It’s obvious that many Republicans—including Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz in the Senate, and dozens in the House, including minority leader Kevin McCarthy—actively inflamed Donald Trump’s white supremacist mob and encouraged their deadly assault on the Capitol. However, it now seems that some Republicans in Congress may have done more than knowingly fan the flames. In the days since the rotunda was cleared of debris and the halls were cleaned of the literal human excrement smeared there by Trump’s biggest fans, information has appeared that indicates some Republicans may have actively been involved in planning or carrying out the assault.
On Tuesday evening, Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill conducted a Facebook live session for her constituents during which explained her support resulting in calling on Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment. During that webcast, Sherrill made an astounding accusation. She claimed to have witnessed Republican members of Congress leading Trump supporters on, not a tour, but a “reconnaissance” of the Capitol. “We can’t have a democracy,” said Sherrill, “if members of Congress are actively helping the president overturn the elections results.”
“Not only do I intend to see that the president is removed and never runs for office again and doesn’t have access to classified material, I also intend to see that those members of Congress who abetted him; those members of Congress who had groups coming through the Capitol that I saw on Jan. 5—a reconnaissance for the next day; those members of Congress that incited this violent crowd; those members of Congress that attempted to help our president undermine our democracy; I’m going to see they are held accountable, and if necessary, ensure that they don’t serve in Congress.”
Sherrill has not so far detailed what she means by this reconnaissance, or given names of Republicans who were involved. However, it’s become increasingly clear in the days since the insurrection that the situation at the Capitol was much more dire than was originally reported.
The accusations of involvement by Republican members of Congress aren’t just coming from Democrats, they’re coming from those who were involved in the assault.
As The Washington Post reports, Ali Alexander, the right-wing activist who formed the “Stop the Steal” movement, did so with the help of three Republican members of Congress: Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks, and Paul Gosar. “We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting,” said Alexander. Biggs’ staff has denied any contact with Alexander—but the involvement of all three Republicans is certainly worthy of investigation.
Completely disowning Alexander’s claims could be difficult. He and Gosar appeared together at a “Stop the Steal” rally in Phoenix on December 19. At that same rally, Alexander played a recorded message from Biggs, who he described as a “friend.” In both the live and recorded messages, Gosar and Biggs singled out January 6 for action.
Gosar would go on to promote other “Stop the Steal” events more than a dozen times, as well as pumping out tweets and emails promoting the January 6 gathering in D.C. Typical of Gosar’s statements was an op-ed on the site Revolver, Gosar called simply counting the legal electoral vote a “Third World coup d’etat.” According to Gosar, Biden’s win involved “statistically impossible” spikes in the voting and “We will not tolerate this.” Far from distancing himself from Alexander’s group, Gosar claimed ownership. “As many of you know, I helped organize the very first ‘Stop the Steal’ rally,” he wrote. “… Patriotic warriors joined together to gather evidence and tell the Left we will not accept a coup and a usurper in the White House.”
All three Republicans continued to be involved in “Stop the Steal.” As The New York Times reports, In the hours immediately before the assault on the Capitol, Brooks addressed the “Stop the Steal” rally in D.C. “Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass,” said Brooks. “Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America? Louder! Will you fight for America?”
Gosar, Biggs, and Brooks are far from the only Republicans connected to Alexander’s group, or the only ones who both inflamed Trump supporters through lies about the election and demands to attend the January 6 event.
On December 30, Alexander tweeted what would happen if Congress voted to approve the count of the Electoral College vote. “If they do this, everyone can guess what me and 500,000 others will do to that building. 1776 is always an option.” The use of “1776” appeared in a number of statements from hard-line Trump representatives right up to the insurrection. Both Q-supporting Reps Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert directly called the insurrection an “1776 moment.”
On Tuesday evening, The Washington Post reports that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she feared some of her Republican colleagues would not only open the doors to rioters, but direct them straight to her. “I can tell you that I had a very close encounter where I thought I was going to die,” she said. “I did not know if I was going to make it to the end of that day alive.” According to Ocasio-Cortez, she can’t go into specifics because of security concerns. But it’s clear there were very good reasons to be concerned. And it’s clear that multiple Republicans in both the House and Senate did more than enough to justify removing them from the halls of Congress. In fact, several of them may well deserve a new office—in very small room surrounded by bars.
