Marjorie Taylor Greene is all ‘I won’t back down’ in public. House GOP meeting was a different story

Wednesday was coward night for the House GOP Conference. Republicans met for five hours to vote on whether to strip Rep. Liz Cheney of her leadership position and to talk over whether to take action against Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. A secret vote gave Cheney a big win, with 145 Republicans voting to keep her as their conference chair, and just 61 voting against. In other words, many of the Republicans who not only voted against impeachment but voted to overturn election results in the hours after the attack on the Capitol also voted to keep Cheney in leadership. That gives some credence to claims that there were Republicans who were motivated solely by fear to give Donald Trump the votes he demanded on those. Cowards.

The next coward was Marjorie Taylor Greene herself. After days of hardcore Twitter posturing about how “I won’t back down. I’ll never apologize,” she … backed down and apologized. That was the right thing to do all along, but doing it in private to keep her colleagues from taking action against her while saying the opposite in public to keep the base riled up and the campaign contributions flowing? Dishonest coward. Not that we’d expect better of someone with her abysmal morals.

Greene expressed “contrition for some of her most outrageous comments made on social media—including questioning the 9/11 attacks, blaming a space ray directed by a Jewish cabal for a deadly wildfire and doubting school shootings,” The Washington Post reports. “She also, according to Republicans in the room, apologized for putting her colleagues in a difficult spot.” 

The next coward is House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who orchestrated the whole thing, and who defended Greene’s position on the education committee despite her claims that school shootings are hoaxes and her harassment of a survivor of the Parkland shooting. McCarthy is approaching peak wanting to have it both ways, saying he disapproves of Greene’s comments, hailing her for apologizing in secret, and most of all being angry that Democrats would dare take action where he won’t—Democrats have a vote planned to strip Greene of committee assignments.

McCarthy also came out of that long GOP meeting and lied to reporters, saying “I think it would be helpful if you could hear exactly what she told all of us. Denouncing Q-on, I don't know if I say it right, I don't even know what it isany from the shootings, she said she knew nothing about lasers, all of the different things that have been brought up about her.” McCarthy knew how to say QAnon, and what it was, perfectly well last summer when he denounced Greene—then not yet part of his caucus—for her promotion of it. And going with Greene’s denial that she said the things she said? Uber-coward.

McCarthy’s big pitch to Republicans to support Cheney but also Greene was that “We need to unite for us to take the majority and govern.” It’s the Republican version of a big tent: You can promote insurrection or oppose insurrection, as long as you’ll vote to slash government spending, cut taxes for the wealthy, and support punitive policies toward marginalized communities. 

The full House will vote on Greene’s committee assignments on Thursday. It is an unprecedented step. But so is having a member saying the kinds of things she’s said while having helped to incite an insurrection that left five dead at the U.S. Capitol, and their party refusing to take action of its own against them.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the sponsor of the resolution, said earlier in the week, “I am in the process of talking to Republicans, and although I don't have a lot of hope that I will attract Republican co-sponsors, I do expect that when we bring the resolution to the floor as a privilege resolution that it will attract Republican support, but not much.” After Wednesday night’s rallying-the-troops moment for Republicans, we’ll see about that.

McConnell’s vote against allowing impeachment trial shows once again how he’s manipulating the media

Senate Republicans once again showed the limits of their willingness to hold Donald Trump accountable for his actions. Those limits include the occasional disapproving statement, but emphatically do not include following through when he’s impeached. Just five Republicans voted to even allow the impeachment trial to go forward when Sen. Rand Paul tried to block it on the grounds that Trump is already out of office.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who had used leaks that he might vote for conviction to con the traditional media into portraying him as a fair broker, was not one of those five Republican votes. Sen. Rob Portman, who likes to be seen as a reasonable guy who’d consider bipartisan action and who doesn’t have to worry about a primary because he’s retiring, was not one of those five Republican votes.

Nope, the only Republicans who were even open to hearing the evidence on Donald Trump inciting an insurrection that physically threatened all of them were Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, and Pat Toomey. Murkowski and Romney probably meant it, Collins and Sasse knew that the time had come when they had to do something do justify continuing coverage of their supposed distaste for Trumpism, and Toomey is retiring.

