Ilhan Omar Says House ‘Will Impeach This Week’ If Pence Doesn’t Act On Trump

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) took to Twitter on Monday to say that the House of Representatives “will impeach this week” if Vice President Mike Pence does not invoke the 25th Amendment against President Donald Trump.

Omar Discusses Impeaching Trump

“Where things stand: I just introduced my impeachment resolution,” she wrote. “The full House will now vote on a measure calling on VP Pence and the cabinet to remove Donald Trump under the 25th amendment. If Pence does not act, the House will move to impeach this week.”

This comes days after Omar said she was “drawing up Articles of Impeachment,” claiming that Trump “should be impeached by the House of Representatives & removed from office by the United States Senate.”

“We can’t allow him to remain in office, it’s a matter of preserving our Republic and we need to fulfill our oath,” she continued.

Related: AOC Calls For Trump To Be Impeached – ‘We Came Close To Half Of The House Nearly Dying’

Omar’s tweet on Monday included various bills and letters that she has pledged to support.

“Together, we will hold this president accountable and restore our democracy,” Omar concluded.

Omar Leading The Charge To Impeach Trump

Omar has been leading the charge to impeach Trump in the days since the riots at the Capitol.

“We must impeach and remove him from office immediately so he cannot threaten our democracy and the world any longer and hold public office ever again,” Omar said, according to Newsweek. “Congress should reconvene immediately to carry out this constitutional duty.”

She added that she has no confidence in Trump’s cabinet actually invoking the 25th Amendment.

“It would be really quite fascinating to have the ability to trust those individuals who have been part of his administration, who have been complacent in his activities to take the lead and invoke the 25th Amendment,” Omar said. “As we’ve just learned moments before I got on with you, Vice President Mike Pence has said he has no interest in invoking the 25th Amendment.”

Related: Maxine Waters Warns Trump May Want ‘Civil War’ – Wants Him ‘Stopped Dead In His Tracks, However We Do It’

“So we are left with figuring out what it means for us as members of Congress, how to fulfill our oath to protect our nation,” she added. She was then asked what had changed since the last time Trump was impeached that might lead to a Senate conviction.

“A lot has changed,” Omar continued. “We have just witnessed the president take part in an attempted coup and there is a clear understanding that he poses an imminent threat to not just our democracy but to our republic and to the world and having him remain in office any longer is not in the best interests of our nation.”

This piece was written by James Samson on January 11, 2021. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

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GOP seditionists are suddenly worried about divisiveness

Republican lawmakers who have spent four solid years embracing Donald Trump's hate speech and targeting of Democrats, liberals, people of color, and women are suddenly very concerned about divisiveness.

It's a convenient time for Republicans’ craven conversion as they prepare to be relegated to minority status in Washington and spend the next few years pointing fingers and whining. And naturally they have zero shame about their hypocrisy, mainly using their unity calls as a club to chastise Democrats over their efforts to impeach Trump.

But the most glaring aspect of the calls for unity is who they are coming from. Naturally, it's the worst of the worst offenders—the GOP lawmakers who backed Trump at every turn, echoed his dangerous and deceptive fraud claims, and voted for his objections to certification in what amounted to a fascist effort to disenfranchise the will of the people.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy last week lamented that impeachment would "only divide our country more."

"I've reached out to President-elect Biden today & plan to speak to him about how we must work together to lower the temperature & unite the country to solve America’s challenges," McCarthy tweeted

Save it, Kev. The only worthy thing McCarthy has left to offer the country is to resign his position and leave Congress after he poured gasoline on the fire that exploded at the Capitol last week.

Same goes for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who was among the first Senate Republicans to say he would join GOP House members in opposing certification of the Electoral College votes. The very day of the violent assault, Cruz, who was uniquely responsible for stoking the unhinged fervor that ultimately cost lives, was blaming people who had no role in the incitement.

"Stop stoking division. Stop spreading hatred," Cruz tweeted last Wednesday at Beto O'Rourke after O’Rourke noted that Cruz's "self serving attempt at sedition" had helped inspire the attack and attempted coup.

Hearing these seditionists now make calls for unity after they nearly destroyed the country in a matter of four years is truly special. If there's one saving grace here, it's that calls for the resignations of McCarthy, Cruz, and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri continue to flow. 

