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Amy Davidson Sorkin/New Yorker:
A Second Trump Impeachment Could Answer More Questions About the Attack on the Capitol
Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, who voted to reject the Electoral College votes of Arizona and Pennsylvania, is among those Republicans now complaining that impeachment is divisive. (In a private, closed-door meeting of the House Republican caucus, McCarthy reportedly acknowledged that Trump has some responsibility for what happened on January 6th—a pathetic half-gesture that only raises the question of why McCarthy seems afraid to hold the President to account in public, and whether he is ready to renounce his own votes to overturn the Electoral College.) As Jamelle Bouie observed, in the Times, this sentiment is better understood as a threat to the country than as a desire for unity. The process will be as divisive or as unifying as the Republicans allow it to be. Seen from another angle, Pelosi is offering her Republican colleagues a chance to come together in a bipartisan way to make the point that the President should not instruct a crowd to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and “fight like hell”—a phrase quoted in the article of impeachment—against the certification of the legitimate winner of the election. Only a handful of House Republicans, notably Adam Kinzinger, of Illinois; Peter Meijer, of Michigan; and Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, seem likely to seize the opportunity—last week, after all, a majority of Republican House members voted to effectively disenfranchise the voters of Arizona and Pennsylvania. (Over the weekend, Meijer wrote of speaking to a colleague who said that he was objecting to the Electoral College tally only because he feared for the safety of his family.) But these are unpredictable days.
One way or another, it seems improbable that any trial in the Senate would begin before Trump leaves office. Even so, it would hardly be moot. In addition to removal from office, an available penalty after conviction is disqualification from holding federal office in the future; Trump could be barred from running in 2024. Again, a conviction would require a two-thirds majority of the Senate, which the Democrats don’t have. But the contours of the trial, and what might be revealed in the course of it, are not yet clear. There is much that we don’t know about what happened last week in Washington, and that we still need to know.
BuzzFeed:
There’s A Straight Line From Charlottesville To The Capitol
Wednesday’s attempted coup is just the natural extension of a presidency spent giving insurgents permission to come inside, kick their feet up, and tear down democracy.
That sense of open invitation was the mood for most of the day, even hours later, when the National Guard arrived in the evening to disperse what was left of the crowd. The rioters’ entrance into the Capitol building and Senate offices was casual, easy, with surprisingly little conflict for a group of people who were attempting a deadly coup in one of the largest democracies in the world. Even before Congress reconvened to finish the certification vote, there was plenty of hand-wringing about how this armed insurrection wasn’t reflective of the country. “This is wrong,” tweeted Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican from South Carolina. “This is not who we are.” But, really, if something simultaneously shocking and woefully unsurprising happens — with a near-immediate justification and approval from the president — maybe it’s time to accept that this is exactly what America has always been.
Richard North Patterson/Bulwark:
The Political Context of the Assault on the Capitol
Bonfires of grievance and dispossession in a country riven by alternate realities.
Demographic sorting and racial and cultural antagonisms have enlisted Trump’s base in a zero-sum war of subjugation against antagonists most will never meet, but with whom they can never compromise. A society so polarized cannot deal with its most urgent problems—or even acknowledge what they are.
Amid the ravages of COVID this schism has turned deadly: The resistance to public health measures has become a form of suicide which doubles as a lethal attack on others. More broadly, the political stasis bred of division is killing our capacity to master our collective future. Inevitably, such a system will disintegrate—or explode.
The paralysis reflects a deeper social pathology with multiple tributaries—the toxins of racial and cultural estrangement; the disintegration of communal bonds; the proliferation of mind-numbing misinformation; the accelerating gaps in wealth and opportunity; the increasingly ossified class system—which, in turn, erode faith in democracy as a means of resolving our problems. Running through this is the crabbed doctrine of shareholder capitalism which reduces human beings to disposable units of production divorced from the conditions that give life dignity: health, safety, security, opportunity.
