CPAC was the first gathering of Republicans and conservatives since those events. And yet, the “constitutional conservative” Lee did not see fit to mention any of that in his address. He spoke of “leftists who hate the Bill of Rights” and he argued that “faith in government is tyranny.” He denounced Democratic governors, who had imposed what he regarded as overly restrictive COVID rules, as tyrants and stressed that “we” (meaning Republicans) “trust the people.”
Lee may be sincere in his desire to restore some equilibrium to the separation of powers. He has introduced several bills that would curtail executive authority, and when Trump usurped legislative powers and arguably broke the law by declaring a spurious border emergency, Lee was among a small number of senators who opposed him. But that burst of independence must have exhausted the senator, because at the time of Trump’s first impeachment trial less than a year later, Lee was among Trump’s firmest defenders. “What he did was not impeachable,” Lee told Politico. “It was not criminal. And I don’t think what he did was even wrong.”
CPAC was, according to The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, a festival of forgetting. If the Capitol insurrection was mentioned at all, it was only to blame it on judges who ruled against Trump’s risible lawsuits. Mostly though, the speakers stuck to Antifa and imaginary late-night ballot dumps.
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