Here’s the really perfect, chef’s kiss part of McConnell voting against a retroactive impeachment trial: Two weeks ago, when he was still majority leader and Trump was still in office, McConnell refused to reconvene the Senate for a trial. But at the same time, he leaked that he might maybe vote to convict, getting the Very Serious Reasonable Person headlines he was seeking. Now McConnell turns around and votes against holding a retroactive trial that is only retroactive because of him.

I’d say, “Do they not think we’re going to notice what they’re doing?” Except that McConnell has the measure of the traditional media, most of which will absolutely allow itself to get played in this way. To really oomph up the level of “Are you kidding me?” involved here, Republicans decided to hear from their go-to constitutional law scholar, Jonathan Turley, about how retroactive trials are no good … even though in 1999 he strongly endorsed retroactive trials

The next level of Republican procedural objection will be because Chief Justice John Roberts isn't presiding over the trial, which was 100% his decision and apparently didn’t come with any indication that he is opting out because he considers the trial illegitimate. But Sen. Patrick Leahy, the most senior Democrat in the chamber, will be presiding, which Republicans will use to suggest it’s a partisan event even though Leahy is scrupulously fair, frequently to a self-owning extent.

It remains possible that evidence of Trump’s incitement of insurrection will emerge that’s so strong that not even most Republicans can ignore it. But in the absence of that, consider the wagons fully circled around Trump, and don’t be surprised by it.

Senate Republicans are preparing to circle the wagons around Trump in delayed impeachment trial

The House impeachment managers delivered the article of impeachment to the Senate on Monday, and the Senate will convene Tuesday afternoon to issue a summons to Donald Trump for his second impeachment trial. But the trial itself won’t begin until February 9, leaving Trump time to try to find a second lawyer willing to take on his defense. South Carolina lawyer Butch Bowers will lead the defense, but other lawyers are proving reluctant to associate themselves with the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, in addition to very reasonable concerns that Trump won’t pay them.

While Republicans are trying to forestall the trial by arguing that Trump can’t be tried now that he’s no longer in office, President Joe Biden told CNN on Monday that  “I think it has to happen,” because, while the trial may be cause delays in his own agenda, there would be “a worse effect if it didn't happen.”

In addition to their reliance on the procedural claim that a former president can’t face an impeachment trial, the delay in beginning the trial will give Senate Republicans time to decide that what’s past is past and the threat to their own lives should be waved off as irrelevant—but during that time there may also be further revelations about Trump’s efforts to illegally retain power. So the wait could cut either way, or both at once.

Once the trial begins, the House impeachment managers are expected to use video from the attack, including video like one assembled by Just Security showing the response of the rally crowd on January 6 as Trump exhorted them to march to the Capitol. Footage of the mob inside the Capitol could remind senators of just what that felt like—but many Republicans have shown that they are more afraid of that mob coming after them again in one form or another if they don’t support Trump at all times. “There are only a handful of Republicans and shrinking who will vote against him,” predicts Sen. Lindsey Graham, who is continuing his service as Trump’s lapdog. 

Since Trump is now a private citizen, his impeachment trial won’t require the services of Chief Justice John Roberts. Instead, Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Senate president pro tempore, will preside. Some Republicans are trying to make an issue of the lack of Roberts, but only a sitting president merits the chief justice, and that is not Donald Trump. Leahy is firmly pledging total procedural fairness, saying “I don’t think there’s any senator who—over the 40-plus years I’ve been here—that would say that I am anything but impartial in voting on procedure.” And no kidding—it’s as likely that Democrats should worry he’ll bend so far backward to show he’s fair that he’ll form a one-man loop.

Conviction remains unlikely because Trump continues to own the Republican Party too thoroughly for it to be likely that 17 senators will be able to admit to the seriousness of inciting an insurrection that threatened their lives. Which is saying something about just how much of a cult this is. But it’s important to hold the trial—especially with evidence still coming out about both the seriousness of the attack and the scope of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.

TRUMP: "...you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength..." CROWD VOICES RESPOND:"Storm the #Capitol... invade the Capitol" @justinhendrix, @just_security & @rgoodlaw use crowd video to argue for incitement. 1/pic.twitter.com/A80WBkt002

— John Scott-Railton (@jsrailton) January 25, 2021

Trump supporters continue to plot violence as second impeachment trial approaches

Thousands of National Guard troops will remain in Washington, D.C., through the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump thanks to continuing threats of violence against lawmakers. The number of troops has already dropped and will continue to drop from a high of around 25,000 to below 20,000 now. It is slated to drop to 5,000 in February.

