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Elected officials who believe their own political survival is more important than anything else threaten the survival of our republic, no matter what they tell themselves to justify their cowardice.
Politicians who minimize the threat, repeat the lies, or enable the liar are not fit for office.
Jordan was not interested in understanding or discussing the rules. He didn’t seem to think the rules mattered. “The only thing that matters,” Jordan said, “is winning.”
think it’s safe to say that Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye dripping down his face today was an act of God.”
In Article VI of our Constitution, the founders required that every member of Congress, all state legislators, and “all executive and judicial Officers” of the federal and state governments take an oath to support and defend the United States Constitution. For elected representatives, the oath must supersede any duty to represent their constituents. They must represent constituents’ interests solely in a manner that complies with the representatives’ paramount duty to the Constitution.
believe that Donald Trump’s decision to attack the lawfully certified Electoral College results and to ignore the rulings of our courts was an assault on the structural constitutional safeguards that keep us free.
Congress does not have the authority to undo an election by refusing to count state-certified electoral votes. Period.
Congress’s role in this specific context is ministerial only: Congress counts the certified electoral votes. The 12th Amendment is very clear in these circumstances: “The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted; The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President.
The Constitution identifies specifically the only occasions when Congress can take any non-ministerial action—when no Presidential candidate has a majority of the electoral votes.…
“Allegations that find favor in the public sphere of gossip and innuendo cannot be a substitute for earnest pleadings and procedure in federal court.
“[C]alling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
In other words, these 11 senators were taking the position that because Donald Trump had successfully spread falsehoods about election fraud, and because a poll showed many people believed those falsehoods, Congress could refuse to do what the Constitution explicitly required.
Why was he objecting only to electors from states that Biden had won? Voting rules in other states, such as Texas and North Carolina, had also been changed because of Covid. If this was a violation of the US Constitution, why then was Johnson objecting only to states where Trump had been defeated?
Green said sheepishly to no one in particular, “The things we do for the Orange Jesus.”
If Gosar really believed there was enough fraud in the Arizona election to overturn it and throw out millions of votes, I wondered how he could have voted—as he did less than 72 hours earlier—to recognize his own victory and officially seat himself.
When one member (who ultimately voted against impeachment) told me that he knew what Trump had done was impeachable but he couldn’t vote to impeach because “I am afraid it will put my wife and my new baby in danger,” I absolutely understood his fear. But I also thought, “Perhaps you need to be in another job.”
“Don’t ask us about security,” Herrera Beutler said, “if you’re telling the attackers where we are.”
had the impeachment vote been by secret ballot, it would have been overwhelmingly in favor of impeachment.
“Mar-a-Lago? What the hell, Kevin?”
Best line in the book so far
a free society that abandons the truth—that abandons the rule of law—cannot remain free.
In the choice between the Constitution and Donald Trump, the leaders of the Republican Party were turning away from the Constitution.
Indeed, the planning for January 6 appears to have consumed the vast majority of the president’s time for several weeks in December of 2020. He was doing almost nothing else. Donald Trump did not do all this on a whim. It was not something planned in one hour, or in one day, or even in one week. It was complicated and detailed.
And, above all else, it was premeditated.
after he spent hours watching a violent mob besiege, attack, and invade our Capitol, Donald Trump tweeted. But he did not condemn the attack. Instead, he justified it. “These are the things and events that happen,” he said, “when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly and unfairly treated for so long.”
The 12th Amendment only says that the President of the Senate opens the ballots in the joint session then, in the passive voice, that the votes shall then be counted.
Americans must not lose sight of an appalling fact. Certain Republican members of the House of Representatives—including many members of the Freedom Caucus—fully supported what Donald Trump was trying to force Mike Pence to do. That is a crucial point: A significant number of House Republicans thought they could ignore the Electoral College result and find a way to reinstall Trump as president.
President Trump is a 76-year-old man. He is not an impressionable child. Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices.
Today, our federal law enforcement is being threatened, a federal judge is being threatened. Fresh threats of violence arise everywhere. And despite knowing all of this, Donald Trump recently released the names of the FBI agents involved in the search. That was purposeful and malicious. No patriotic American should excuse these threats or be intimidated by them. Our great nation must not be ruled by a mob provoked over social media.
