Kevin McCarthy has declared open contempt for the rule of law by bringing an insurrectionist among several House GOP freshmen to tour the border. As the MAGA House attempts to deploy a narrative that the southern border lacks law and order, the House GOP is showcasing a man who marched on January 6, 2021. Derrick Van Orden was a part of former President Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and remains a fervent election denier. This stunt shows that election deniers and extremists continue to run the House GOP and will stop at nothing to forward their MAGA agenda.
House Republicans Are Hypocritically Bringing An Insurrectionist To the “Lawless” Border. By traveling to the border with an insurrectionist, Kevin McCarthy and his allies are undermining their own claims about a “lawless” border policy. Freshman Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-NJ) attended the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021 and continues to defend his participation in the event claiming that he went to “stand for the integrity of our electoral system.” Van Orden claims he never entered Capitol grounds on January 6, but photographic evidence shows him standing on a wall on Capitol grounds that was inside a restricted area during the riot. Van Orden was also named as a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by Sidney Powell seeking to overturn the election in Wisconsin, but he has stated his name was included without his permission and he was not involved in the suit.
Kevin McCarthy’s MAGA Entourage Has A Record of Undermining Rule of Law, Democratic Principles. The other three GOP freshman joining McCarthy and Van Orden have a history of subverting democratic norms:
- Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) is an election denier who has propped-up the same lies and conspiracies that gave rise to the Jan. 6 insurrection. She refused to give a clear answer about whether Joe Biden won the 2020 election, saying that “there’s some question to what people felt,” and that voters “felt” the election was “unusual.” After the 2020 election, Chavez-DeRemer called for “forensic audits” of Oregon elections and questioned the security of the state’s popular mail-in voting system, which has been in place since 1998.
- Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-VA) has also spread lies and conspiracies that gave rise to the Jan. 6 insurrection. She flatly refused to state that Joe Biden was legitimately elected, saying only that Biden is “living in the White House, and I wish he was not.” Kiggans was one of just four state lawmakers to vote for a $70 million taxpayer funded “forensic audit” of the 2020 election in Virginia and she promised to “bring the same focus on election security to the national level” as part of her midterm election campaign.
- Juan Ciscomani (R-AZ) has followed Trump’s election denier playbook closely, refusing to say that Joe Biden was the elected president of the United States ahead of the midterm elections—even when pressed multiple times.
…not to mention Kevin McCarthy’s own troubled record with the rule of law. McCarthy is a fanatical Trump supporter who was a key figure in the January 6 conspiracy. McCarthy voted against certifying the 2020 election and appeared on Fox News on November 5, 2020 to declare that, “President Trump won this election” when it was clear that he had not. Nearly two years later, when asked five times whether the outcome of the 2020 election was legitimate, McCarthy refused to answer each time. He defied a subpoena by the January 6th Committee and has hand-picked a slate of election deniers to oversee an investigation of the January 6th Committee itself. Now, after subverting the rule of law over and over for Trump, Kevin McCarthy is hypocritically pushing a “law and order” agenda at the border.
