When we were very little, my sisters and I often heard from our parents the expression “honesty is the best policy.”

Patty and I heard the expression correctly, but Nancy, the youngest, heard it this way.   “Honesty is the best politics.”

Maybe her version was the correct one for our times.

by Lynn Mandaville

In the media, it’s being called The Big Lie.

Specifically, it’s the unfounded claim that widespread voter fraud is the cause of Donald Trump’s defeat in the November 2020 election.

Nonetheless, it is The Big Lie.

And The Big Lie was Trump’s basis for his call to insurrection.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Donald J Trump put into incontrovertible words his wish that his party – The Republican Party of Trump – stage a coup that would wrest the presidency from Joseph R. Biden.

He was using The Big Lie to urge on the thousands of people he had amassed at a rally on the Ellipse near the White House to storm the Capital and overturn the official ballot certification of the Electoral College.

The Big Lie.  To distinguish it from the thousands of other “small” lies he has uttered during his administration.

The Big Lie.  That the 2020 election was stolen from him and his supporters by massive voter fraud.

The Big Lie.  That somehow didn’t affect any of the other Republicans who were fairly elected to office in the very same election, but only affected his bid for re-election.

It is a sad state of affairs to think that Trump is so delusional that he believes he alone is the victim of imagined voter fraud.

That delusion has proven to be downright dangerous, to the point that his base has bought into the delusion and have obeyed his call to insurrection.

It was right for the House to call immediately for another impeachment.

Sedition is probably the most serious charge to be leveled against any American president, because it seeks to undermine the very basis of our democracy, our right to vote.

And because Trump did it so blatantly, in front of all the media, in broad daylight, in no uncertain words, it was incumbent on the House to respond in kind.

In impeaching Trump, ten Republicans found their spines and their consciences and voted to find for a trial in the Senate.  A big step in the face of The Big Lie, seeing as how only Mitt Romney found his spine in finding Trump guilty on one of the two charges leveled in Trump’s first impeachment.

The question now is how many Republican senators will regain their moral centers when faced with the ultimate truth about the result of The Big Lie?

How many will remember their oaths of office when they consider the evidence against the former president?

How many will remember that they serve their Constitution instead of their voting base, or their compromised party?

There was a time when the Republican Party provided a Yin to the Democrats’ Yang in politics.

But intervening years have brought significant changes in both parties, and both are suffering from identity crises, brought about by such movements as the Tea Party and the Green New Deal.

And now the Republicans are coping with something more than just an emerging movement within the party.  They are dealing with a party that stands not for a fiscal philosophy, but for a narcissistic demagogue.

I recently heard the Party of Trump referred to as Retrumplicans, a term that differentiates them from the remnants of a respectable Republican Party.  I guess that plays into speculation that the Republican Party as we know it no longer exists, or is about to morph into a new party altogether.

It’s worth saying that I don’t hold Democrats as paragons of virtue.

Democrats are facing their own identity crises as Progressives become more numerous, and the Green New Deal becomes more vocal.

Right now, however, it’s the Republican Party that poses an existential threat to our republic as we know it.

Their members have lost the ability to acquiesce to truth, or perhaps they’ve lost the consciences they formed as children.

They don’t seem inclined to see past enlightened self-interest to the bigger picture of what life would be like with an autocratic ruler, a president for life, a petty tyrant.

A deep-seated fear of how Trump could affect their offices rules how they compromise their values.

In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, honesty is defined as “devotion to telling the truth.”  Both truth and honesty appear as synonyms for one another.

All members of Congress, in taking their oaths of office, promise “to bear true faith and allegiance” to the Constitution.  TRUE faith and allegiance.

By default, that means they must be honest about the evidence that will be placed before them during the impeachment trial of Donald J Trump beginning on Feb. 8.

They must dig deep and find the core of their consciences.

They must rediscover the meaning behind my little sister’s malapropism, “Honesty is the best politics.”

Especially now.