Was perusing Politwoops and noticed… On Jan. 3, GOP Rep. Pete Sessions tweeted that he had a great meeting with “folks from ‘Stop the Steal'” and that he “encouraged them to keep fighting.” Tweet was deleted 4 days later, on Jan. 7, after insurrectionists stormed the Capitol. pic.twitter.com/HeZgyXHjQU
The House convened at 9 AM ET for the second impeachment of Donald Trump. And this time around, several Republicans are voting to impeach, after Trump incited an attack on the Capitol in an effort to block Congress from doing its job and finalizing the election results. After that attack, far more Republicans still voted to block the true election results on Trump’s behalf than will vote to impeach him, but go figure, sending a mob of insurrectionists to threaten the lives of your own vice president and members of Congress will get at least a few Republicans to admit that there’s a problem.
Republicans Reps. Liz Cheney, John Katko, Adam Kinzinger, Fred Upton, and Jaime Herrera Beutler have all publicly said they will vote to impeach. “The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” Cheney, the third-ranking House Republican, said in a statement announcing her decision. “There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”
Kinzinger asked “If these actions . . . are not worthy of impeachment, then what is an impeachable offense?”
These Republicans are expected to be joined by several others, but the final number is not yet known.
There’s a single article of impeachment, for “incitement of insurrection,” under debate. Trump “gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of Government,” it reads. “He threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of Government. He thereby betrayed his trust as President, to the manifest injury of the people of the United States.”
The theory of how this will proceed, per CNN’s Manu Raju, is after an hour of debate, there will be two procedural votes, then two hours of debate, followed by the vote. In reality it will probably take longer than that implies. A vote is expected Wednesday evening.
After that, impeachment will go to the Senate for a trial, with Majority Leader-for-now Mitch McConnell reportedly not whipping votes to protect Trump, and supposedly himself open to voting to convict. Believe it when you see it, because McConnell would definitely pretend to be open to something like this to protect his reputation with the media, but then again, he too was under threat from Trump’s thugs and is reportedly very angry about it—and, presumably, about having lost his Senate majority.
You can watch the House proceedings on most television news stations or stream at the House clerk’s website, C-SPAN and YouTube, among other sites.
If you’ve heard it once from the sedition party, you’ve probably heard it a hundred times already: Democrats’ impeachment is horribly divisive at a time when the country needs healing and unity.
Thanks, GOP, for coming around to the unity argument more than four years too late, but it turns out you’re wrong. Again. In actuality, the Democrats’ steely eyed resolve to hold Donald Trump to account whether through the 25th Amendment or impeachment/conviction has proven to be a uniquely clarifying and unifying moment for the country.
Here’s a brief list of all the different entities that have rallied around the effort to put a final nail in this dark chapter of American history by punishing Trump in no uncertain terms:
Democrats in both the House and Senate, with few defections and uncharacteristic unity, are unapologetically focused—clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose
The FBI and Department of Justice, the nation’s two chief law enforcement agencies, are tracking down and promising to arrest hundreds of individuals who took part in last week’s insurrection
Corporate titans like Hallmark, MasterCard, and American Express—not necessarily known for their conscientious political giving—have halted political donations to the sedition party for the time being
In a dramatic shift, tech giants such as Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and Google have effectively deplatformed and simultaneously defanged Trump for the foreseeable future
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, made up of the heads of each military branch, issued an unprecedented joint statement Tuesday condemning the “sedition and insurrection” at the U.S. Capitol
In early public opinion polls, more Americans back impeachment this time around than did the last time, with a weighted average of 13 polls showing 52% support for impeachment to 42% who oppose it—up from an average of about 47%/48% who supported impeachment following Trump’s traitorous Ukraine call. Those numbers will almost surely get worse for Trump as more people and entities from all walks of life dump Trump. In Civiqs polling, Trump is headed toward the lowest job approval ratings of his entire tenure. At just 40% since the last update on Jan. 8, he looks to be tanking. Trump hasn’t fallen below 40% on Civiqs since early 2017 after Republicans failed twice to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, Rep. Liz Cheney, and various other GOP lawmakers are coming around to the idea of supporting Trump’s impeachment. McConnell never does anything out of a sense of duty or patriotism, but he’s clearly looking at the polling, the Georgia runoff results, and the defections among corporate donors and deciding that being on the right side of history is a better place for Republicans to be if the party is going to survive.
So apparently, impeachment only looks “divisive” to GOP seditionists like Reps. Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, and others. They made the wrong bet, as did Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
Two years ago, in one of the most colossal upsets of the midterm blue wave, Democrat Lauren Underwood, then a 32-year-old nurse who’d never sought office before, defeated Republican Rep. Randy Hultgren in Illinois’ 14th District, making her the youngest Black woman ever elected to Congress. Last year, she drew a far weaker opponent in perennial candidate Jim Oberweis, a state senator who was so despised by his own party that a major Republican super PAC tried to defeat him in the primary, but Underwood wound up winning by a closer-than-expected 51-49 margin.
