Violent threats against lawmakers have Congress on edge

Posted on (Updated by Mike Lillis

Rep. G.K. Butterfield was proud to be in Congress. Some years ago, the veteran Democrat installed a vanity message on his congressional license plate, broadcasting the district he represents: North Carolina 1.

Those days are over.

In recent years, the number of menacing threats against sitting members of Congress has ballooned, forcing the Capitol Police to launch thousands of investigations; prompting a flood of new funding for lawmaker security back home and in Washington; and impelling lawmakers to take remarkable precautions to ensure they don't become the next target of political violence. 

For Butterfield, that meant taking steps to become more anonymous when he's out in public.

"I've taken the congressional license tags off of my car, because I don't want to be identified publicly. It was right after Jan. 6," Butterfield said before the House left Washington for the long summer recess.

"I used to be proud to display the plate, had No. 1 on my plate for the 1st District — North Carolina 1," he continued. "Used to be a time when people would pull up beside me at the stoplight and give me the thumbs up. But now it's different."

The source of the concern is not merely anecdotal. Over the past half-decade, the number of threat investigations launched by the U.S. Capitol Police has skyrocketed, from 3,939 in 2017 to 9,625 in 2021 — a spike of almost 150 percent, according to numbers provided by the department.

As members of Congress head into a long Labor Day weekend of parades, barbecues and other district events — a holiday marking the unofficial launch of the final leg of public campaigning ahead of November's midterm elections — they seem to be keenly leery of what they might encounter. 

"The threat level has been elevated," Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the select committee investigating last year’s attack on the U.S. Capitol, said Friday. "There has been a coarsening of discourse, and a perceived relaxation in inhibitions people would have about attacking public officials."

Raskin spoke Friday while flanked by a security detail matching those assigned to each member of the Jan. 6 investigative panel.

The spike in lawmaker threats has coincided with increasingly personal and bitter attack lines stemming from the Trump era, with Democrats maintaining that the blame falls squarely on the former president and his fiery rhetoric against perceived political enemies.

“We hear — you’ve heard it — more and more talk about violence as an acceptable political tool in this country. It’s not. It can never be an acceptable tool,” President Biden said Thursday night in Philadelphia, where he castigated Trump and those who do not condemn violence as "a threat to democracy."

“We can’t be pro-insurrectionist and pro-American. They’re incompatible,” Biden added.

Trump’s supporters have rushed to his defense, saying accusations that the former president encourages violence are merely political attacks designed to hurt his chances of returning to the White House in 2024.

Attacks aimed at members of Congress have targeted Republicans as well, they note, including recently when Rep. Lee Zeldin (R) was assaulted on stage while speaking at a campaign stop in New York for his gubernatorial bid.

Zeldin escaped largely unscathed, though other attacks have gone much farther. In 2017, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) was shot on a baseball field during a GOP practice in northern Virginia, sending him to the hospital with critical injuries.

In another more recent incident, an armed man was arrested near Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's home in the middle of the night in June after making death threats. In that case, Republicans accused Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) of encouraging the situation when he warned Kavanaugh, in 2020, that the justice would “pay the price” if he rolled back abortion rights. 

“Rhetoric that incites violence toward any elected or appointed member of the three branches of our constitutional government is dangerous and condemnable,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), former head of the far-right Freedom Caucus, said after the June incident.

Lawmakers who are critical of Trump remain among those most frequently targeted for violence. The long and diverse list includes Republicans who voted for an infrastructure bill he opposed; Democrats who managed the former president’s impeachments; Republicans who supported his ouster after the Jan. 6 Capitol attack; and most recently the nine House lawmakers on the select committee investigating the 2021 riot, all of whom have round-the-clock security details.

Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Republicans critical of Trump are particularly prominent targets because they’re viewed to be disloyal in the eyes of the MAGA faithful. 

“People who show that there's a way to be a conservative and not be part of the MAGA faction are in the targets because that's the most threatening group,” Kleinfeld said. “You see that in every country where you start having this kind of factional violence is that, what's called ‘in-group moderates’ — who might not be moderate in their policy beliefs, but who don't believe in violence — are the first to be targeted.”

