In 1954, at a time when Sen. Joe McCarthy was still the most dangerous demagogue America had ever experienced, it was a courtly Boston lawyer named Joseph Welch whose words finally broke the grip on much of the country held by the thuggish senator from Wisconsin. "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" was the entirely rhetorical question posed by Welch that somehow exposed the morally bankrupt McCarthy for what he was during the Army-McCarthy hearings, jump-starting his political collapse. It's the line from the McCarthy era that history remembers most vividly.

If it turns out that the alarming fever that is Trumpism finally breaks and the nation that has more than flirted with Donald Trump now repudiates him, it may be Rep. Liz Cheney's message to her Republican colleagues last week that history remembers in the same way it remembers Welch's takedown. Cheney, a profile in political courage if America ever has had one, is the Republican vice chair of the congressional committee charged with investigating the former president's fraudulent, felonious attempts to remain in power despite being voted out of office by the American people. She has sacrificed her leadership position in the GOP, and will probably lose her seat in Congress altogether, because she has refused to go along with Trump's colossal con that he won an election he lost.

Lepers have been treated better than Cheney's fellow Republicans have treated her, because she, unlike they, refused to be intimidated by Mar-a-Lago's answer to Mussolini. "I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible," Cheney said during the committee's first night of hearings, "there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain."

The opening session was a tale of two women's courage. Joining Cheney in the history books was Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, granddaughter of a Korean War veteran who, like his granddaughter, was seriously wounded defending America. Edwards told a rapt nation about trying to hold the police line on Jan. 6 as the MAGA mob rushed the Capitol, bashing her brain in and leaving her with injuries from which she may never fully recover. Battered to the ground, she got back up to join her overwhelmed fellow police officers, slipping on their blood, catching them as the horde exhorted by Trump to stop the counting of electoral votes knocked them over.

"What I saw was a war scene," was how Edwards described Jan. 6. Here is how the most brazen liar in American history described it. "The love — the love in the air," Trump told Fox News. "I have never seen anything like it."

The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, the white supremacist paramilitary squads and Trump loyalists extraordinaire whose leaders have recently been indicted for seditious conspiracy, were literally front and center in the Jan. 6. assault, summoned to Washington by Trump, who exhorted them to "Be There. Will Be Wild!" The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers are to Trump what the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is to the ayatollahs, and they rampaged through the Capitol looking to kidnap House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence.

Like everyone else who stormed the Capitol, they believed the lie that Trump trumpeted that he had won the 2020 election. This, as Trump's own attorney general told him, was pure "BS." A deeply dishonest Trump told his countrymen otherwise.

The committee expects to address other aspects of Trump's attempt to hold onto power any way he could, including discussions among certain of his Cabinet members about whether he should be removed from office immediately. It's never ideal when a president's own appointees are chatting about whether the man who appointed them is a criminal, insane or criminally insane. But America is in a dangerous place, and the Jan. 6 committee is doing its best to demonstrate just how dangerous that place is.

Jeff Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.

Photo credit: bones64 at Pixabay