That spread was similar to Biden’s 50-48 win, but that take represented Biden’s biggest district-level improvement in the state on Hillary Clinton’s performance four years ago, when she lost the 14th to Donald Trump 49-45. In a sign of just how much things have changed, this district’s predecessor, also numbered the 14th, was once held by child molester and former Republican House Speaker Denny Hastert before his resignation following the GOP wipeout in the 2006 elections.
Biden also saw a sizable jump in the neighboring 6th District, one rung closer to the city of Chicago, which Democrats also picked up in 2018. That seat, however, is now all but out of reach for Republicans: Biden won it by a sizable 52-43 margin, after Clinton carried it 50-43. Democratic Rep. Sean Casten secured a second term with a similar 53-45 victory.
Democrats were less successful in the one Illinois district that outside groups targeted in 2020, the 13th in the central part of the state. While Trump’s margin declined slightly, from 50-44 to 51-47, Republican Rep. Rodney Davis defeated Democrat Betsy Dirksen Londrigan 54-46, considerably better than his narrow 50.4-49.6 escape in their first matchup two years earlier.
Team Blue was lucky, however, to avoid a major humiliation in the 17th District in the northwestern corner of the state. That seat is occupied by former DCCC chair Cheri Bustos, who won re-election just 52-48 over an unheralded Republican foe, Esther Joy King, after deep-pocketed super PACs on both sides poured money into the race just before Election Day. But Bustos actually ran ahead of the top of the ticket, as Trump once again carried the 17th, this time by a 50-48 margin—a slight increase on his 47.4-46.6 win in 2016. With Biden flipping the 14th District, that leaves Bustos as the only member of Illinois’ delegation to represent a district carried by the opposite party’s presidential candidate.
Biden’s 57-41 statewide victory was very similar to Clinton’s 55-38 win, but his success in the suburbs was offset by a decline in Latino and Black areas of Chicago. The district that saw the biggest drop in the margin was the 4th, a majority-Latino seat represented by Democratic Rep. Chuy Garcia, which Biden won 81-17 versus 82-13 for Clinton. Similar dips took place in the 1st and 7th, which are predominantly Black. Biden still won each of these districts in a romp, but his weaker performance mirrors a similar slump in Black and Latino neighborhoods in other states.
Senate
●CA-Sen: Not that anyone was expecting otherwise, but Democrat Alex Padilla, who will fill Kamala Harris’ Senate seat as soon as she’s sworn in as vice president, has confirmed that he’ll run for election to a full six-year term next year.
Governors
●NJ-Gov: That was fast: Former New Jersey Republican Party chair Doug Steinhardt, who announced a bid for governor just a month ago—and left his post as head of the state GOP to do so—has now dropped out of the race. Steinhardt claimed that “unforeseen professional obligations have made it untenable for me to continue,” but the New Jersey Globe suggests that former Assemblyman Jack Ciattarelli’s consolidation of party support in several key counties was an important factor in Steinhardt’s departure.
Ciatterelli hasn’t completely cleared the field just yet, though. Former Somerset County Commissioner Brian Levin says he’s still considering a bid for the GOP nomination and will make up his mind this week. (Until the start of this year, the position of county commissioner had been known in New Jersey as “freeholder.” However, because of the term’s association with slavery, lawmakers passed a bill last year to replace it.)
●NM-Gov, NM-01: It seems that Republican Mark Ronchetti, whose name surfaced as a possible candidate for governor or Congress following his closer-than-expected 52-46 loss in last year’s Senate race, has given up the campaign trail for the TV studio. Joe Monahan reports that Ronchetti, who’d been a meteorologist for an Albuquerque news station before his Senate bid, returned to his old job on Monday, delivering the weather forecast with little fanfare. While many other TV news personalities have run for office before, we can’t recall one who’s later gone back to broadcasting. If you can think of someone, let us know!
●VA-Gov: The field seeking the GOP nomination for Virginia’s governorship this year is getting more crowded: Sergio de la Peña, a former official in Trump’s Defense Department, just joined the race, while an aide to wealthy finance executive Glenn Youngkin says a formal campaign kickoff is coming this week. Already running are state Sen. Amanda Chase and Del. Kirk Cox. Republicans previously decided to select their nominee through a convention rather than a traditional primary.
House
●LA-02: New Orleans City Councilwoman Helena Moreno said Tuesday that she would not run in the special election to succeed her fellow Democrat, Cedric Richmond. The filing deadline for the March all-party primary is Jan. 22, so the field will be set before long.
