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Good Thursday evening. This is Daniel Allott with The Hill’s Top Opinions.

Leaked texts between Mark Meadows, President Trump’s former chief of staff, and dozens of Republican lawmakers highlights how far many in the GOP were willing to go to keep Trump in power following his 2020 election loss, write Amherst College political science professor AUSTIN SARAT and former federal prosecutor DENNIS AFTERGUT.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), to take one example, “was one of those who reportedly texted Meadows the day before the congressional certification vote, urging him to pursue the unlawful plan to have former Vice President Pence steal the election for Trump,” the authors tell us.

Overall, “Meadows had ‘coup’ communications with 34 Republican members of the House.”

“The Meadows texts tell us about the breadth of the post-2020 election conspiracy and the disloyalty of so many Republican House members. Not since the Civil War have members of Congress betrayed our constitutional republic and subverted the union that it makes possible.”

What can Americans do in the face of the betrayal revealed in the Meadows texts?

It all comes down to voting, write Sarat and Aftergut. “Americans need to remember that democracy helps those who help themselves by staying aware and engaged.”

Read Sarat and Aftergut’s piece here.

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MORE TOP OPINIONS

Is this Donald Trump's Joe McCarthy moment?

ByJOHN KENNETH WHITE, professor of politics at The Catholic University of America

In many ways, the Republican Party’s history with Donald Trump harkens back to its experience with another demagogue, Joseph R. McCarthy. In 1950, the Wisconsin senator claimed to have in hand a list of 205 communists working in the State Department, a charge that catapulted the heretofore little-known McCarthy onto the national stage.

Read the op-ed here

Putin’s war on Ukrainian power grid reveals more than he’d like

By YULIA LATYNINA, recipient of the U.S. State Department’s Defender of Freedom award

It’s possible – theoretically – for Russia to destroy the Ukrainian power grid, were the air defense non-existent or the missile swarms big enough to saturate it. But neither is not going to happen if the West continues to supply Ukraine. And because of several bottlenecks, that speak volumes about the Russian army.

Read the op-ed here

Putin’s leaning tower of Jenga

By Jonathan Sweet, retired Army colonel, and Mark Toth, retired economist and historian

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine is looking more like a losing effort from the 1980s British board game Jenga. Remove one wrong piece and the tower collapses, or subsequently place it in the wrong place atop the tower and it’s “game over.”

Read the op-ed here

Trump special counsel Jack Smith lost the John Edwards case — what might that mean?

By STEPHEN WEISSMAN, former associate director for policy at the nonpartisan Campaign Finance Institute

Jurors voted to acquit Edwards of several felony violations of federal campaign finance law. The core issue in that trial could be central to the most talked about potential cases against Trump: allegedly interfering with the post-2020 transfer of presidential power and allegedly obstructing the FBI’s investigation of missing classified and other federal government records. 

Read the op-ed here

QUICK TAKES

• Can America survive two more Biden years?

• Can we put to rest the myth that Congress is broken and gridlocked?

• The Supreme Court gone rogue

• House Republicans should just say no to ‘revenge impeachments’

The Hill's Top Opinions is written by Daniel Allott, an opinion editor at The Hill and the author of “On the Road in Trump’s America: A Journey Into the Heart of a Divided Nation.”

Views expressed by contributors are theirs and not the opinion of The Hill.

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