After five years of steady threat increases on Capitol Hill, it’s unclear if 2022 will continue the trend. The Capitol Police reported opening “roughly 1,820 cases” between Jan. 1 and March 24 — on pace to top 8,000 incidents for the year, which would be well below the figure for both 2020 and 2021. But the department is now withholding the release of incremental figures and instead will provide annual numbers at the end of each year. The change, a spokesperson said, is designed to curb “confusion” surrounding the statistics.

The figures represent incidents of both “concerning comments and direct threats,” a determination guided by the Supreme Court, which has defined threats to be “statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.”

Some incidents are more clear-cut than others. 

In July, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), one of two Republicans on the Jan. 6 select committee, released a compilation of profanely violent threats made by phone to his office. This week, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who served as one of the managers of Trump’s second impeachment, released a similar audio message from a man threatening to come to Swalwell’s office with a gun for the purpose of assassinating him. And a number of other lawmakers have comparable stories, even if they haven’t released the threats publicly. 

"There's an escalation,” said Rep. Juan Vargas (D-Calif.). “We have some new interns and they're shocked [at] the level of animosity that people talk about when they call us — the level of hatred and threats. They were absolutely stunned, and I said, 'No, that's what we live with. And it's getting worse.'” 

In July, the House Sergeant at Arms announced new funding designed to protect lawmakers from the enhanced threats: $10,000 to install alarms and other systems to bolster the security of their homes.  

One House Democrat, who spoke anonymously so as not to become a greater target, said that’s not all: Local law enforcers also monitor the family house. 

"We have a police car that comes once in the morning, and once at night,” the lawmaker said. “It's just not a time when everyone feels safe.”

Rebecca Beitsch contributed.

House conservatives prep plans to impeach Biden

Posted on (Updated by Mike Lillis

Republicans hoping to seize control of the House in November are already setting their sights on what is, for many of them, a top priority next year: impeaching President Biden. 

A number of rank-and-file conservatives have already introduced impeachment articles in the current Congress against the president. They accuse Biden of committing "high crimes" in his approach to a range of issues touching on border enforcement, the coronavirus pandemic and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Those resolutions never had a chance of seeing the light of day, with Democrats holding a narrow control of the lower chamber. But with Republicans widely expected to win the House majority in the midterms, many of those same conservatives want to tap their new potential powers to oust a president they deem unfit. Some would like to make it a first order of business.

“I have consistently said President Biden should be impeached for intentionally opening our border and making Americans less safe,” said Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.). “Congress has a duty to hold the President accountable for this and any other failures of his Constitutional responsibilities, so a new Republican majority must be prepared to aggressively conduct oversight on day one.”

The conservative impeachment drive is reminiscent of that orchestrated by liberals four years ago, as Democrats took control of the House in 2019 under then-President Trump. At the time, a small handful of vocal progressives wanted to impeach Trump, largely over accusations that he’d obstructed a Justice Department probe into Russian ties to his 2016 campaign. The idea was repeatedly rejected by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), not least out of fear that it would alienate voters in tough battleground districts. 

The tide turned when a whistleblower accused Trump of pressuring a foreign power to find dirt on his political opponent — a charge that brought centrist Democrats onto the impeachment train. With moderates on board, Pelosi launched a formal impeachment inquiry in September of 2019, eight months after taking the Speaker’s gavel. Three months later, the House impeached Trump on two counts related to abusing power.

The difference between then and now is that liberals, in early 2019, were fighting a lonely battle with scant support. This year, heading into the midterms, dozens of conservatives have either endorsed Biden’s impeachment formally, or have suggested they’re ready to support it. 

At least eight resolutions to impeach Biden have been offered since he took office: Three related to his handling of the migrant surge at the southern border; three targeting his management of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last year; one denouncing the eviction moratorium designed to help renters during the pandemic; and still another connected to the overseas business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden.

Those proposals will expire with the end of this Congress. But some of the sponsors are already vowing to revisit them quickly next year. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), the lead sponsor of four of the impeachment resolutions, is among them. 

“She believes Joe Biden should have been impeached as soon as he was sworn in, so of course she wants it to happen as soon as possible," Nick Dyer, a Greene spokesman, said Monday in an email. 

