![](\"https:\/\/img.huffingtonpost.com\/asset\/600b149d260000070bacf878.jpeg?ops=scalefit_720_noupscale\")
<\/p>\nRepublican lawmakers suddenly have a lot of thoughts on how to heal the nation \u2015 and none of them has to do with addressing the insurrection that Donald Trump\u2019s supporters mounted at the U.S. Capitol two weeks ago in an attempt to overturn election results.\u00a0<\/p>\n
GOP legislators have been reluctant to accept their own responsibility for stoking massive divisions in the country. But in the two days since President Joe Biden took office, Senate and House members have been twisting his call for unity into attacks on his agenda.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In his inaugural address Wednesday, Biden called on Americans to come together to confront the \u201crise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism,\u201d in order to \u201crestore the soul and to secure the future of America.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can treat each other with dignity and respect. We can join forces, stop the shouting, and lower the temperature. For without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury,\u201d the president added, standing on the same platform where pro-Trump rioters had invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In response, Republican lawmakers are arguing that Biden\u2019s policies will only hurt unity. In other words, according to these lawmakers, the only way to heal the nation after a violent mob tried to overturn an election that put Democrats in power, is to do exactly what Republicans want.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Here are some of the policies that Republicans have claimed would undermine national unity:\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As part of a broader first-day executive order to \u201cprotect public health and the environment and restore science,\u201d Biden ordered a review of Trump\u2019s rollbacks of national monuments \u2015 a first step toward his own\u00a0promise to restore the sites.<\/p>\n
Ten Utah Republicans, including Sen. Mitt Romney and Gov. Spencer Cox, issued a joint statement this week decrying the move, saying it \u201cwill only deepen divisions in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cFor over 25 years Utah has been the center of controversial and divisive unilateral national monument decisions. … A review in name only with predetermined results, which ultimately leads to a unilateral executive order enlarging the monuments\u2019 boundaries, will not solve the root of the problem and will only deepen divisions in this country,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n
Republicans invoking national monuments \u2015 in particular, Bears Ears in Utah \u2015 in their newfound wish for harmony is ludicrous.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In 2017, following a sham review in which the Trump administration cozied up to monument opponents, cherry-picked data and dismissed overwhelming public support for maintaining protected sites, Trump carved more than 2 million acres away from two sites in southern Utah.<\/p>\n
Bears Ears, a landscape sacred to several area Native American tribes that is named after a pair of buttes, was shrunk by 85%. Nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante, a sweeping 1.87-million-acre monument rich in dinosaur fossils and archeological sites, was cut roughly in half. Later, in June 2020, Trump opened the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, a 4,900-square-mile protected site off the East Coast, to commercial fishing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The 10 Republican critics made no mention of the five tribes that had petitioned the Obama administration to grant Bears Ears monument status and felt betrayed by Trump\u2019s rollback. After dismantling several federally protected land and water monuments, including one that honored Native American cultural heritage, Trump turned around and threatened up to 10 years in prison for anyone who vandalized or destroyed a monument to a slave-owning president or leader of the Confederacy.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/img.huffingtonpost.com\/asset\/600b159e260000140bacf879.jpeg?ops=scalefit_720_noupscale\")
<\/p>\n
On his first day in office, Biden issued a temporary moratorium on oil and gas drilling on federal lands.<\/p>\n
Halting fossil fuel development in Alaska\u2019s pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the middle of a rapidly worsening global climate crisis? That would go against \u201chealing\u201d the nation, Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) said.\u00a0Sullivan immediately\u00a0called the move \u201cdivisive.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn his inaugural address, President Biden called for national unity and healing. However, just hours earlier, his administration took their cues from radical environmentalists in issuing punitive and divisive actions against Alaska, many other resource development states, and whole sectors of our economy,\u201d Sullivan said in a statement.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There\u2019s some added hypocrisy in Sullivan\u2019s comments about unity here. Biden\u2019s moratorium reverses a policy that was slipped into the 2017 tax law \u2014 a bill that Republicans crafted behind closed doors without any bipartisan input and passed without a single vote of support from Democrats.<\/p>\n
To make their case for opening the Arctic refuge to oil drilling, the Trump administration and its Republican allies repeatedly touted the potential for this fossil fuel development to generate $1.8 billion in federal revenue over a decade. But when the administration held the long-awaited lease sale \u2015 on Jan. 6 as the Capitol was being stormed by pro-Trump extremists \u2015 it generated a paltry $14.4 million in bids, less than 1% of the administration\u2019s total revenue estimates.<\/p>\n
Other GOP lawmakers echoed this \u201cunity\u201d complaint when deriding Biden\u2019s other early environmental policies, like revoking a crucial permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline and reentering the Paris climate agreement.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was really ironic that he\u2019s talking one thing, one game, over here about unity,\u201d Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) said in a video posted to Twitter. \u201cAnd the first thing he does is go over to the White House and do just the opposite, and that is alienate a number of people who agree with those [Trump] policies and want to see those policies implemented.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carter, who called the insurrectionists \u201cnothing short of pure anarchy,\u201d nonetheless voted against certifying the election results hours after the riot, alongside 146 other Republican lawmakers \u2014 a vote that Trump encouraged as a last-ditch attempt to override the will of 81 million American voters.<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/img.huffingtonpost.com\/asset\/600b16c9240000920b0b8334.jpeg?ops=scalefit_720_noupscale\")
<\/p>\n
Last week, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)\u00a0said that Trump \u201cbears responsibility\u201d for the attack that left five people dead at the Capitol, adding that Trump \u201cshould have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.\u201d<\/p>\n
But McCarthy has already backtracked, saying this week that Trump didn\u2019t provoke the rioters and that holding the former president accountable in an impeachment trial and otherwise taking a stand against that sort of violence would tear the nation apart.<\/p>\n
In polls conducted before Trump was impeached for the second time, Americans were largely split along party lines on whether he should have been removed from office and disqualified from holding future office, although there was slightly more appetite this time around.<\/p>\n
Ten Republicans joined with Democrats to impeach Trump in the House last week, making it the most bipartisan impeachment vote in history.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the vast majority of GOP lawmakers don\u2019t want to convict Trump of inciting the mob in a Senate trial. Many of these same politicians spent months spreading baseless allegations about voter fraud, questioning the legitimacy of Biden\u2019s win and standing silent as Trump encouraged the \u201cstop the steal\u201d movement.<\/p>\n
Now, with Biden in office, they\u2019re concerned about unity.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, I think it\u2019s obvious that the post-presidential impeachment [trial] has never occurred in the history of the country for a reason, that it\u2019s unconstitutional, that it sets a bad precedent for the presidency and it continues to divide the nation,\u201d Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Capitol Hill reporters on Friday.<\/p>\n
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said the same in a Friday tweet, writing that \u201cBiden is preaching unity & healing while Dem leadership is focused on impeachment of a former president.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) perhaps put the GOP view most plainly\u00a0in a Friday morning tweet: \u201cA radical leftist agenda in a divided country will not help unify our country, it will only confirm 75 million Americans biggest fears about the new administration.\u201d That was after Rubio posted a video claiming that Biden had governed \u201cfrom the radical left\u201d in his first two full days in office.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As Democrats come to power in both chambers of Congress and the White House, Republicans are making clear that the only unity they\u2019re interested in is unity behind their agenda. Anything contrary to that would simply be too \u201cdivisive.\u201d<\/p>\n