●NJ-03: Republican Assemblyman Ryan Peters, who last month sounded like he might be gearing up to challenge sophomore Democratic Rep. Andy Kim, has decided not to seek re-election to the legislature this year. While such a move might normally presage a bid for higher office in a state like New Jersey, where the fact that state elections take place in odd-numbered years can pose an obstacle to running for Congress, it seems instead that Peters is giving up on politics for now.
Citing his obligations as “a father, husband, coach, Naval officer and volunteer,” Peters said in a statement that he feels compelled “to shift where and how I should spend the limited hours we have each day.” The New Jersey Globe added that Peters “has no plans to run” against Kim next year. Of course, that could always change, but for the moment at least, we’re counting Peters out.
Judges
●PA Supreme Court: Democrats currently hold a 5-2 majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, but they could strengthen their grip further in November because Republican Justice Thomas Saylor will hit the mandatory retirement age of 75 this year, creating an open seat.
At least two Democrats and one Republican who currently sit on the Superior Court, the more prominent of the state’s two intermediate appellate courts, are already running for Saylor’s seat, while the AP reports that one GOP judge on Pennsylvania’s other appellate court, the Commonwealth Court, is considering. Primaries are scheduled for May 18, though state parties will convene before then to consider endorsements, which could clear the field on either side.
Democrats won a trio of races to flip the court in 2015, which opened the way for a string of decisions protecting voting rights, including a major ruling in 2018 that struck down the state’s GOP-drawn congressional map as an illegal partisan gerrymander. Those rulings have, however, ignited unending fury from Republicans, who have abandoned the compact at the heart of every democracy and ceased to regard the court as legitimate.
To strike back, they’ve proposed an amendment to the state constitution that would effectively gerrymander the Supreme Court as well as the Superior and Commonwealth courts by electing judges via districts—that Republicans would craft—rather than statewide. There’s a good chance GOP lawmakers will place the measure on the ballot this year, possibly as soon as the May primary, though even if voters pass it, it would not impact elections this fall.
Mayors
●Boston, MA Mayor: Several more Bostonians have expressed interest in competing in this year’s contest to succeed Mayor Marty Walsh, who is Joe Biden’s nominee for secretary of labor. Police Commissioner William Gross, who is the first Black person to hold this post, confirmed on Monday that he was considering after an unnamed source told WBZ he was “90%” likely to run.
City Councilor Michael Flaherty also acknowledged his interest this week, though he said that Gross’ decision would factor into his own. Flaherty ran for this post back in 2009 against incumbent Thomas Menino and lost 57-43, which was the closest that Boston’s longest serving mayor ever came to losing. John Barros, the city’s chief of economic development, also said he was looking at another run. Barros competed in the crowded 2013 race to succeed Menino and took sixth place with 8% of the vote.
One big question looming over the race, though, is whether there would be a special election for the final months of Walsh’s term in addition to the regularly-scheduled contest this fall. Should Walsh resign by March 5, the city charter would require a special take place 120 to 140 days after his departure. However, City Councilor Ricardo Arroyo, who says he won’t run, is planning to introduce a proposal on Wednesday to waive this rule, though the legislature would need to sign off on any action by the City Council.
City Council President Kim Janey would become mayor following Walsh’s resignation, and she could benefit from a few extra months of incumbency if she decides to run in her own right.
●Fort Worth, TX Mayor: City Councilman Brian Byrd announced Monday that he would run in the May 1 nonpartisan race to succeed retiring Mayor Betsy Price, a fellow Republican.
Before Byrd launched his campaign, a 2016 clip surfaced of him urging the local school board to repeal a policy aimed at helping transgender youth that Byrd dismissed as “a destructive worldview.” Byrd defended himself this week, arguing, in the words of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Luke Ranker, that he had been “mostly concerned about elements of the policy that would bar parents and guardians from discussions about a student’s gender identity.” Byrd added, “There’s no place for discrimination in the city of Fort Worth anywhere.”
●St. Louis, MO Mayor: Show Me Victories, a Democratic pollster that says it is not working for anyone involved in the March 2 nonpartisan primary, is out with the first survey we’ve seen of this contest, which will be conducted using the “approval voting” system. Aldermanic President Lewis Reed takes first with 30%, while City Treasurer Tishaura Jones leads Alderman Cara Spencer 28-11 for the second spot in the April 6 general. Republican Andrew Jones, who is also the only non-Democratic candidate on the ballot, brings up the rear with 5%.
Approval voting allows voters to cast as many votes in the primary as there are candidates, with up to one vote per candidate. However, Show Me Victories finds that 59% of respondents intend to select just one contender, while only 21% say they plan to back multiple candidates.
