Go to the Facebook account of newly elected Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and you’ll find that she supports the lunatic theories that the massacres of schoolchildren in Newtown and Parkland were events staged to promote gun control. Today, House Republican leaders decided that this concern for murdered children made her eminently qualified to serve on the House Education Committee, to which they appointed her.

By now, it’s clear that House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (CA) more than merits the judgment that Lyndon Johnson once passed on a previous House Republican leader (later president), Gerald Ford. The unsanitized version: "Gerry Ford is so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time."

But if McCarthy and his ilk were merely stupid, they wouldn’t pose the danger to the nation that they surely do. Rather, they’re stupid with an anti-small-d-democratic bias and an apparent tolerance for violent attacks on those who uphold the tenets of that small-d democracy. Go to Greene’s Twitter account and you’ll find her liking tweets that called for shooting Nancy Pelosi and executing FBI agents for their "deep state" persecutions of Donald Trump. I suppose the equivalent of that would have been Democratic members of Congress applauding the shooting of House Republican Whip Steve Scalise—except, no Democratic members of Congress did that; rather, they all expressed horror and condemnation.

But the Republicans’ indulgence of the Greenes in their ranks—and there are many such—is of a piece with their overwhelming refusal to hold Trump responsible for the insurrection at the Capitol, much less their own current colleagues, such as Arizona’s Paul Gosar and Andy Biggs, who also encouraged the January 6 rioters. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution says that no government official can hold office "who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof." That surely applies to Trump, but it increasingly appears that it should apply to most Republican members of Congress as well.