Nicholas Grossman/Arc Digital:
You un-American, anti-democracy, lying sack of sh*t
“Liar or believer?” is often hard to answer. Trump-loving Congressmen Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan, Fox personality Sean Hannity, MAGA “youth activist” Charlie Kirk, and President Trump himself seem to really believe some of it (though can’t possibly believe it all).
With Ted Cruz it’s easy. There’s no doubt that the Republican Senator from Texas is fully aware that Trumpist claims of mass voter fraud are complete and utter bunk. He’s a Harvard-educated attorney, clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and taught law at UT Austin. He knows that Team Trump lost 61 court cases in their effort to overturn state election results, winning only one (a Pennsylvania case with no effect on the outcome). He knows, contra Trump’s whining, that lack of standing is a perfectly legitimate reason for courts to reject a case. And he knows that the time for legal challenges is over now that states have recounted and audited their votes, and certified Electoral College results.
Nicholas Grossman/Arc Digital:
QAnon Woke Up the Real Deep State
An open letter to QAnon, “stop the steal,” and other communities involved in the Capitol attack
To the QAnon community, and others involved in storming the Capitol:
The Deep State is real, but it’s not what you think. The Deep State you worry about is mostly made up; a fiction, a lie, a product of active imaginations, grifter manipulations, and the internet. I’m telling you this now because storming the Capitol building has drawn the attention of the real Deep State — the national security bureaucracy — and it’s important you understand what that means.
You attacked America. Maybe you think it was justified — as a response to a stolen election, or a cabal of child-trafficking pedophiles, or whatever — but it was still a violent attack on the United States. No matter how you describe it, that’s how the real Deep State is going to treat it.
The impact of that will make everything else feel like a LARP.
LARP is live action role-playing. After a few more repetitions, i won’t need to keep defining it.
Emily Gorcenski/Twitter:
Here’s the challenge with disrupting militia plots: most militia dudes are Dunning-Kruger levels of incompetent, but not Dunning-Kruger levels of dangerous.
So the problem is that militia culture is wrapped up in this sort of virtue signalling nonstop. It’s all around trying to project yourself as a leader, a military expert, a tactical master, based entirely on what you’ve read in Tom Clancy novels
So a militia might say things like, alright, here’s the plan. We’re gonna get 1000 guys, and we’re gonna set up a barricade at each of the three entrances to the statehouse, and then we’re gonna neutralize the security forces.
Super scary stuff! Just one problem.Where are they gonna get 1000 guys? How are they going to implement a Command and Control structure for 1000 guys? What are they gonna make the barricades out of?
Kurt Bardella/USA Today:
Trump doesn’t deserve post-presidential benefits. Remove him and ensure he won’t get them.
In spite of the U.S. Capitol siege incited by President Donald Trump, Republican leaders in Congress continue to oppose any meaningful action to hold him accountable for his seditious conduct. They seem to think that in spite of his dangerous and undemocratic behavior, he should still be the beneficiary of taxpayer-financed perks for the rest of his life.
It has become clear that Republicans are trying to run out the clock on the Trump presidency, using his short-timer status to justify their inaction. “I firmly believe impeachment would further destroy our ability to heal and start over,” tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy maintained that impeaching Trump so close to the end of his term “will only divide our country more.”
For the record, I don’t remember Republicans in Congress worrying about healing the country when they created the Select Committee on Benghazi for the sole purpose of undermining Hillary Clinton, the Democrats’ leading presidential prospect in the runup to the 2016 race. Does this mean that if there was more time in the Trump presidency, they’d magically be for impeaching him? Last time I checked, they had the chance to impeach him a year ago, and they refused.
Caity Weaver/Twitter:
This is why we stan local news!
Support your local paper!!!! For the love of God!!!!!
?LoOoOcal news! Interesting news about the loOoOocals!?
Tennessee said ? I know that man! That’s the governor’s pastor!
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