A noisy impeachment push from the GOP’s right flank could create headaches for Rep. Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), the Republican leader in line to be Speaker, and other party brass just as the 2024 presidential cycle heats up. 

On the one hand, impeaching Biden could alienate moderate voters and hurt the GOP at the polls, as was the case in 1998 following the impeachment of President Clinton. Already, GOP leaders like Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.) are throwing cold water on the impeachment talk, suggesting it could damage Republicans politically in the midterms. 

On the other hand, ignoring the conservatives’ impeachment entreaties might spark a revolt from a Republican base keen to avenge the Democrats’ two impeachments of Trump, who remains the most popular national figure in the GOP. McCarthy knows well the perils of angering the far right: The Freedom Caucus had nudged Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) into an early retirement in 2015, deeming him insufficiently conservative, then prevented McCarthy from replacing him.

McCarthy’s office did not respond Monday to a request for comment. 

The challenge facing Republican leaders in a GOP-controlled House will be to demonstrate an aggressive posture toward the administration, to appease conservatives, without alienating moderate voters in the process. 

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) appears to be walking that line. Last summer, she called Biden “unfit to serve as president,” but stopped short of endorsing his impeachment. 

Stefanik’s office did not respond to requests for comment. 

Another strategy GOP leaders may adopt is to impeach a high-ranking member of the administration, but not the president himself. Several resolutions have been introduced to do just that, separately targeting Vice President Harris, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Attorney General Merrick Garland. 

McCarthy, during a visit to the southern border earlier in the year, had floated the idea of impeaching Mayorkas if he is found to be “derelict” in his job of securing the border. And the concept has plenty of support among conservatives.   

“Mayorkas and Garland have purposefully made our country less safe, politicized their departments, and violated the rule of law. In some instances, they have instructed their subordinates to disobey our laws. That is unacceptable,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), who has endorsed a number of impeachment resolutions this year, said in an email. 

“Next January I expect the House to pursue my impeachment articles against Mayorkas as well as Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s impeachment articles that I co-sponsored against Attorney General Merrick Garland,” Biggs added.

Still, conservatives like Biggs, the former head of the Freedom Caucus, also want to go straight to the top by impeaching Biden. And it remains unclear if anything less than that will appease the GOP’s restive right flank — one that’s expected to grow next year with the arrival of a number of pro-Trump conservatives vowing to take on anyone they consider to be part of Washington’s political establishment. 

Some Republicans said the decision whether to endorse impeachment next year will simply hinge on events. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), for instance, has endorsed two impeachment resolutions this cycle related to the Afghanistan withdrawal, but “has made no decisions yet on supporting impeachment articles next year with Republicans in the majority,” according to spokesman Austin Livingston. 

“He will wait to see what those efforts look like, specifically how they align with Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution," Livingston said, referring to the section outlining Congress’s impeachment powers. 

But others are eager to use a GOP majority to hold Biden’s feet to the fire. And that energy doesn’t appear to be fleeting, particularly when it comes to the border crisis, which could very well remain a hot topic six months from now. 

Rep. Mary Miller (R), a strong Trump supporter who recently won an Illinois primary over the more moderate Rep. Rodney Davis (R), said Biden should be removed “for purposely ignoring our immigration laws.”

“Biden and Harris have failed their most basic duty,” Miller said, “which is ensuring the safety of the American people through the security of our borders.”

Raskin launches bid to lead House Oversight panel

Posted on (Updated by Mike Lillis

The race for the top Democratic seat on the powerful House Oversight and Reform Committee got more crowded on Friday when Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) entered the contest to replace the outgoing chairwoman, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.).

Maloney lost her primary race on Tuesday to Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), ending a 30-year career on Capitol Hill and opening up the top panel seat in the next Congress.

Raskin's decision to seek the spot pits him against two other, more veteran Oversight Democrats — Reps. Stephen Lynch (Mass.) and Gerry Connolly (Va.), who launched their candidacies on Wednesday.

Democrats have traditionally favored seniority when choosing top committee spots, which would seem to place Raskin at a disadvantage in the race.