In addition to the threat of armed protesters returning during the impeachment trial, law enforcement agencies are looking into threats that were “Mainly posted online and in chat groups” and “have included plots to attack members of Congress during travel to and from the Capitol complex during the trial,” the Associated Press reported based on information from an unnamed official who “had been briefed on the matter.”

These threats are not hard to imagine. Indeed, one of the alleged Capitol attackers already faces charges for threats against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and for saying it’s “huntin[g] season” with respect to the officer who fatally shot rioter Ashli Babbitt as she tried to climb through a broken window to get to where lawmakers were evacuating the House chamber.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has been flailing in his response to the Capitol attack, but even he has been very clear about the threat to members of Congress, telling his caucus not to attack any of their colleagues by name because “it's putting people in jeopardy.” 

Saying he had reached out personally to some Republicans—we can guess which offenders those might have been—McCarthy emphasized, “Do not raise another member's name on a television, whether they have a different position or not. Let's respect one another and you probably won't understand what you're doing, and I'm just warning you right now—don't do it.”

The insurrection Donald Trump incited isn’t going to go away all at once. The threats continue, and they’re not just threats to individual members of Congress—they’re threats of continuing attacks on our democracy.

House Republican leader flails after blaming ‘everybody across this country’ for Capitol attack

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is finding out that it’s tough to strike the right balance between supporting leaders of your party who incited a violent insurrection and criticizing the violent insurrection. It turns out that there’s no “right balance” when it comes to supporting violent insurrection, go figure.

McCarthy has ping-ponged from admitting that Donald Trump “bears responsibility” for his supporters’ attack on the U.S. Capitol that left five dead, including a police officer beaten to death by the mob, to stumbling backward to insist that “I don’t believe [Trump] provoked it, if you listen to what he said at the rally,” because oh noes, Trump supporters get mad if you say he ever bears responsibility for anything at all. Next McCarthy careened over to the insistence that “I also think everybody across this country has some responsibility.”

Everybody! Across the whole country! People who battered down windows at the Capitol and chanted “Hang Mike Pence” and people who watched in horror on their televisions as that happened. Politicians who, like Trump, told the mob to march on the Capitol while saying “you’ll never take our country back with weakness,” and politicians who went from trying to fulfill their constitutional duty to count the electoral votes to hiding in secure rooms while the screaming mob tried to find them. And, of course, President Biden bears responsibility for trying to unite the country by only pursuing policies Republicans like, and if he tries to do any Democrat-type things, then it’s all his fault, too.

McCarthy also went on to whine about Rep. Liz Cheney's impeachment vote, saying “Look, I support her, but I also have concerns.” He’s concerned she didn’t run her stand by him first, but again, Kevin McCarthy is not trying to be the guy taking a firm position on anything, so “I do think she has a lot of questions she has to answer to the conference.” He’s just concerned, himself, and disappointed she didn’t communicate better. But hoo boy, that conference is going to have some questions.

Next, McCarthy came out with an ass-covering tweet about how he doesn’t support the domestic terrorists, but “it is incumbent upon every person in America to help lower the temperature of our political discourse.” Again, everybody. No special responsibility to the people who are carrying out the violence. His staff even emailed other Republican communications staffers asking them to please please please retweet this masterful piece of statesmanship.

Or, more privately, ”We're eating sh*t for breakfast, lunch and dinner right now,” a McCarthy aide told Axios. Yeah, well, your boss is spewing sh*t every time he opens his mouth, then backtracking to eat his own words, so that makes sense.

There just isn’t a comfortable “both sides” on a violent mob attacking the seat of government to prevent lawmakers from formalizing an election result the mob doesn’t like. Until McCarthy realizes that and commits to a side—for violent insurrection or against it—he’s going to keep taking incoming from all directions. Forget the single violin, break out the entire tiny orchestra for this poor guy.

Senate Republicans push to let Trump off the hook for inciting Capitol attack

Republicans want to move along and forget that whole thing where a mob of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol, threatening the lives of lawmakers and killing one police officer and wounding others. Donald Trump isn’t in office anymore, the senators who would have to vote in his impeachment trial say, so there’s nothing to talk about anymore.