●St. Petersburg, FL Mayor: On Tuesday, former City Councilwoman Darden Rice kicked off her long-anticipated bid to succeed termed-out Mayor Rick Kriseman, a fellow Democrat. Rice would be the first woman to hold this post since Corinne Freeman left office in 1985, as well as the city’s first gay mayor.
Grab Bag
●Where Are They Now?: The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that former Republican Gov. Rick Snyder and several former top aides would soon be charged by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel for their role in the Flint water crisis, which poisoned the majority-Black city with lead-tainted water and led to the outbreak of disease starting in 2014. The AP said it “could not determine the nature of the charges” and Nessel’s office declined to elaborate except to say that it would “share more as soon as we’re in a position to do so.”
This week, hosts Markos Moulitsas and Kerry Eleveld were joined on The Brief by two guests: Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who talked about the attempted terrorist coup at the Capitol, another economic stimulus package for coronavirus relief, and priorities under the Biden administration; and Adam Jentleson, former Deputy Chief of Staff to former Sen. Harry Reid and author of the new book “Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate,” who shared his thoughts on the shifting makeup of the Senate, the emergence of a new centrist Republican contingent in Congress, and ending the filibuster.
Sen. Schatz kicked off the episode by reflecting on last week’s attempted violent coup by Trump supporters and discussing what’s at stake as Democrats move forward with impeachment proceedings and welcome Joe Biden as the new president. In the aftermath of last week’s violence in the Capitol, Schatz emerged with an even stronger resolve to ensure that democratic processes would continue as normal in the face of threats and other acts of intimidation, saying, “We weren’t going to allow an attempted insurrection to intimidate us or to prevent us from discharging our constitutional duties.”
On priorities, Schatz is passionate about climate action, but he believes a COVID-19 relief package is the most crucial priority at this time—which is especially important for the millions of Americans who are jobless and struggling to make ends meet. He also believes that it is not contradictory for Congress to work on impeachment and also help the Biden administration carry out its policy goals within the first few months of his presidency:
I guess I just want to reject as publicly as I can this premise that the Senate can or should only do one thing at a time. The amount of damage that has been done to American institutions, and to Americans, is just too vast for to say, ‘Well, I mean, can we just fit that into a reconciliation bill? I don’t know.’ And the framing, even among liberals, has always been sort of that Rahm Emanuel conversation with Barack Obama: Do you want to do healthcare, or do you want to do immigration, or do you want to do climate, and in what order, because you know, you’ve only have so much political capital you can spend? … I really do think that we should reject that thinking.
In thinking about the impeachment process and passing legislation during the next four years under the Biden administration, Schatz also criticized another roadblock that has been normalized, which is the slow pace of passing legislation — making Congress less efficient: “Our inability to process legislation quickly is a huge part of the problem in the United State Senate.”
Next, the pair welcomed Jentleson onto the show, a veteran U.S. Senate staffer who weighed in on what the new chamber dynamic will like be now that Democrats have regained the majority after last week’s victories in the Georgia runoffs. But even with the majority, Democrats could find themselves obstructed due to the filibuster. To Markos’ question about whether or not Republicans might join in to help bring an end to the filibuster, Jentleson said:
You can sort of see this centrist party taking shape before our eyes, and mainly taking shape in the Senate, where you have Murkowski, Collins … Romney, and on our side, Manchin and King, and the thing about majority rule is that it would actually dramatically empower that group of centrist Republicans. That’s, you know, not my goal here. But it is still a fact that in a majority-rule Senate, those people, like Murkowski, are far more powerful than they would be in a sixty-vote Senate. In a sixty-vote Senate, they’re just one faction among many that you’d have to assemble to get to sixty. In a majority-vote Senate, they are the ones straddling that threshold, and they’ll be the kingmakers on every single bill.
When a minority of the Senate represents as little as 11% of the U.S. population, Jentleson emphasized, the filibuster process can result in particularly skewed policy results. Even the framers of the Constitution understood this:
Fundamentally, the problem that we face, and the reason Democrats are going to face obstruction from Republicans—and the reason that Biden’s agenda is likely to be blocked—is that Republicans will simply use this power to force a sixty-vote hurdle and block everything the Democrats want to do. And so reforming all the hours, and all that stuff, I don’t oppose it. But it doesn’t fix the fundamental problem—which is taking away the power from the minority to block the majority from doing anything … The reason that is such an important dynamic is that we live in such a polarized environment where … once side succeeds by making the other fail.