Dem. Sen. Whitehouse (Judiciary): “The Senate Ethics Committee must consider the expulsion, or censure and punishment, of Senators Cruz, Hawley... Because of massive potential conflict of interest, Senators Cruz, Hawley, and Johnson need to be off all relevant committees."

— j.d. durkin (@jiveDurkey) January 11, 2021

Tomorrow, I’m introducing my resolution to expel the members of Congress who tried to overturn the election and incited a white supremacist coup attempt that has left people dead. They have violated the 14th Amendment. We can’t have unity without accountability.

— Cori Bush (@CoriBush) January 10, 2021

“We can't have unity without accountability” is exactly right. If people like McCarthy, Cruz, Hawley, and others who helped push Trump supporters into this frenzy escape without consequence, they will simply continue poisoning the well in perpetuity to their own benefit. 

Trump’s Pentagon officials look increasingly complicit in a deadly serious coup attempt

Last Wednesday’s storming of the U.S. Capitol looked really, really bad as it was happening. Over the weekend, as more videos and information came out, it looked worse and worse. From video of the Trump-supporting terrorists beating a police officer with flag poles and crushing an officer in a door to the authorities’ refusal to hold a briefing to tell the nation what they know about what happened, how many people are injured, and what they’re doing to prevent this from happening again, the assault on the Capitol increasingly looks like an organized and serious coup attempt with some level of complicity in Congress and at the Pentagon. That’s one reason it’s so important for the House to impeach Donald Trump now, first, right away—because there’s good reason to believe other shoes are going to drop. When that happens, Democrats need to be ready to move.

House Democrats are planning to introduce an article of impeachment Monday morning: “incitement of insurrection.” That’s good—but it would have been better to do it over the weekend, in line with the urgency of the moment. We know now how close we came to members of Congress being publicly beaten to death by a mob whipped up by Trump. Even allowing for the trauma members of Congress are dealing with, that’s not a “take a weekend off” situation.

Wednesday we saw pictures of bros milling around giving thumbs up and grinning as they put their feet on a desk in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office or carried away a lectern. Since then, we’ve seen more evidence of how many were wearing tactical gear and moving in coordinated ways, of members of hate groups in the Capitol, of preparation for serious violence.

“That was a heavily trained group of militia terrorists that attacked us,” a Black officer who has been in the Capitol Police for more than a decade told Buzzfeed. “They had radios, we found them, they had two-way communicators and earpieces. They had bear spray. They had flash bangs ... They were prepared. They strategically put two IEDs, pipe bombs, in two different locations. These guys were military trained. A lot of them were former military.”

Every detail that emerges shows how serious this was, and how seriously the government should be taking it. That is not what’s happening, with Trump-appointed Pentagon officials giving the coup a name that actively downplays it and—it cannot be emphasized enough—law enforcement not having given one briefing of the sort that would be absolutely standard after any significant event.

One Republican member of Congress who did condemn the coup attempt claimed some of his Republican colleagues voted to overturn the election results out of fear for themselves and their families. “One of the saddest things is I had colleagues who, when it came time to recognize reality and vote to certify Arizona and Pennsylvania in the Electoral College, they knew in their heart of hearts that they should've voted to certify, but some had legitimate concerns about the safety of their families. They felt that that vote would put their families in danger,” Rep. Peter Meijer said.

But even if that’s true, it’s a reason to act firmly now, before things get worse. They won’t have less to fear if they allow Trump’s insurrection to continue growing.

The weekend also brought news of yet another attempt by Trump to coerce an official into overturning Georgia's election results. But one amazing thing about this weekend was that, following Trump’s permanent Twitter suspension on Friday night, we didn’t get a blow by blow of Trump’s moods and whims all weekend. It’s kind of weird and disorienting, to be honest, but also freeing and wonderful.

AOC Calls For Trump To Be Impeached – ‘We Came Close To Half Of The House Nearly Dying’

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) spoke out on Sunday to call for President Donald Trump to be removed from office due to the Capitol riots last week.

AOC Calls For Trump To Be Impeached

“I absolutely believe that impeachment should be scheduled for several reasons,” Ocasio-Cortez said on Sunday while appearing on ABC’s “This Week.”