We should move on from the 15 police officers hospitalized and more than 100 injured as Trump-supporting domestic terrorists beat them with fire extinguishers and American flags and fists and whatever else was available, shot bear spray at them, massed in the hundreds if not thousands to force their way through doors and beat down windows, and in one case Tasered an officer in the neck until he had a heart attack.

Rep. John Katko, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee and one of the 10 House Republicans who voted for impeachment, said after classified briefings on the attack, “I was left with a profound sense that it was much worse than people realized.”

But Senate Republicans are strenuously looking for excuses not to hold Trump accountable. Sen. John Cornyn spent Thursday morning quoting former Trump impeachment lawyer Alan Dershowitz to suggest that holding Trump to account for his significant role in whipping up the mob that attacked the Capitol would be merely “seek[ing] revenge” and would “distract from President Biden’s agenda, and make it hard to heal the country.” 

”What good comes from impeaching a guy in Florida?” Sen. Lindsey Graham asked. But he made clear to CNN that his concern was not about “what good” but about what’s good for the Republican Party, saying: “There's no way to be a successful Republican Party without having President Trump working with all of us and all of us working with him. That's just a fact. And I think we got a decent chance of coming back in 2022. But we can't do it without the President.”

Trump told these people to come to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, the day Congress met to count the electoral votes that made Joe Biden the president. “Will be wild,” he tweeted. That day, he told the crowd “we’re going to have to fight much harder,” and, “You will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can’t let that happen.” Then, “We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” And he told them he would be with them as they marched on the Capitol.

What good would come from impeaching him now that he’s a private citizen in Florida? You put a marker down that inciting violence against Congress specifically as it attempts to carry out the process of democracy is not acceptable. Do Cornyn or Graham treat a dirt-filled wound by slapping a bandage on it and pretending it’s not there? Because that’s a recipe for festering infection, just as refusing to address what happened at the Capitol, and Trump’s role in it, would worsen the already festering infection in U.S. politics. 

Republicans like Cornyn and Graham, though, don’t care about what’s good for the nation. They care about what’s good for the Republican Party.

We can’t fix our democracy without understanding the roots of its problems

The House has just impeached Donald Trump for the second time following a violent insurrection by his supporters that endangered the lives of Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress. Trump got into the White House to begin with despite losing the popular vote in 2016, but went on to pack the federal courts with lifetime judges, including appointing one in three Supreme Court justices. The recent Republican Senate majority, which refused to rein in Trump’s abuses after his first impeachment, was elected with 20 million fewer votes than the Democratic minority.

You don’t have to look far or hard for evidence of the flaws in U.S. democracy. But in thinking about how to fix it, it’s helpful to have a framework for understanding what’s going on here—the roots of the problems and how deep they go. Political scientist Douglas Amy offers a start on that with Second Rate Democracy, a website laying out 17 ways the U.S. lags behind other major western countries on democracy.

In the introduction, Amy notes that:

  • Besides Denmark, no other advanced democracy follows the U.S. example and appoints Supreme Court justices for life – all now have mandatory term limits or age limits for justices.
  • None use an Electoral College that allows a minority of voters to choose its chief executive.
  • Most use different voting systems that make gerrymandering impossible and create more representative multi-party legislatures.
  • None have anything like our misrepresentative Senate that gives the 40 million voters in the 22 smallest states forty-four seats, while giving 40 million Californians two seats.
  • Nearly all have rejected our conflict-prone separation-of-powers model of government and have chosen instead a more cooperative parliamentary system that avoids the legislative gridlock that plagues our government.
  • And all rely much more on public money, not private money from rich organizations and individuals, to fund their election campaigns.

Amy offers a framework for assessing the health of democracies, from majority rule and fair representation to the rule of law, political equality, and public participation. To fix the problem, we need to understand the problem. This is one resource for doing so.

QAnon congresswoman is really trying to get someone killed with her latest incitement

Ten days after joining Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene continues building the case for her removal from the House of Representatives. In the wake of the violent attack on the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump trying to keep Congress from formalizing his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, Greene tweeted out another incitement to violence.

