Alarming developments like these need to be conjoined with the legalist stylings peddled by partisan R pundits these days Take Andrew C. McCarthy. 1/ nytimes.com/2021/06/19/us/…
He is the quintessential (Jonathan Haidtian) elephant rider. He's a lawyer-pundit; he argues on behalf of the GOP, best he can. He's made little adjustments over the months to not get too cross-wise with this difficult client, while doing as much as he can on its behalf. 2/
Way back on 1/17 the maximalist position McCarthy thought he could stake, without being laughed out of court, was that 1/6 was an 'insurrection' - duh - but it is deporably impolitic of D's to make that fact the, ahem, 'gravamen'. 3/ nationalreview.com/2021/01/the-tr… 
Today McCarthy is comfortable stepping out from behind the legelese. 'Insurrection' is a term that the left irresponsibly bandies about - to make us think more people died! - but sensible folk know better. 4/ nationalreview.com/2021/06/what-t…
The baseline for legal negotiation now is that Jan 6 was 'nothing' - as the GOP base fervently believes. McCarthy immediately establishes his bona fides as independent-minded by insisting the truth is far from that. 5/
But the game is: you can get pretty far from nothing without getting near the truth of 1/6. That'll do for McCarthy's purposes. And now we are getting to it. 6/
But first, one more adjustment McCarthy has made over the months. Today McCarthy thinks it is crucial that it is deeply mysterious what the thing was really all about. 7/
Way back in January, he thought that much was obvious. It was a conspiracy between Trump and the mob to pressure Pence and Congress to overturn the election results. Back in January he was only concerned to get congressional R's off the hook for being abettors of that. 8/
Note his free use, back then, of 'abettors of the storming of the Capitol'. You couldn't potentially 'abet a storming' unless it was purposive, collective and wrongful. 9/
These days the legal danger has passed that important R's will be held responsible for bad acts associated with 1/6 - acts McCarthy admitted at the time were 'baffling': life is mysterious! - so McCarthy can relax his vigilance on that front. 10/
And now we come to it. Sure, there are conspiracy charges, but only of a 'catch-all' variety that makes thoughtful persons wonder whether there really was a so-called 'insurrection' at all. Surely an insurrection would involve ... sedition, right? 11/
Again: back in Jan, McCarthy was only concerned to shield R congresscritters, legally. Now that R impunity for past bad acts seems fairly assured for the foreseeable future, McCarthy can shift to exculpating the mob itself, after all, on grounds of - 12/
- comprehensive paranoid delusion. 13/
On 1/17 McCarthy would have been embarrassed to argue this. But the thing to note is what this sort of legal reasoning affords, going forward. Yes it was wrong of Trump to lie to outrageously, but once the lie is believed - well, lemonade from lemons. 14/ nytimes.com/2021/06/19/us/…
For the sake of 'election integrity', GA is setting up a system in which partisan R's can act wrongly with impunity. We are moving into a Brave New World of stealing better what Trump failed to steal, badly, the last time out. McCarthy, seeing which way the wind is blowing - 15/
- is exploring the furthest extent to which lack of conscious criminal intent, due to severe, paranoid delusion, is a serviceable legal shield. Some R partisan, in authority, is going to steal an election, in the sincere conviction he/she is 'protecting election integrity'. 16/
It's going to be 1/6 mob mentality, now wielding the levers of power. And McCarthy is going to deplore that Democrats have finally brought our great republic to such a low, paranoid, partisan condition but the GA law is the law ... 17/
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe McCarthy will come out strong against these new R laws on the grounds that these, plus the severe, widespread 'Big Lie' delusions that (so he argues) make it impossible to prosecute members the Capitol mob for sedition ... 18/
will make it the case, likewise, that R's can steal elections - by any reasonable standard of what that means - so long as they, crazily, don't believe they are doing that. And there will be no legal recourse against this clearly, system-destroying result. 19/
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