Democrats are still cooking up their GOP colleagues who favor Trump’s efforts to discredit the election and blame them for the contribution to the atmosphere that inspired the crowd. Republicans largely abandoned the debate, but as Democrats began sharpening tactics to marginalize the 138 Republicans of the House who voted to reject some of the 2020 results, some began to vote more to brush. And during Thursday’s hearing, the dam broke.
Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) Accuses the Democrats of an ‘outrageous abuse of power’ of ‘giving rise to a political war’ and an attempt to ‘criminalize’ GOP disagreement. He compared the relations between the parties in the House to a ‘Cold War’ which would lead to ‘mutually assured destruction’.
When it was his turn, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) Mocked the ‘waterfall of falsified indignation and outrage’, emphasizing that no legislators were actually punished for their words or their voices, but that it was certainly a violent revolt incited. was different from making offensive comments.
Raskin further characterized the modern Republican Party as a ‘religious cult’ that has shrunk in the service of Trump, who he calls a ‘snowflake’, as he tries to ‘cancel’ the 2020 election, while his GOP allies shout canceled about ‘culture’.
“You invented the cancellation culture,” he said. “This right-wing cancellation culture has gone on a rampage.”
Johnson responded by asking Raskin to withdraw his attacks on Trump, especially the snowflake.
“The former president’s defamation … obviously violates the rules,” Johnson said.
The conversations were indicative of the entire trial, where the testimony of four witnesses was largely a reflection. The witnesses largely agreed that the House has the power to punish and even expel its own members under the Constitution, but that the process should only be used in extremely rare and clear cases when a super-majority – and not just one political faction – consider it necessary.
Republicans, however, see the trial as part of an increasingly clear attempt by Democrats to begin looking for ways to punish those they see as responsible for the Jan. 6 uprising. The attempt, they said, began a few days ago when Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-California) posted a second page of tweets by IDP lawmakers questioning the integrity of the 2020 election. Johnson accused Lofgren, who sits on the judicial committee but not the subcommittee that met Thursday, of “outrageous abuse of power” and said it may have violated the House Rules, as she instructed her personal office staff.
“It’s a Rubicon being crossed over here,” he said.
He and other Republicans on the panel also argued that Democrats intended to punish Republicans who voted to challenge the results in certain states, although many of them, including Raskin, did the same in 2017.
Democrats forcibly rejected this argument.
“No reasonable person can in good faith compare what happened on January 6, 2017 with what happened on January 6, 2021, when the President of the United States, aided and enchanted by members of Congress, staged an uprising incited led to an armed attack on the US Congress that resulted in the deaths of 6 people, ‘said Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) Said. ‘On January 6, 2021, many of us here today personally experienced how fragile our democracy is. Yet we are sitting here today, and some of us are acting as if what happened on January 6, 2021, never happened. ‘
Hank Johnson then read a definition of ‘inciting conspiracy’, a federal criminal offense, and asked if a member of Congress who committed the offense should be expelled from the House.
One of the most tense exchanges took place when Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) chaired the panel, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), Complained that he Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) Accused during a CNN interview of being in alliance with the Capitol rioters and of possibly helping some of them explore through the tunnels. Cohen intervened and said he never said he was sure he saw Boebert with some of the prospective insurgents, but he saw her in a tunnel with a group of people in the days leading up to January 6th. Boebert vehemently denied leading any potential rioters through the Capitol complex.
Jordan refused to accept Cohen’s explanation.
“You know what you did, Mr. Chairman,” he said.
Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), A progressive freshman lawmaker who has drawn some of the sharpest Republican attacks, has accused some of her colleagues of inciting death threats against her.
“It dawned on me early on that not all members are united to do the people’s work in the house of the people,” she said. “A lot is here to distract, distract and disrupt.”
When the trial comes to an end, Cohen returns to Mike Johnson’s charge that Raskin violated the rules by attacking Trump. He noted that although Trump was president, the rule could possibly apply.
“If you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet,” he said, referring to the “West Side Story” language. But now that he has left office, Cohen added, Trump is a fair game for Raskin’s harshest comments.
That theater, ironically, attracted one of the only glimmers of overall good humor from the audience.
Michelle Fischbach, a freshman from Minnesota, said I did not want to complicate the trial, “but I just want to say how much I appreciate your reference to ‘West Side Story’.”
The remark made Cohen laugh out loud, ending the trial by using a mini-Louisville Slugger baseball bat as a hammer.