the British sacked Washington, D.C., in 1814; the Supreme Court issuing its first-ever decision to repeal a civil right it had previously granted; and an election season that is a parade of anti-democratic authoritarian rhetoric, it can feel as though there isn’t much to celebrate about America right now.
We’re at a moment when American heroes are in short supply while American villains are on the march.
Which is why the courage, bravery and patriotism of a staunchly conservative 26-year-old former White House aide was so inspiring, refreshing and simultaneously disturbing.
Cassidy Hutchinson worked for the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows during the Trump administration, including on Jan. 6, 2021. On Tuesday, she was a surprise witness in a last-minute hearing of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. Her testimony left little doubt that on Jan. 6, Donald Trump was a violent and angry man plotting desperately to hold on to power, no matter what the cost.
He was a president attacking America in ways never seen before. Trump and his followers trampled on the flag, yet this week there emerged a young woman who is mending the tears and hoisting it again.
Her testimony included inside accounts that Trump knew his insurrectionists were armed but wanted them to march on the Capitol anyway to stop Congress from validating the election, how he thought then-Vice President Mike Pence deserved to be hanged and how Trump was so out of control he left ketchup dripping down a White House wall after throwing a plate of food across the room in anger when the attorney general said the election was fair.
The risks associated with crossing Trump World, especially for a young, ambitious Republican politico, are almost unfathomable, which makes Hutchinson’s testimony that much more courageous. Yes, she’s just doing her job, but to do so publicly, on national television, when her own former boss is defying subpoenas and refusing to testify, is heroic.
She will be threatened. She will be defamed. She will be lied about. She will face the animalistic onslaught encountered by anyone crossing Trump World and its insurrectionists. And she will not be safe. She knows the private costs will be enormous.
Still, she stood up for the truth.
Hutchinson, like Reps. Liz Cheney, R- Wyo., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., stands as a moral bulwark against those in the GOP eager for dictatorships and the destruction of American values, demonstrating the way back to dignity for a party that has so badly lost its way.
This is what patriotism looks like.
Hutchinson likely disagrees with every Democrat on the Jan 6. committee on nearly every policy issue. But they all agree that our republic must be defended. Compared with Hutchinson, Cheney and Kinzinger, the cowardice of so many of their peers is as ugly as this trio’s heroism is admirable.
Yet it shouldn’t be. Public servants fulfilling their oaths to defend the Constitution shouldn’t be so abnormal as to justify a celebratory editorial.
Public service is supposed to be exactly that — a service performed for the benefit of the public. It is remarkable that so many public servants at the highest level of government refuse to serve the public or the law by appearing before the committee. Even the Republican leaders of Congress itself, most notably House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, have refused to participate in honest, unscripted fact finding.
Instead, Republicans in leadership have painted the hearings as a witch hunt.
But let’s not forget that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed to allow five Republicans to join the House Select Committee. Pelosi accepted McCarthy’s first three hand-picked nominees without question but raised concerns about the professionalism and behavior of two others.
Instead of giving Pelosi assurances that their antics would be kept in line or nominating two hand-picked replacements, McCarthy instead behaved like a toddler on the playground. If he couldn’t make up the rules as he went along, he wasn’t going to play, and he boycotted the committee.
Despite McCarthy’s lack of leadership, Kinzinger and Cheney, the former House Republican chair defied McCarthy and joined the committee anyway.
In other words, this is a bipartisan effort, although we still remain shocked by this: Of the 212 Republican members of the U.S. House, only two have demonstrated that they are real public servants.
They have been joined by a small but passionate chorus of other patriotic Republicans who are refusing to allow selfishness or cowardice to override their sworn oath or their duty as Americans. In fact, of the 17 witnesses who have testified in public hearings thus far, 14 are Republicans. Beyond those who have testified in person, the committee has presented taped depositions of more than a dozen other GOP officials, including Trump’s own family and top-level Cabinet officials.
They all support Hutchinson’s narrative of an unhinged child in the White House, who was so rabid in his lies and so cowardly that he resorted to getting his white supremacist school-yard bully friends to fight for him.
While the congressional hearings are not formal “trials” in a legal sense, the committee has still elected to present evidence in an open and transparent manner.
It’s courageous patriotism at its finest, and it’s being led by heroic Americans of all political stripes.
So, as we approach the Independence Day holiday weekend, we salute Cassidy Hutchinson and the many other patriots participating in these hearings. In her quiet yet courageous dignity, Hutchinson shows the way back to sanity for the GOP. We also salute those Republicans at the state level, including our own secretary of state, who resisted Trump’s demands to cheat on his behalf.
We also call on the rest of the Republican Party, and especially those traitors who refused to stand for democracy to follow this young woman’s lead, and be brave enough to share your story, your knowledge, your experiences, in service to the American public and the Constitution you swore an oath to uphold.
