[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 83 (Thursday, May 13, 2021)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E518]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      SHARING THE WASHINGTON POST OP-ED BY FORMER SEN. JEFF FLAKE

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                          HON. STENY H. HOYER

                              of maryland

                    in the house of representatives

                         Thursday, May 13, 2021

  Mr. HOYER. Madam Speaker, on Wednesday the Republican Conference 
ejected the Gentlelady from Wyoming from the ranks of its leadership 
because she dared to speak truth and refused to join in spreading 
falsehoods regarding the recent election. This is a dangerous moment 
for our democracy, when one party is operating according to a set of 
clearly debunked falsehoods and punishes its Members who prefer actual 
facts. To underscore that danger, I include in the Record the following 
op-ed, which was published in The Washington Post on Tuesday and 
written by the former Republican Senator from Arizona, Jeff Flake. I 
hope all of my colleagues--on both sides of the aisle--will read his 
words and consider carefully this perilous moment in which our country 
and this Congress finds itself.

                [From the Washington Post, May 11, 2021]

Opinion: In Today's Republican Party, There Is No Greater Offense Than 
                                Honesty

                   (By Former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ))

       ``The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it 
     will hate those who speak it.''--George Orwell
       Near the beginning of the document that made us free, our 
     Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote: ``We 
     hold these truths to be self-evident.''
       There you have it. From the very beginning of America, our 
     freedom has been predicated on truth. For without a 
     principled fidelity to truth and to shared facts, our 
     democracy will not last.
       On Wednesday, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) will most likely 
     lose her leadership post within the House Republican 
     Conference, not because she has been untruthful. Rather, she 
     will lose her position because she is refusing to play her 
     assigned role in propagating the ``big lie'' that the 2020 
     election was stolen from Donald Trump. Cheney is more 
     dedicated to the long-term health of our constitutional 
     system than she is to assuaging the former president's 
     shattered ego, and for her integrity she may well pay with 
     her career.
       No, this is not the plot of a movie set in an asylum. 
     Ladies and gentlemen, this is your contemporary Republican 
     Party, where today there is no greater offense than honesty.
       It seems a good time to examine how we got to a place where 
     such a large swath of the electorate (70 percent of 
     Republican voters, according to polling) became willing to 
     reject a truth that is so self-evident.
       This allergy to self-evident truth didn't happen all at 
     once, of course. This frog has been boiling for some time 
     now. The Trump period in American life has been a celebration 
     of the unwise and the untrue. From the ugly tolerance of the 
     pernicious falsehood about President Barack Obama's place of 
     birth to the bizarre and fanatical fable about the size of 
     inauguration crowds, to the introduction of the term 
     ``alternative facts'' into the American lexicon, the party's 
     steady embrace of dishonesty as a central premise has brought 
     us to this low and dangerous place.
       I don't know what will happen to Cheney politically after 
     Wednesday. For me, I knew that I couldn't support Trump's 
     election or reelection after his seminal falsehood about 
     Obama's birth certificate, to say nothing of the cascade of 
     untruths, from the trivial to the consequential, that 
     followed daily. I had hoped that, over time, my Republican 
     constituents would feel differently about the former 
     president, or at least value a Republican who pushed back, 
     and that I could stand for reelection in 2018 with a 
     reasonable chance of surviving a Republican primary. It soon 
     became apparent that Republican voters wanted someone who was 
     all in with a president that I increasingly saw as a danger 
     to the republic. That could not be me, so I spoke out instead 
     and didn't stand for reelection.
       When I became an unwitting dissident in my party by 
     speaking in defense of self-evident truths, I assumed that 
     more and more of my colleagues would follow me. I remain 
     astonished that so few did. Congresswoman Cheney, I know how 
     alone you must be feeling. But just know that history keeps 
     the score, not Kevin McCarthy or Elise Stefanik.
        In January 2018, three years before the Capitol 
     insurrection, I said the following on the Senate floor: ``Mr. 
     President, let us be clear. The impulses underlying the 
     dissemination of such untruths are not benign. They have the 
     effect of eroding trust in our vital institutions and 
     conditioning the public to no longer trust them. The 
     destructive effect of this kind of behavior on our democracy 
     cannot be overstated.''
       Three years later, it's clear that I didn't know the half 
     of it. The destructive effect of the president's behavior--
     and the willingness of Republican elected officials to 
     indulge, excuse, defend, justify and, in many cases, just 
     roll with it--has taken a devastating toll.
       It is elementary to have to say this, but we did not become 
     a great nation by believing or espousing nonsense, or by 
     embracing lunacy. And if my party continues down this path, 
     we will not be fit to govern.
       Cheney has proved her fitness, and today it seems that 
     adherents to the ``big lie'' will cast her out. Hold your 
     head high, congresswoman. Those of us who believe in American 
     democracy and who live in objective reality are grateful that 
     you have chosen to take a stand for truth--self-evident 
     truth--regardless of the consequences.

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