Ironically, this is exactly what the framers foresaw when they argued vehemently against imposing a supermajority threshold in the Senate. They wrote in the Federalist Papers that you can’t give what they called a ‘pertinacious minority’ the ability to block the majority, because if you did, they would be unable to resist that temptation, and they would use it to embarrass the majority repeatedly. So they knew exactly what was going to happen—they foresaw Mitch McConnell, they saw him coming … We have to take the option away from the minority to just block the majority for the purposes of making them look bad, and then the minority rides voter discontent back to power in the next election.
✌ A president who wakes up and the first thing on his mind is his country, not his Twitter feed
✌ A competent cabinet, none of whom have degrees in grifting or ransacking
✌ The White House Science Fair
Continued…
✌ Democratic control of the Executive and Legislative branches…at the same time!
✌ A First Lady whose resting face isn’t a creepy sneer-scowl hybrid and who doesn’t wear clothing boasting of the fact that she doesn’t care
✌ Membership in the Paris Climate Accord and respect for our NATO allies
✌ A press secretary who tells the truth
✌ 15-flush toilets
✌ Senate Committee chairwomen and men with a ‘D” after their name
✌ The nuclear launch codes in the possession of a stable person
✌ POTUS and FLOTUS attending the Kennedy Center Honors again
✌ An independent Justice Department
✌ Dogs—and a cat—running around the White House
✌ Just getting shit done
And now, our feature presentation…
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Cheers and Jeers for Wednesday, January 13, 2021
Note: Today is Wednesday the 13th. No need for any special precautions, but it’s as good a day as any to take a few minutes to check up on the condition of the porn collection in your panic room. Remember: mildew is not your friend. —Clarence Thomas
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By the Numbers:
1 week!!!
Weeks ’til inauguration day: One!!!
Days ’til the Perseverance rover lands on Mars: 36
Percent of Americans polled by Gallup who describe themselves as “totally” conservative, moderate, and liberal: 36%, 35%, 25%
Percent of Americans polled by ABC News-Ipsos who blame Trump for last Wednesday’s coup attempt: 67%
Trump job approval in the new Quinnipiac poll: 33%
Number of jobs lost in December, via the Labor Department’s latest report of the Trump presidency: -140,000
Percent chance that GM’s new logo is designed to draw attention to its new focus on electric cars: 100%
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Mid-weekRapture Index: 184 (including 4 false prophets and 1 important point for the seditionists by God). Soul Protection Factor 24 lotion is recommended if you’ll be walking amongst the heathen today.
CHEERS to one week and counting. In seven days, Joe Biden will become our 46thpresident. Time to break out the inaugural fun facts:
» John Quincy Adams was the first president sworn in wearing long trousers (1825).
» Abraham Lincoln was the first to include African-Americans in his parade (1865). Women were included for the first time in Woodrow Wilson’s second inaugural parade (1917).
William Howard Taft’s 1909 inauguration. “It took 6,000 men and 500 wagons to clear 58,000 tons of snow and slush from the parade route.”
» Neither Theodore Roosevelt nor John Quincy Adams swore their oath on a Bible.
» Jimmy Carter’s inaugural parade featured solar heat for the reviewing stand and handicap-accessible viewing (1977).
» Ronald Reagan’s second inaugural had to compete with Super Bowl Sunday (1985).
» The first ceremony broadcast on the Internet was Bill Clinton’s second inauguration (1997).
» Four retiring presidents have not attended the inaugurations of their successors. Those who were absent: John Adams missed Thomas Jefferson’s inaugural. John Quincy Adams was not present at Andrew Jackson’s. Andrew Johnson was not at Ulysses Grant’s ceremony. Richard Nixon was not present at Gerald Ford’s inaugural. [Trump will be #5 when he snubs Joe Biden’s swearing-in.]
And here’s some hopeful news: we’re now close enough that we can check the Inauguration Day weather forecast for DC. (The historic stats are here at the National Weather Service.) It couldn’t be more symbolic, according to The Weather Channel: morning clouds giving way to afternoon sunshine, with a warmer-than-usual high of 45. Or as we call it in Maine: shorts weather.
CHEERS to impeachment day. Today is impeachment day. The president is going to be impeached. He is a bad president. He tried to become a dictator. He cannot be one. The End.
JEERS to pissing your life away. Sheldon Adelson was born of humble roots in Boston 87 years ago. Then he turned into a greed-obsessed right-wing scumbag…the epitome of the bubble-protected billionaire ($33 billion to be exact) for whom the world was a personal playground to be exploited no matter how many people got hurt. Exhibit A: the countless men and women his casinos lured in and turned into gambling addicts. Plus…
☹ He and his wife Miriam Adelson were Donald Trump’s largest donors; they provided the largest donation to Trump’s 2016 campaign, his presidential inauguration, his defense fund against the Mueller investigation into Russian interference, and the 2020 campaign.