“One, of course, our main priority is to ensure the removal of Donald Trump as president of the United States,” she added. “Every minute and every hour that he’s in office represents a clear and present danger not just to the United States Congress but frankly to the country.”

“But in addition to removal, we’re also talking about complete barring of the president, of Donald Trump from running for office ever again and in addition to that, the potential ability to prevent pardoning himself from those charges that he was impeached for,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. 

Related: Nancy Pelosi: After ‘Armed Insurrection’ House Could Impeach Trump Again

AOC Doubles Down 

Not stopping there, Ocasio-Cortez doubled down as she talked about supporters of Trump storming the Capitol last Wednesday.

“We have to understand that what happened on Wednesday was insurrection against the United States,” she said. “That is what Donald J. Trump engaged in, and that is what those who stormed the Capitol engaged in. The process of healing is separate and, in fact, requires accountability. And so if we allow insurrection against the United States to happen with impunity, with no accountability, we are inviting it to happen again. That’s how serious it is.”

“I don’t believe that perhaps my colleagues weren’t in that room, perhaps my colleagues were not fully present for the events on Wednesday, but we came close to half of the House nearly dying on Wednesday,” Ocasio-Cortez added.

“If a foreign head of state, if another head of state came in and ordered an attack on the United States Congress, would we say that should not be prosecuted? Would we say there should be no response to that? No. It’s an act of insurrection,” she concluded. “It’s an act of hostility, and we must have accountability because, without it, it will happen again.”

Democrats are set to officially launch their latest impeachment effort on Monday.

Read Next: Pelosi Calls For Trump To Be Prosecuted – Dubs Him ‘Deranged, Unhinged, Dangerous’

This piece was written by James Samson on January 10, 2021. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

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Harrowing attack steels Democrats ahead of uniquely consequential era of U.S. governance

If anyone ever doubted that American democracy was at least temporarily saved by voters defeating Donald Trump at the ballot box, they can lay that lingering doubt to rest. 

Just as people on the left have been warning for more than four years, Trump provided incontrovertible proof this week that he is an unmoored menace to society, an existential threat to the country, and a danger to the entire globe.

In fact, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi released a letter Friday morning reassuring her Democratic colleagues that she had spoken with military leadership about safeguarding the country's nuclear stockpile from Trump, it was likely as much about reassuring the world that someone reasonable was in charge as it was about comforting the American people.  

“This morning, I spoke to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley to discuss available precautions for preventing an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike,” Pelosi relayed. "The situation of this unhinged president could not be more dangerous, and we must do everything that we can to protect the American people from his unbalanced assault on our country and our democracy."

Jan. 6, 2021 will live in infamy—as will the four years in which Republican lawmakers coddled a would-be dictator who grew so confident in his iron grip on power that he ultimately declared war on the very government under his command. The absolutely harrowing episode has so far resulted in five deaths, including one Capitol Police officer who died of injuries he sustained during the violent insurrection incited by Trump and his henchmen. But it could have been far far worse. The military gear donned by the terrorists, the zip ties or "flex cuffs" some carried, and the gallows the mob erected outside the Capitol left no doubt they were there for blood. Nearly the entire line of succession was in the buildings they stormed—Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Senate President Pro Tempore Chuck Grassley, all of whom were whisked away to a secure location.

But as Rep. Sean Maloney of New York later explained on MSNBC, the rioters were one door away from capturing any number of congressional members in the Speaker’s Lobby as lawmakers made their way to the only remaining escape route in the building. The Washington Post obtained video of the scene, capturing the tense moment that resulted in the fatal shooting of one rioter without getting overly graphic. Other lawmakers, congressional staff, and journalists also narrowly escaped injury or being taken hostage as they huddled in offices and congressional chambers, sometimes donning gas masks and hugging the floor for cover. In essence, the nation was one door, one gunshot, one execution away from a moment where no one could have earthly known what would come next. And as dangerous as the territory is that we are now in, that precarious moment of unknowing easily could have precipitated a far more perilous period for our country and the world. 

And yet, within the same 24-hour period surrounding this riotous assault on U.S. governance, Democrats clinched the 50th Senate seat that secured their impending control of both chambers of Congress, while congressional lawmakers still managed to certify 306 electoral votes ensuring President-elect Joe Biden will indeed become commander in chief at noon on Jan. 20. 