Still, the three-term congressman has built a sturdy national profile in his short time on Capitol Hill, leading the House's second impeachment of former President Trump after last year's attack on the U.S. Capitol, and now playing a high-profile role in the investigation of the attacks.

A former professor of constitutional law, Raskin is now making the case that his legal background makes him the best candidate to lead the Democrats on the Oversight panel.

"We are still in the fight of our lives to defend American constitutional democracy and—by extension—political freedom and human rights all over the world," Raskin wrote Friday to his fellow Democrats in a letter obtained by The Hill.

Liz Cheney approaches likely primary loss with defiance

Posted on (Updated by Mike Lillis

Rep. Liz Cheney may be about to lose her day job. If so, she’s totally OK with that.

Cheney, a third-term Wyoming Republican, is charging into Tuesday’s primary in the Cowboy State defiantly embracing the very message that’s sparked the conservative backlash brewing to oust her: Namely, that former President Trump, with his baseless claims of a “stolen” election, poses an existential threat to the country’s democratic foundations and should be barred from holding future office.

That argument, combined with Cheney’s national prominence, has made her both the public face of the anti-Trump movement and a pariah in the eyes of the MAGA faithful, including those in ruby-red Wyoming where the former president remains wildly popular.

Some recent polls have Cheney’s challenger — an election denier named Harriet Hageman — leading by almost 30 points. 

The Cheney name has been revered in conservative Wyoming circles for decades; the seat she holds was once held by her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney. And two years ago, the thought of her losing that seat would have been laughed out of Laramie.

Then came last year’s attack on the Capitol — a riot aimed at overturning Trump’s election defeat. Since then, Cheney has pursued the 45th president with a crusader’s zeal, becoming one of only 10 House Republicans to support Trump’s second impeachment, which deemed him responsible for inciting the insurrection, and then joining the Jan. 6 select committee investigating the rampage. 

It was then, political experts say, that Cheney decided the fight against Trump and his election lies was more important than keeping her job in Congress.

“She's almost certainly toast,” said David Barker, a political scientist at American University. “My guess is that she knew that the second she decided to really join the Jan. 6 committee and pursue the president in that way.”

“She hasn't just been kind of a passive member of the committee,” Barker added. “She's been really leading the whole charge and doing so in the most provocative and high-profile ways.”

Indeed, Cheney, as vice chair of the select committee, has been the most prominently featured figure throughout the eight public hearings the panel has staged this summer. And heading into the final stretch of what appears to be a doomed campaign for a fourth term, Cheney is not dodging the anti-Trump sentiment that’s put her in hot water with Wyoming voters. She’s amplifying it. 

“America cannot remain free if we abandon the truth. The lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is insidious — it preys on those who love their country,” Cheney said in a closing-argument campaign video released Thursday. “It is a door Donald Trump opened to manipulate Americans to abandon their principles, to sacrifice their freedom, to justify violence, to ignore the rulings of our courts and the rule of law.

“This is Donald Trump’s legacy, but it cannot be the future of our nation.”

Cheney is 56 years old, and her own legacy — along with her political future — remains uncertain. But this much is clear: She’s gambled both on the notion that, in challenging the most popular figure in her own party, she can prevent him from becoming president once again. In that campaign, she’s essentially arguing that the GOP needs saving from itself — and she’ll either be the one to do it, or fall hard trying.

“She faced a binary choice between doing what she thought was right and necessary, after Jan. 6, and continuing her political career in the Republican Party,” said Bill Galston, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “And unlike most politicians, she made a clean and honorable choice. And she's obviously prepared to take the consequences.”

In a last-ditch effort to gain ground in Tuesday’s primary contest, Cheney last week aired a public endorsement from her father. Appearing in a cowboy hat and questioning Trump’s masculinity, Dick Cheney called the former president “a coward” who “tried to steal the last election using lies and violence.”

“In our nation's 246-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” he says in the minute-long ad. 

Still, 70 percent of Wyoming voters chose Trump in 2020 — the highest number of any state in the country. And even the appeals of a state institution like Dick Cheney aren’t expected to save his daughter in Tuesday’s race. The experts say the simple reason is that the GOP, as old-guard power brokers like Dick Cheney knew it, no longer exists. 