Can’t imagine why.
☹ Adelson’s newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was the only major newspaper nationwide to endorse Trump in 2016
☹ Deutsche Welle reported that he was one of the largest backers of a hard-right fringe network promoting Islamophobia.
☹ Haaretz wrote that Adelson had “hijacked” the Israeli-American Council to turn it into a pressure group for his “hard-right agenda.”
☹ On Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program he said: “You pick up your cell phone and you call somewhere in Nebraska and you say ‘OK, let it go’ and so there’s an atomic weapon goes over, ballistic missiles in the middle of the desert that doesn’t hurt a soul, maybe a couple of rattlesnakes and scorpions or whatever.”
☹ In February 2013 the Las Vegas Sands, in a regulatory filing, acknowledged that it had likely violated federal law that prohibits the bribing of foreign officials. Allegedly, Chinese officials were bribed to allow Adelson to build his Macau casino.
Well, he’s dead now. I’d bet money his trip to the afterlife will involve taking the ‘Down’ elevator. But, darn it, I have this dumb rule about saying something nice about the recently departed. So here goes: he was once a candy vendor. Ah, the banality of evil.
JEERS to strange reactions. Maine’s senior senator Susan Collins says that the first thought that popped into her noggin last Wednesday afternoon, when the insurrection began, was that “the Iranians had followed through on their threat to strike the Capitol.” Wow—that’s like leaping from A to Z in a single bound while skipping B through Y. But, to be fair, I can actually understand why she’d think that and get confused. After all, the Republican terrorists’ actions were screaming “Death to America.”
CHEERS to discus lite. Wham-O began producing the “Frisbee” 64 years ago today. Ever wonder where the name comes from?
The Frisbie Baking Company (1871-1958) of Bridgeport, Connecticut, made pies that were sold to many New England colleges. Hungry college students soon discovered that the empty pie tins could be tossed and caught, providing endless hours of game and sport.
A Frisbee from the‘76 Democratic convention.
Many colleges have claimed to be the home of ‘he who was first to fling.’ Yale College has even argued that in 1820, a Yale undergraduate named Elihu Frisbie grabbed a passing collection tray from the chapel and flung it out into the campus, thereby becoming the true inventor of the Frisbie and winning glory for Yale. That tale is unlikely to be true since the words ‘Frisbie’s Pies’ was embossed in all the original pie tins and from the word ‘Frisbie’ was coined the common name for the toy.
Frisbees remind me of the Republican party: Lightweight, logic as contorted as a no-look reverse-flick backhanded corkscrew air bounce, and the only thing keeping them aloft is spin.
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Ten years ago in C&J: January 13, 2011
JEERS to odd departures. A Republican district chairman in Arizona is calling it quits because of vitriol coming from his own side. In announcing his decision, Anthony Miller cited “threats from the Tea Party,” a group that apparently doesn’t find him radical or irrational enough for their liking. Miller says he wants to spend more time with his family. Alive. [1/13/21 Update: A reminder that the GOP has been the party of violent whackadoos, who have no problem threatening their own leaders, for a long time.]
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And just one more…
CHEERS to naming rights. Lost in all the hoopla about trivial issues like—[Reads notes off hand]—World War III, the immolation of Planet Earth, and Republicans’ ongoing effort to throw America into the toilet and flush 15 times, is the most pressing issue of our generation: what parents are naming their spawn, of course. So allow me, via babycenter.com, to terminate the suspense: the most popular boy names of 2020 were Liam, Noah, Jackson and Aiden. Top girl names were Sophia, Olivia, Riley, and Emma. I went through a period of confusion when I was young, thanks to my mom and dad. For the first eighteen years of my life I thought my last name was Billy and my first name was Dammit.
Have a happy humpday. Floor’s open…What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today’s Shameless C&J Testimonial
“There might have been a time when Bill in Portland Maine’s Cheers and Jeers could mask the fact that he’s an empty toilet waiting to be filled with shit, just to give it purpose, but that time has passed.”
This chaotic moment has one root cause: Trump’s refusal to accept his loss
First Read is your briefing from “Meet the Press” and the NBC Political Unit on the day’s most important political stories and why they matter.
The president begging Georgia’s secretary of state to overturn the election results … More than 140 House and Senate Republicans objecting to the Electoral College count … Trump addressing supporters in Washington (“You will have an illegitimate president … And we can’t let that happen.”) … Many of those supporters later storming the Capitol … Trump saying that he won’t attend the inauguration (and getting banned from Twitter) … The drafting of articles of impeachment … And now authorities warning of more armed protests.