At the same time, the Republican Party has been indefinitely thrown into an epic tailspin. Its future leadership is an open question. Its electoral viability is a complete mystery after the party managed to lose the House, Senate, and White House in a period of four years. Will Trump voters still show up at the polls in future elections? Will conservative-leaning suburbanites stick with a party that aided and abetted a president who sicced a violent mob on the U.S. Capitol? Maybe that's why the GOP is currently splitting up between staunch pro-seditionists and those who are abruptly and belatedly advocating for a break with Trump after four years of helping him destroy the country's Democratic norms at every possible turn. 

If there's a silver lining in all this upheaval, it's that Democrats are finally at the point where (forgive me) they seem to have no f'cks left to give. Instead of a lengthy internal debate over whether it makes sense to impeach a president who literally tried to get them killed while overthrowing the government, they are ploughing ahead, electoral consequences be damned. That's a far cry from where they started the week, with some top congressional Democrats expressing their hope to simply move beyond any lingering investigations of Trump and his administration. But Trump's deadly meltdown paired with the GOP's feckless refusal to confront his unfitness for office seems to have finally pushed Democratic lawmakers over the brink. 

Democrats coalesced around removing Trump from office by any means possible within 24 hours of the siege. They immediately pressured Pence and Trump's Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment. After Pence failed to even return the phone calls placed by Democratic leaders Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, Pelosi told House Democrats impeachment articles would be introduced on Monday

In a teaser clip of Pelosi's 60 Minutes interview set to air on Sunday, Pelosi went further than removal, calling for prosecution of Trump.

“Sadly, the person running the Executive Branch is a deranged, unhinged, dangerous president of the United States and it will be a number of days until we can be protected from him," Pelosi told Lesley Stahl, adding that "nothing" was off the table. "He has done something so serious that there should be a prosecution against him."

Outside of Trump and his cultists, absolutely no one wanted the horrific events that unfolded this week to take place. It was one of the darkest and most shameful moments in U.S. history. But the unimaginable episode also appears to have inspired a resolve among congressional Democrats that could prove a game changer heading into an era that may arguably be among the most consequential years of U.S. governance since the years surrounding the Civil Rights movement, the Great Depression, and even the Civil War.  

Watch the teaser for Pelosi’s 60 Minutes interview: 

NEWS: Nancy Pelosi calls for President Trump to be prosecuted. This is a preview of a @60Minutes interview airing this Sunday on CBS. ‘Sunday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi calls President Trump “deranged, unhinged, dangerous” and says he should be prosecuted. Lesley Stahl reports’ pic.twitter.com/tXbiG7VwJU

— David Begnaud (@DavidBegnaud) January 9, 2021

Maxine Waters Warns Trump May Want ‘Civil War’ – Wants Him ‘Stopped Dead In His Tracks, However We Do It’

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) spoke out on Friday to nonsensically warn that Donald Trump may try to start a “Civil War,” adding that he “has got to be stopped dead in his tracks,” whether it’s by impeachment or by invoking the 25th Amendment.

Waters Demands Investigation Into Capitol Police

Waters, who is chair of the House Financial Services Committee, has also called for an investigation to be launched into the U.S. Capitol Police’s failure to stop Wednesday’s riot at the Capitol building.

“There’s got to be prosecutions. There’s got to be accountability,” Waters said while appearing on “The Joe Madison Show” on SiriusXM.

“And of course, this president, who has lied his way all the way up, until this insurrection that he has caused, and the fact that we all, many of us believe he is trying to create a civil war, has got to be stopped dead in his tracks, however we can do it: whether it is Amendment 25 or whether it is a new way by bringing him up before the Congress,” Waters continued. 

The 25th Amendment allows for a president to be removed from office if the Vice President and the majority of the cabinet deem him incapable of carrying out the job, according to The Washington Times.

Related: Maxine Waters Outrageously Claims Trump Has Been ‘Compromised’ By Putin

Waters Doubles Down

Not stopping there, Waters also slammed U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund, who has already handed in his resignation. She said that she had already specifically asked Sound about security.

“[Sund] was telling us that he had it all under control. It turned out he had nothing under control. Nothing under control. And we were overrun,” said Waters.

“The Capitol of the United States of America, one of the most supposedly secure buildings in the country, was breached, and with them climbing the wall it looked like a Third World country overtake of the government,” she added. 