“These Democrats are the enemies to the American people who are leading the impeachment witch hunt against President Trump,” Greene tweeted Wednesday. “AGAIN!”

Then, ominously, “They will be held accountable.”

Enemies to the American people who will be held accountable, huh? That sounds like a call to violence from a member of Congress who described Jan. 6 as a “1776 moment.” When you have spent months trying to overturn an election and then compared the day on which a violent attack on the Capitol was planned to the American Revolution, you don’t get the benefit of the doubt on “enemies of the people” who “will be held accountable.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene is dangerous and she’s reveling in it. She’s positioning herself as some kind of brave freedom fighter, but she’s standing on the sidelines, in a position of privilege, egging others on to do her dirty work. She’s joined Trump in spending months working to convince his followers that the election was stolen—every single fact to the contrary—and now she’s trying to use that belief to get people killed. To get elected Democrats killed in a larger coup attempt.

She needs to go before (more) people are killed, not after.

Republican congresswoman just tweeted that Democrats are "enemies to the American people" and said, "They will be held accountable." That seems very...incitement-y. pic.twitter.com/Sj6o60zDhH

— Eric Umansky (@ericuman) January 13, 2021

The second impeachment of Donald Trump is underway, and this time, several Republicans are on board

The House convened at 9 AM ET for the second impeachment of Donald Trump. And this time around, several Republicans are voting to impeach, after Trump incited an attack on the Capitol in an effort to block Congress from doing its job and finalizing the election results. After that attack, far more Republicans still voted to block the true election results on Trump’s behalf than will vote to impeach him, but go figure, sending a mob of insurrectionists to threaten the lives of your own vice president and members of Congress will get at least a few Republicans to admit that there’s a problem.

Republicans Reps. Liz Cheney, John Katko, Adam Kinzinger, Fred Upton, and Jaime Herrera Beutler have all publicly said they will vote to impeach. “The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” Cheney, the third-ranking House Republican, said in a statement announcing her decision. “There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”

Kinzinger asked “If these actions . . . are not worthy of impeachment, then what is an impeachable offense?”

These Republicans are expected to be joined by several others, but the final number is not yet known.

There’s a single article of impeachment, for “incitement of insurrection,” under debate. Trump “gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government,” it reads. “He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of Government. He thereby betrayed his trust as President, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”

The theory of how this will proceed, per CNN’s Manu Raju, is after an hour of debate, there will be two procedural votes, then two hours of debate, followed by the vote. In reality it will probably take longer than that implies. A vote is expected Wednesday evening.

After that, impeachment will go to the Senate for a trial, with Majority Leader-for-now Mitch McConnell reportedly not whipping votes to protect Trump, and supposedly himself open to voting to convict. Believe it when you see it, because McConnell would definitely pretend to be open to something like this to protect his reputation with the media, but then again, he too was under threat from Trump’s thugs and is reportedly very angry about it—and, presumably, about having lost his Senate majority.

You can watch the House proceedings on most television news stations or stream at the House clerk’s websiteC-SPAN and YouTube, among other sites.

Schumer to FBI: Put Capitol rioters on the no-fly list and prosecute them

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—soon to be the Senate majority leader—is calling for the domestic terrorists who attacked the Capitol to be added to the no-fly list. Schumer urged that move in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, additionally calling for the insurrectionists to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Videos of rioters learning they couldn't fly home have become popular online content after American Airlines banned some and others were blocked or removed by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). 

As tempting as it is to think about these violent terrorists being banned from air travel, and as much as they should absolutely face consequences for their actions, there are serious problems with the no-fly list, as the ACLU has highlighted repeatedly over the years. For instance, “innocent, law-abiding Americans have found themselves subject to relentless hassles, interrogation and searches every time they try to travel by air.  They may share similar names with those who have been placed on suspect lists, or be the victims of random error, malicious discrimination, or mysterious bureaucratic quirks.” You don’t have to have any sympathy for these specific asshats to see the problems with such a system.

At the same time, flight attendants and other workers who have to deal with air travelers shouldn’t have to face the kind of abuse that Trumpists frequently deal out. “Acts against our democracy, our government and the freedom we claim as Americans must disqualify these individuals from the freedom of flight,” Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) said in a statement following the attack on the Capitol.

Then again, if the people who stormed the Capitol were in prison, they couldn’t fly anyway.