“Donald Trump executed a hostile and irreversible takeover of the Republican Party,” Galston said. “The Reagan party that appealed to so many of the now middle-aged or even aging Republican conservatives in the 1980s and '90s is gone. It's not coming back.” 

Cheney is hardly alone among GOP lawmakers suffering politically for clashing publicly with Trump over the Jan. 6 attack. Of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump last year, only two are in line to return in the next Congress. Four others are retiring, while three more lost their primaries to Trump-endorsed conservatives who backed his false election claims. 

Cheney, of the 10, is the last outstanding race, and the outcome appears certain. 

“Yeah, he won — in the short term, at least,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), one of the impeachment-supporting retirees, acknowledged to WGN-TV in Chicago last week. “There’s no use in pretending somehow I scored some major victory and saved the party.” 

To Trump’s allies, the former president remains a heroic figure — the single most electrifying force in the GOP who launched the populist movement that toppled Hillary Clinton and continues to fuel expectations that Republicans will flip control of the House in November’s midterm elections. In that light, Cheney, Kinzinger and the other Trump critics are seen as apostates to the larger cause of winning power.

In February, the Republican National Committee took the remarkable step of voting to censure both Cheney and Kinzinger for their involvement in the Jan. 6 investigation. It said the two were “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

Cheney’s likely defeat on Tuesday has raised plenty of speculation about potential next steps, including the possibility that she’d make a presidential run of her own in 2024 — an idea she has not ruled out. 

Still, her success in such a contest would hinge squarely on the collapse of Trump’s popularity within the party, which is likely to endure, some experts said, longer than Cheney would prefer. 

“My sense is that if it is [her plan], she's going to have a long wait,” Galston said. “I don't think that Donald Trump supporters will ever forgive her, nor do I think they're going away. 

“Where else would they go?”

Caroline Vakil contributed.

Republicans rally behind Trump after search warrant is unsealed

Posted on (Updated by Mike Lillis

House Republicans on Friday wasted no time rallying behind former President Trump following a court’s decision to unseal the search warrant that had empowered the FBI to search his Mar-a-Lago residence in South Florida earlier in the week. 

The newly public warrant revealed that the Department of Justice had suspected Trump of violating the Espionage Act, among other federal statutes, when he stockpiled reams of documents at Mar-a-Lago after he left office last year.

FBI agents on Monday retrieved 11 sets of documents categorized as classified to some degree, an inventory of the items seized showed, including one set labeled “various classified/TS/SCI documents,” a highly-classified category of sensitive items typically pertaining to national security. Agents also retrieved four sets of "top secret" items.

But Republican lawmakers on Friday dismissed the news, accusing the Department of Justice (DOJ) of conducting a political witch hunt designed for the sole purpose of harming Trump politically as he weighs another run at the White House in 2024. 

"What they've been doing to President Trump is a political persecution,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) told reporters on the steps of the Capitol. “Merrick Garland has abused his position of power, as the attorney general, to politically persecute Joe Biden’s enemies. And the whole purpose of this is to prevent President Trump from ever being able to hold office.” 

“We cannot tolerate this in America,” she continued, “where our great institutions are wielded and abused in such a way to defeat people’s political enemies.” 

Greene then walked into the Capitol and introduced articles of impeachment against Garland. 

She was hardly alone. Other GOP lawmakers also defended Trump against a DOJ they’re portraying as out of control. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), another close Trump ally, wondered why the department isn’t continuing its investigation into Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of State, who came under scrutiny for using a private server to conduct official business, but was never charged. 

“Did they find Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails in the safe? That’s what I want to see,” said Boebert, who also endorsed the effort to impeach Garland. 

Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), chairman of the Republican Study Committee, didn’t go quite so far, but accused Garland of withholding information vital to the public’s understanding of the investigation.  

“The fact that Merrick Garland is selectively working through the media rather than releasing further details, is again – makes all of this very fishy,” he said. “There's so much that the American people deserve to know that we don't know.” 

Other Republicans brought up various DOJ investigations of the past, suggesting the department goes soft on Democrats and their allies while dropping the hammer on Republicans and other conservatives. 

Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) cited another concern, saying he’s worried that the DOJ was overly aggressive in targeting a former president. 

“People are rightfully upset [about] the precedent this sets. It seems highly unnecessary to be sending in armed FBI agents into Mar-a-Lago when he could have just subpoenaed these documents. He supposedly knew they were there. He was being cooperative already … with other documents,” said Crenshaw. 

Earlier in the year, Trump had turned over 15 boxes of documents and other materials to the National Archives. The DOJ later subpoenaed Trump for additional documents the agency suspected he had withheld. 

Garland on Thursday had delivered a highly unusual statement defending Monday’s search, saying the DOJ had first attempted “less intrusive means,” which failed to yield the remaining materials. 

Democrats, meanwhile, have defended the agency. While they’re eagerly awaiting more details, they’re voicing concerns that at least some of the documents might have been related to defense and national security.  

"If the nature of these documents is what [it] appears to be, this is very serious,” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Emily Brooks contributed. 

Pelosi courts controversy with Taiwan trip that’s personal to Speaker

Posted on (Updated by Mike Lillis

Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan has stirred a storm of controversy, heightening tensions with China and captivating the world’s attention.

For the California Democrat, however, the trip is something much more personal.

Pelosi has a long track record of confronting Chinese leaders head-on, particularly on issues of human rights, stretching back decades to include the massacre of pro-democracy activists on Tiananmen Square.

Her decision to visit Taiwan — a self-governing democracy that Beijing claims as its own — ranks among the most conspicuous exhibitions of that advocacy campaign; Pelosi on Tuesday became the highest-ranking U.S. official to set foot in Taiwan in 25 years.

Through that lens, Pelosi's trek — taken in the twilight of her long career against the wishes of the Biden administration — is not only a diplomatic endeavor to demonstrate U.S. support for Taiwanese autonomy, but a legacy-building crusade for a figure who likes to boast she takes “second place to no one” in her condemnation of Beijing's human rights atrocities.

It’s a historic trip for a historic Speaker — and it may prove to be the crowning global performance of a long political run that’s widely expected to reach an end with the close of this Congress.

“Pelosi has a long history of challenging Beijing — including her visit to Tiananmen Square in 1991 – unfurling an American flag no less,” Sarah Binder, political science professor at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said in an email Tuesday, just hours after the Speaker landed in Taipei.

“If she does indeed retire after this Congress, I suspect the trip will be viewed as the capstone of her legacy on the issue (well, if all goes well, that is),” Binder said.

That “if” has also been on the minds of top Biden administration officials, particularly those in the Pentagon who had cautioned against Pelosi’s visit over concerns that it would trigger a retaliatory response from Beijing. President Biden had vocalized the Defense Department’s apprehensions late last month, telling reporters that “the military thinks it’s not a good idea right now.”

Yet Biden never attempted to dissuade the trip himself, Pelosi said, and White House officials more recently have come around to bless the visit — at least publicly — while warning China against any sort of bellicose response.

“We shouldn’t be — as a country — we shouldn’t be intimidated by that rhetoric or those potential actions,” White House national security spokesman John Kirby said Monday in an interview with CNN. “This is an important trip for the Speaker to be on and we’re going to do whatever we can to support her.”

Chinese leaders have ignored those warnings, following up their initial admonitions with new threats after Pelosi arrived in Taipei. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs quickly issued a statement saying Pelosi’s visit not only represents “a serious violation of the one-China principle,” but will have “a severe impact on the political foundation of China-U.S. relations.”

“It gravely undermines peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and sends a seriously wrong signal to the separatist forces for ‘Taiwan independence,’ ” the ministry charged.

Shortly afterward, Beijing announced that it would launch “targeted military operations” around Taiwan.

Pelosi on Tuesday explained her reasoning behind the trip with some unveiled shots of her own, accusing Beijing’s leaders of doing everything they can — economically, diplomatically, militarily and even through cyberattacks — to punish Taiwan for its enduring resistance to Chinese rule.

“In the face of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) accelerating aggression, our congressional delegation’s visit should be seen as an unequivocal statement that America stands with Taiwan, our democratic partner, as it defends itself and its freedom,” Pelosi wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post.