Related: MSNBC’s Joy Reid Claims Capitol Police Went Easy On ‘White’ Protesters, Ignores Woman Killed

She went on to add that she was afraid of snipers, so she asked him about the top of the buildings.

“[Y]ou know what I was thinking about? I was thinking about John Kennedy and Martin Luther King in opposite buildings and windows near the top of those buildings, and how they target people and they snipe and they could kill people,” she said. “And that’s what really was on my mind. I asked him about all of that.”

This piece was written by James Samson on January 8, 2021. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

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The post Maxine Waters Warns Trump May Want ‘Civil War’ – Wants Him ‘Stopped Dead In His Tracks, However We Do It’ appeared first on The Political Insider.

This is why Facebook is suddenly emboldened to deplatform Donald Trump

After years of pressure from outside and inside the company, Facebook has (for the time being) deplatformed wannabe fascist Donald Trump. 

We believe the risks of allowing President Trump to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great, so we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks. pic.twitter.com/JkyGOTYB1Z

— Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) January 7, 2021

This comes after years of frustration with Facebook’s refusal to police Trump’s most incendiary rhetoric. In June of last year, Facebook employees staged a virtual walkout to protest their company’s refusal to label Trump’s lies the way that Twitter had decided to do. “Personally, I have a visceral negative reaction to this kind of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric,” Zuckerberg said in a post to his Facebook page in response. “But I’m responsible for reacting not just in my personal capacity but as the leader of an institution committed to free expression.”

Yet those notions of “free expression” are suddenly moot. What changed? Well, the terrorist siege of the Capitol was clearly a factor, but there was likely an even bigger one: Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley is suddenly on the wrong side of history. 

No one has been more aggressive in attacking “Big Tech” and its supposed “censorship” of conservative voices than Hawley. 

Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, has emerged as a surprising Republican voice on those issues. The youngest working lawmaker in the Senate, Hawley has taken a lead on the ongoing investigations into Facebook, joining with Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) in February for a letter probing the company’s teen data collection practices, and penning legislation with Democrats that would extend more rigorous privacy protections for children. He’s also been outspoken in calling for changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, often seen as the central legal protection for online platforms.

Facebook may not like the scrutiny on its noxious data-collection policies, but that’s a bipartisan concern. The bigger danger was the last sentence above—Hawley’s advocacy for stripping social media companies of their Section 230 protections. 

As you might remember, Section 230 was the real reason that Trump vetoed the Pentagon/national security budget bill, the only veto to be overridden by Congress during his single term in office. It protects online platforms from legal liability of those writing on that platform. It’s literally the reason Daily Kos allows its community to exist and thrive. Without it, Facebook and Daily Kos and every other site with community generated content (including comments!) would be legally liable for everything posted on that site or platform. 

Section 230 is existential to Daily Kos, and it’s extra existential to Facebook. So conservatives have tried to use it as a cudgel to block the big social media companies from monitoring and limiting certain content—like the false bullshit and incendiary stuff that conservatives love to post. 

Now the notion that Facebook is anti-conservative is laughable, as can be seen by the platform’s most shared content on January 5: 

The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from: 1. Franklin Graham 2. Dan Bongino 3. Franklin Graham 4. Donald J. Trump 5. Franklin Graham 6. ABC News 7. Ben Shapiro 8. Occupy Democrats 9. The Dodo 10. Fox News

— Facebook's Top 10 (@FacebooksTop10) January 5, 2021

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, and 10 are all conservative voices. And I’m not cherry-picking, this Twitter account lists Facebook’s top 10 links every single day. The list is always dominated by politically conservative voices. In fact, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire blatantly breaks Facebook’s rules in promoting his material, yet Facebook has been too afraid to act, lest it give Hawley further ammunition for his anti-Section 230 crusade. 

Last week, Popular Information exposed how The Daily Wire has gained unprecedented distribution on Facebook through its relationship with Mad World News. Five large Facebook pages controlled by Mad World News expanded The Daily Wire's audience by millions through the coordinated posting of dozens of links from The Daily Wire each day.

Facebook previously said it had looked into the matter, found no evidence of a violation, and could not prove a financial relationship. The company now admits the two publishers are working together.

