Let's dispense with this quickly, because House Minority Whip Steve Scalise isn't pretending to be serious about this or anything else: He rose to power by being one of the most shameless hacks in the Republican House, a very high bar in a party that has gone crooked from top to bottom and has nothing of even the smallest value left in it be saved.
"We had disagreements with a lot of Barack Obama’s policies, but we never disrespected the office," a gaslighting and insincere Scalise sniffled Tuesday morning. "I called him president of the United States as we all did. If he asked us to go meet with him at the White House, we went. We expressed our disagreements in a respectful way, but what they continue to do to go after him personally"—and we can stop right there, because that's already pegged the bullshit meter, and none of us have had enough coffee to deal with even one more noun or verb or preposition or burping noise from him.
Let us run down the list very, very quickly. House Republicans, of which Scalise is consigliere by virtue of his own shamelessness, shouted, "You lie!" during an official presidential address by President Obama to Congress. House Republicans publicly said that Obama, who was born in Hawaii, should be sent "back to Kenya"; a Colorado member of their delegation called him a "tar baby." This was all in the midst of an extended, unendingly peddled Republican conspiracy claiming that President Barack Obama, the first nonwhite American to ever hold the office, was not actually even an American citizen at all, and therefore not the "legitimate" president.
The most prominent pusher of this particular theory used it as launching point for his own successful Republican presidential campaign. His ass is parked on an Oval Office chair as we speak.
But those are just the personal attacks on President Obama and the attacks on his legitimacy as elected holder of the office. Of more substance is Republican efforts to sabotage the office of the presidency itself, purely on the basis of their distaste for its occupant. Scalise may not remember Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's vow to block all of Obama's would-be acts as a means to remove him after one term, or the orchestrated Senate Republican efforts to stall or block the nomination of every federal judge submitted by the sitting president, regardless of record vacancies on the courts themselves. He may somehow have forgotten the Republican declaration that the sitting president no longer had the authority to nominate Supreme Court justices at all during the last quarter of his four-year term, regardless of what the Constitution said or did not say on the matter.
But Scalise might be expected to remember House Republicans violating the usual expectation that the president, and not Congress, be the driver of foreign policy with their invitation to the Israeli Prime Minister to address Congress—in an effort to thwart ongoing negotiations between the president and Iranian diplomats. Or an even more direct attempt to sabotage the president's foreign policy capabilities, in which 47 Republican senators wrote to Iranian leaders to emphasize that whatever negotiated deal Obama was seeking with their country would be, without their own sure-to-be-withheld approval, "a mere executive agreement" that could be undone "with the stroke of a pen."
Or not. A defining feature of Republicanism as practiced by Scalise and other postmodern adherents is that the Republican stance of yesterday or last week not only does not apply, but never existed in the first place. Their own history is, from the blur of Reagan onward, an enforced blank. Scalise may presume that because he would find it advantageous for Americans to remember none of these past things, he may erase them from our minds and his own at will. The videotapes now do not count; the official records are now to be considered mere rumor.
Because he is just that bad a person, and his party is just that devoted to peddling false information over true, and there's no point in pretending otherwise. Scalise is propagandizing. Not even he presumes otherwise.