In a new op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Rep. Liz Cheney says that the January 6 Committee’s public hearings will directly repudiate Trump’s Big Lie: “While some degree of fraud occurs in every election, there was no evidence of fraud on a scale that could have changed this one. As the Select Committee will demonstrate in hearings later this year, no foreign power corrupted America’s voting machines, and no massive secret fraud changed the election outcome.”

This is very important, in my judgment. If the correct diagnosis of the current problem is what I’ve labeled “electoral McCarthyism” (because it’s the replication of Red Scare intentional falsification of reality by a charismatic demagogue), the only remedy is to lance the cancer of the Big Lie itself. The question, then, is whether the January 6 hearings can be the equivalent of the Army-McCarthy hearings, where McCarthyism ultimately was undermined.

Related point: I think Rep. Cheney is rightly focused on the aspects of the investigation that do not directly involve the horrific violence that occurred at the Capitol. It still would have been an effort to negate the outcome of a valid election even if there had been no violence. And this plot still would have been predicated on the “electoral McCarthyism” of the Big Lie even without any violence. Cheney’s op-ed is extremely strong in general and very much worth reading in full; this particular point is just one that’s especially worth highlighting.