#Raphael warnock legacy racial tyranny full
#Raphael warnock legacy racial tyranny pro
#Raphael warnock legacy racial tyranny trial

#Raphael warnock legacy racial tyranny full

Instead, they chose a course that they had to know would be interpreted by the fantasists as their full agreement: as support for the proposition that Trump had been cheated out of reelection, that there was a real prospect to “stop the steal,” and that other Republicans were just being weak when they refused to take action. The flipside is that they would have had to give up the reward they were after, too, and might well have faced the wrath of Trump and those core supporters.

#Raphael warnock legacy racial tyranny pro

But the argument they made - that pro forma objections to certification have already become part of our politics, with no serious pushback from Democrats, and Republicans should not be judged more harshly for participating in the trend - would have had some weight.īut they would have deserved a lot less criticism than they have gotten, and I think they would have received a lot less too. In that case, their conduct would have still deserved criticism: Following, and building on, the Barbara Boxer precedent was not something Republicans should do. (This is as good a place as any to note that Cruz is an old friend.) They could have actually rebuked Trump for his poisonous fantasies, acknowledged that Biden had won, and said that they were going to object to some states’ certifications because of the legal issues they had identified. To think through the choice Cruz and Hawley made, consider an alternative course they could have taken. They were, they might even have thought, channeling those supporters’ feelings in a better direction than the president. The senators probably reasoned that they had found a political and moral sweet spot: They weren’t saying anything false, what they were saying was (somewhat) defensible on the merits, and they would win credit from some of Trump’s most fervent supporters, and from the president himself. To listen to Hawley’s speech in the Senate the night of the riot, you would have thought the marchers were just people who got carried away by their fervor for following the Pennsylvania state constitution. There were some solid grounds, they added, for such doubts, raising specific issues such as the legal propriety of the Pennsylvania legislature’s liberalization of absentee voting. There were widespread doubts about the election that needed to be allayed, they said. They didn’t say Brad Raffensperger had failed in his job.īut they didn’t deny any of these falsehoods either, even as President Trump and other allies of his were eagerly spreading them.

They didn’t say Trump won any of the states that went to Biden, or that rampant voter fraud had put the Democrats over the top. They didn’t say that Trump had actually won reelection, let alone in a landslide. Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley did not spread crazy conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines. Policy in the Middle East on Capitol Hill, September 24, 2020. Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaks during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on U.S. Trump’s offense on Wednesday was incredibly grave, but it’s easy to see how this response ends up becoming a fiasco. How motivated would Senate Republicans be to pursue the matter at that point? It would still be a painful vote for many of them, and the Trump presidency would already be in the rearview mirror. It is technically possible to impeach an official after he has left office, but, in sheer political terms, that would presumably strike people as at the least very odd and perhaps as vindictive.

#Raphael warnock legacy racial tyranny trial

If not, is the idea that the trial would take place after Trump left office in Chuck Schumer’s senate? Is it remotely plausible, even if McConnell were motivated to try to do it, that a Senate trial would take place immediately after the House passed articles and finish in a matter of days? (The Senate is in recess until the 19th, by the way, so it would have to come back explicitly for this.) The middle of next week puts us a week away from Biden’s inauguration. But in a noon phone call, some others cautioned that Democrats needed to pause to consider the implications. Trump of his duties, House Democrats were prepared to act on impeachment by the middle of next week. 4 Democrat, said that if Vice President Mike Pence would not invoke the 25th Amendment to forcibly relieve Mr. Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the No. So Democrats are sounding more serious about impeachment, but the timing is obviously an enormous problem.