That message of democratic solidarity, she added, is even more urgent in the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of a peaceful Ukraine earlier in the year.

“As Russia wages its premeditated, illegal war against Ukraine, killing thousands of innocents — even children — it is essential that America and our allies make clear that we never give in to autocrats,” she wrote.

Pelosi’s place in history is already assured. She was the first woman to lead any party in Congress, and in ascending to the Speakership in 2007 became the highest-ranking woman in U.S. history — a distinction surpassed only last year when Kamala Harris was sworn in as vice president.

Over that span, Pelosi shepherded the passage of historic legislation, including ObamaCare, an economic stimulus package in response to the Great Recession and the Wall Street reforms that followed that financial collapse. More recently, she oversaw both impeachments of President Trump, and launched the select committee that’s now investigating Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Her shift this week to take on China promises to extend that legacy well beyond domestic policy and into the realm of foreign diplomacy. Binder, of Brookings, said it has highlighted the fact that congressional legislators can play a crucial role in areas typically reserved for the executive branch.

“In a word, their actions can be consequential for public affairs far beyond the halls of Congress,” she said.

Pelosi’s outspoken campaign against China’s despots, launched with her 1991 visit to Tiananmen Square, hardly ended there. In the years since, the Speaker has also condemned Chinese abuses against pro-democracy activists across Hong Kong and Tibet; she’s pressed Chinese leaders directly to release political prisoners; she’s met a number of times with the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet; and most recently, she fiercely denounced Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs, a Muslim minority group in China’s western-most province, labeling it a genocide.

Pelosi’s show of solidarity with Taiwan this week has been met with overwhelming support on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers in both parties have cheered her defiance of Beijing, even as it ruffles feathers at the White House.

“I can see how it could create some tension in the region,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.). “But I was telling some people the other night: Don't get concerned about it. I don't think anybody's trying to create an international incident.

“If I had anything to say to the Chinese leadership it would just be: Be cool."

Republicans are also on board. Led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), 26 GOP senators issued a statement Tuesday praising her decision.

“She has every right to go,” McConnell later told reporters.

Liz Cheney doesn’t care what the pro-Trump GOP thinks of her

Posted on (Updated by Mike Lillis

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) didn't make any new friends in the GOP with her star turn bashing former President Trump in prime time on Thursday night. It doesn't bother her a bit.

Cheney, a dynastic figure who sits in the House seat once held by her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, used her high perch on the Jan. 6 select committee to accuse Trump of abusing the powers of the presidency to orchestrate nothing short of an attempted coup — explosive charges that have reinforced her status as Public Enemy No. 1 in the eyes of the MAGA faithful. 

The much-watched hearing has further complicated Cheney’s path to reelection in deep-red Wyoming, a Trump stronghold where her primary opponent has the energetic backing of the 45th president, who is actively stumping against the mutinous incumbent. 

But as Cheney's attacks on Trump have grown only louder, it's increasingly clear that she's motivated by something other than securing her future in the lower chamber. Whether that thing is a self-sacrificing desire to save the country's democratic traditions from the former president or an egomaniacal effort to advance her own fame and political powers largely depends on the perspective of her fans and critics.

What is not in question is that Cheney has staked her legacy on her relentless anti-Trump activism — a reputation that will become only more deeply entrenched as the select committee airs its investigative findings in a long series of public hearings that will dominate discussion in Washington through the rest of the month.

“President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack,” Cheney, the vice chairwoman of the select committee, said during the panel’s prime-time hearing Thursday night. 

For the like-minded Trump critics, Cheney is an enormous asset to the investigation, offering the committee not only a good dose of bipartisan legitimacy, but also a seasoned legal mind who knows the ins and outs of the GOP conference and its complicated dealings with the former president. 

“She’s an awesome lawyer, … [and] she was the chair of the House Republican Conference,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a former professor of constitutional law who also sits on the investigative panel. “So she obviously knows the terrain better than anyone else on the committee.”

To Trump’s allies on and off of Capitol Hill, however, Cheney is simply a traitor to the party — a “Pelosi Republican” who’s been all but disowned as GOP leaders try to tap Trump’s popularity in their effort to flip control of the House in November’s midterm elections.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who wants to take the speakership next year, said this week that the responsibility for the Jan. 6 falls on “everybody in the country.”