After denying what everyone knew to be obvious, Facebook finally admitted that Daily Wire was breaking its rules. And the response? “We are also warning Daily Wire and will demote them if we see this behavior continue.” Oh no. A warning. Click on that link and see how blatant Shapiro’s conduct has been. But Facebook did nothing. 

And similarly, Facebook refused to act on Trump, while its CEO Mark Zuckerberg regularly dined at the White House. 

Yet here we are today, with Facebook issuing perhaps the most aggressive deplatforming of the major social media outlets, calling the suspension “indefinite.” By all indications, it’ll last through the rest of Trump’s presidency. And if no one can control Trump now, imagine when he’s a private citizen again? He’ll be even worse, completely subsumed by QAnon conspiracy theories with little checks on his ability to vomit that crap on Twitter and Facebook. Without the protections of his office, there’ll be even less hesitation for those platforms to keep him around. Trump’s ability to do damage on Parler will be limited. 

But given Facebook’s fear of riling up conservative critics, wouldn’t deplatforming Trump, even temporarily, be problematic? Well, that’s where Josh Hawley comes into play. 

1. Republicans lost the Senate

Hawley’s ability to call for hearings and use the Senate majority as a platform for his anti-Facebook crusade is obviously degraded. Democrats will want to probe into Facebook for anti-trust and privacy violation issues, but there’s less appetite for an ideological effort to overturn Section 230. And while some Democrats have made noise about Section 230, they have far bigger priorities to deal with, and they will be more amenable to arguments against messing with it (or at least, protecting sites like this one with any changes). 

2. No one can pretend Trump’s Q-flavored rhetoric and supporters aren’t dangerous

Republicans and other Trump defenders claimed that no one took Trump literally, that it was all figurative! Turns out, the deplorables were absolutely taking his rhetoric literally. “Stand back and stand by” was literally a call to be ready for action. 

And people died as our own Capitol was taken over by terrorists, putting Congress and the vice president in grave mortal danger.  

3. And now, Josh Hawley is on the wrong side of history

I’ll have more to say on this in the coming days, but Wednesday’s siege of the Capitol changed everything. 

On Tuesday, Republicans were bought into the Trump wing of the Republican Party, doing their damndest to cater to the crazy deplorables. We saw this in the challenges to the electoral votes of Arizona, and the planned challenges to other states. Rudy Giuliani was even pressuring its allies in the Senate to challenge up to 10 states to gum up the works! Hawley and Cruz and others were tripping over themselves to prove the most Trumpy, looking toward the 2024 presidential election (as if Trump would bless anyone not named “Trump” as his successor). 

Then the siege happened, and everything has changed. Those gallows and zip ties weren’t just for Democrats. In fact, they seemed even more directed at Republicans and Vice President Mike Pence himself, traitors in the eyes of the deplorables. There was real fear in the statements put out by Republicans in the aftermath of the attack, doing little to tamp down on Democratic calls for 25th Amendment or impeachment solutions. In fact, some of them seemed to tacitly approve of them. 

When the dust cleared, Republican appetite for more challenges evaporated, yet there was one a-hole still pushing them—Josh Hawley, the same guy who had cheered on the terrorists moments before their attack began. He’s steadfastly refused to distance himself from the mob. He still sees them as his allies and pals and best path toward the 2024 nomination. He has no plans to give that up. 

Problem is, a big chunk of his party sees the deplorables as a problem—a problem electorally (they will further repel suburban voters and motivate core Democratic constituencies), and a personal safety problem. They created this monster, and it’s clear many Republicans have little appetite to keep feeding it.

So you can see Hawley’s problem, as he refuses to back off. Without even talking about the coming Republican civil war, it’s clear that Hawley’s personal brand is now far less daunting and scary than it was a mere two days ago. It’s as if Reps. Louie Gohmert or Jim Jordan were your chief nemesis. You can laugh them off as ideological cranks, once elevated by Trump, but now pushed back to back-bencher status. 

That’s not to say that Hawley won’t be a real threat moving forward, but he’s now marked as a deplorable at a time that even Republicans want to distance themselves from Trump and his deplorables. He’s lost credibility. And with that loss of credibility, he’s a lot less scary to Facebook. So much so, that it’s easy for them to say “that content is incendiary” and they ban it, not worried that Hawley can muster the political capital to do anything about it.