Juan Williams: Chaos beckons if the MAGA GOP wins

I’ve seen this movie before.

The blockbuster original began with the 2010 Tea Party ‘uprising’. It did not turn out well for the incumbent Democrat — President Obama. He lost big in the midterms that year, and by 2016 Donald Trump had won the White House.

In this new movie, the Tea Party is history. The new stars are people billed by President Biden as the “Ultra-MAGA.” 

Today’s stars of populist Republican politics bring a new edge to the show. They foment political violence. 

The House Select Committee on January 6th is currently revealing the extent of the violence committed by former President Trump’s Make America Great Again loyalists when they attacked the Capitol in 2021. 

They wanted to stop Biden from being certified as president — an effort that, had it been successful, would have destroyed the concept of the peaceful transfer of power and ended more than two centuries of democratic rule. 

The scary videos and taped depositions are teasers for a potentially explosive new plot featuring the MAGA crowd in the House majority.

Excitement about this upcoming horror show is also building due to the fear of what we can’t see behind the closed door.

No one is openly investigating the Republicans already in Congress even though a majority of the current GOP caucus undermined the Constitution by voting against the certification of Biden as the winner of the 2020 election. 

Current MAGA stars such as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) will be joined in 2023 by a crop of Republican reinforcements heavy with more Trump-supporting election deniers.

“So far, voters have chosen eight candidates for the U.S. Senate, 86 candidates for the House, five for governor, four for state attorney general and one for secretary of state who embrace Trump’s election denialism,” according to the Washington Post’s accounting of races in the 14 states that had held primaries or nominating conventions by the end of May.

While the Tea Party was initially kept at a distance by GOP leaders in the House, such as former Speakers John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the current GOP House leaders fear the Ultra-MAGA crowd because of its relationship with Trump. 

The new MAGA block in Congress is also likely to exercise control over the next GOP Speaker. That is true whether the Speaker turns out to be current House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who made his peace with Trump soon after the insurrection, or an even more ardent pro-Trump figure.

After last week’s primaries, it looks like the GOP House caucus could soon be joined by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Carl Paladino, a former nominee for governor in New York.

Palin has been endorsed by Trump. After getting the most votes in a special primary last week, she thanked backers who “voted to make Alaska great again.”

Palin is best known as the abrasive 2008 vice presidential candidate on the Republican ticket. She accused the Democratic candidate, future President Obama, of “palling around with terrorists.”

Paladino, a candidate in a GOP House primary set for June 28, potentially brings an even more polarizing history to the next Congress. He praised Adolf Hitler for his rhetorical abilities during a 2021 radio interview. According to the New York Times, Paladino added that Hitler was “the kind of leader we need today.”

The paper quoted a Black Republican, Keith H. Wofford, the GOP nominee for New York attorney general in 2018, as saying Paladino is a “straight-up, old-school racist.”

The next Congress, led by the MAGA House caucus and potentially including newcomers like Palin and Paladino, will pursue the Tea Party’s long-ago goal of paralyzing Capitol Hill, specifically aiming to obstruct any legislation coming from the Democrat in the White House.

The MAGA House caucus’ proactive agenda appears to lack any plans to deal with inflation or gun violence. The only hint of an agenda comes from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s budding “American Revival” platform.

She told Molly Ball of Time magazine she wants to impeach Biden; impeach the Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas; eliminate the official position held by Dr. Anthony Fauci; pass a federal ban on abortion; and investigate the president’s son, Hunter. 

She also holds a grudge for being pushed off her committee assignments, so Greene also plans to punish Democrats.

When she lost her House committee assignments for comments accusing Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) of treason, and appearing to endorse political violence, she got a promise from the House Republican leaders. Greene said they agreed to get even by throwing some Democrats off committees when Republicans gained majority control of the House. 

Biden is aware of the extremism possible if the far right controls the House. 

He has denounced “MAGA Republicans” as not only “extreme,” but “mean-spirited.” In May he said, “it really is beyond the pale” referring to their “radical agenda,” as proof this is not “your father’s Republican Party.”

“I don’t have to tell you about the ultra-MAGA agenda, attacking families and our freedoms,” Biden told a White House audience last week. 

He has good reason to remind anyone voting Republican in the midterms of the potential chaos coming from a GOP House majority.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.