In one sense, Cheney is an unlikely figure to assume the role of Republican iconoclast. Her family ranks among the most powerful GOP dynasties of the last half century, and her father's unique brand of conservatism — combined with his no-apologies approach to power-policymaking — made him a favorite with the Republican base. 

In a similar vein, Liz Cheney’s staunch conservative positions — including strong attacks on gay marriage during an early campaign — made her a villain in the eyes of Democrats nationwide, but helped propel her quickly into the leadership ranks once she arrived on Capitol Hill in 2017. 

In another sense, however, Cheney is the natural fit to play Trump's foil. 

Trump had devoted much of his successful 2016 campaign bashing the overseas entanglements of the Bush-Cheney administration, most notably the 2003 decision to launch the Iraq War, which was championed by the elder Cheney. After taking the White House, Trump continued those attacks on the old Republican guard that had pushed an aggressively interventionist foreign policy, a group that included both of the Cheneys. 

Although Cheney had opposed Trump’s first impeachment, she was furious with his actions surrounding the attack on the Capitol, where a violent mob of Trump supporters tried to overturn his election defeat. More than 150 police officers were injured in the rampage. 

Cheney was one of just 10 Republicans to support Trump’s impeachment following the riot, and she’s jumped headfirst into her role investigating the tragedy. On Thursday, she used the platform of the televised hearing to warn those Republicans still backing Trump that history won’t treat them kindly. 

“Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain,” she said.

Supporters of the far-reaching investigation note the significance of having a Republican of Cheney’s stature joining the probe.  

“It's important, because like she said, this is not about political parties, or your political views. It's about finding out the truth,” U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell said following the hearing. “And from what the committee laid out today, it seems like there's a lot more that needs to be done.” 

But Cheney’s recalcitrance has come with political costs. 

Last year, after Cheney refused to stop criticizing Trump for his role in the Capitol riot, the GOP conference voted overwhelmingly to boot her out of leadership, replacing her with a Trump loyalist, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who has embraced the former president's lies about a stolen election. 

More recently, the Republican National Committee voted to condemn Cheney — along with the only other Republican on the select committee, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) — for their willingness to join Democrats in the Jan. 6 investigation. That decision, the Republican National Committee charged, “has been destructive to the institution of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Party and our republic.”

In the wake of Thursday’s select committee hearing, the attacks on Cheney from Trump’s allies have grown only more pronounced. During the hearing, Tucker Carlson, the wildly popular Fox News pundit, characterized Cheney as “the Iraq War lady” who’s now “lecturing us about honor and truth.”

Carlson’s guest was Joe Kent, a Trump supporter from Washington state who’s launched a primary challenge against Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.), who also supported Trump’s second impeachment. He, too, had some sharp words for the Wyoming Republican. 

“It's absolutely absurd and insulting,” Kent said of Cheney’s attacks on Trump’s defenders. “She thinks that we can't go back and look at her record that she has been lying to the American people basically for her entire career and profiting off of it, but also she has to bring up this whole, ‘Oh it must be a big Trump thing.’”

Kent said the Capitol rioters were in Washington on Jan. 6 not because of anything Trump did or said, but because “a vast majority” of Americans “did not feel like their voices were heard at the election box, and therefore things started to get a little bit dicey.” 

In the face of such attacks, Cheney has found a new group of allies: Democrats, who have always opposed her conservative policy prescriptions, but are now cheering her on as she takes on a shared adversary in Trump.

“Liz Cheney and I do not agree on almost probably 80 percent of the contentious issues that come up, give or take 10 points,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters this week. “But what she is standing up for is the truth.”

“That's why she was removed as the leader of the Republican Party,” he continued. “Because the Republican Party didn't want to hear the truth."

Senate votes to hear witnesses in Trump trial

Posted on by Mike Lillis
The Senate voted Saturday to allow witnesses in former President Trump's second impeachment trial, a stunning development that could extend the proceedings.House Democrats prosecuting the case called for a single immediate witness to testify: Rep....
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