All of these events have taken place in just the last 10 days.
And of all them have a simple root cause — the president of the United States refusing to concede an election he clearly lost. (Yes, he acknowledged there would be a new administration and a transition of power, but that’s as far as he’s gone.)
We still need to work on whether there were higher-ups involved with Wednesday’s abysmal law enforcement response.
Good luck to house republicans struggling to figure out how to vote on impeachment tomorrow cause trump didn’t give you anything to work with here https://t.co/ahu6SWj4eq
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.
New: Group pledges up to $50 million to defend Republicans who support impeaching Trump https://t.co/Ypxg3JIFaY
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.
Huffington Post reports at least 9 Republicans refused to wear masks while huddled in secure room during the riots.https://t.co/ossgD01tQM
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.
US Chamber of Commerce says some lawmakers will lose its support due to their actions last week (certification) and in the week ahead (impeachment). Candidates that show respect for Democratic institutions and norms will have its backing.
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.
if anyone didn’t get it before, the violent end to the Trump era brought into sharper focus something about the previous era: namely, how much of the ferocious resistance President Obama faced wasn’t standard ideological or partisan conflict but rather white reactionary backlash
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.
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?
A Senate Republican aide tells me he thinks there were about 20, give or take, Republicans who were *open* to a conviction Before our story on McConnell
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.
“As the costs of looking the other way became more apparent, the depth of the denial only grew more deeper. Now the debt is due, and the costs of indulging a wannabe tyrant will haunt the Republican party for the foreseeable future.”https://t.co/29x2Gukg9z
Support your local paper!!!! For the love of God!!!!!
NEW: PA state Sen. Doug Mastriano and former state rep. Rick Saccone among Trump supporters who occupied U.S. Capitol. Both are known to peddle in conspiracy theories. https://t.co/jXL475AOdP
🎵LoOoOcal news! Interesting news about the loOoOocals!🎵
Former Oakland Police Officer Jurell Snyder was among the mob that attacked the Capitol yesterday. In this interview he defends the attempted coup and repeats conspiracy theories about voting fraud.https://t.co/T8ziliZ5Fb
Tennessee said 🗣 I know that man! That’s the governor’s pastor!
JUST UP: @mort713 and I worked together to identify a short list of Tennesseeans in the DC mob yesterday, including @GovBillLee‘s pastor. Please take a moment to read really concerning comments, including references to 6MWE. My latest for @TNLookout. https://t.co/GOE8HaSjYR
[…] The anti-democratic message Wednesday’s insurrection sent is chilling. Far-right mobs incited by the president over baseless conspiracy theories and a commitment to white nationalism breached one of the most secure places in the U.S. and disrupted a basic democratic process of certifying election results. But what it portends for both the future of the Republican Party and its response to the climate crisis is even more chilling. […]
Climate change is chaos by nature. It means more powerful storms, more intense wildfires, more extreme floods and droughts. It is an assault on the weakest among us, and decades of the right-wing mindset of small government have left the country with fewer resources to deal with the fallout. As the summer’s wildfires show, the far-right will be there to try to fill the power void. Those fires occurred in a predominantly white region.
There’s a strong strain of white nationalism and neo-Nazism that ran through Wednesday’s insurrection, and it’s easy to imagine what will happen when flames or storms hit places that are predominantly Black, brown, or Indigenous. In fact, we don’t need to imagine it at all. We’ve seen it in the gunman who showed up at a Walmart to kill immigrants whom he falsely blamed for putting strain on the environment. And we saw it in the white vigilante violence in the vacuum after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. We’ve seen it so frequently, it even has a name: ecofascism.
After Wednesday, the boundaries of permissible violence have now expanded to a distorting degree, at a time of increasing climate instability. White supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other extremists literally took over the halls of power and got away with it. When climate change upends communities with far fewer defenses—communities that hate groups already scapegoat—the results will be catastrophic.
It’s never been clearer that a large chunk of the nation’s top Republican leaders will embrace and even fuel this extremism and hate. The Venn diagram of people who push election denial and climate denial has near-perfect overlap, but even if these figures deny the climate crisis, they’ll still look to exploit it. At the end of the day, their goal is to use easy-to-disprove lies to build and consolidate power.
Fixing a mess like this absolutely has to be part of the process of addressing climate change. Accountability for those who incited extremists is a good place to start. […]
THREE OTHER ARTICLES WORTH READING
Sheryl Sandberg, Resign, by Melissa Gira Grant. The Facebook COO’s denials about the platform’s role in the violence at the Capitol should be the last straw.
If Congress REALLY wanted to stimulate the economy, they could just take the bodycam footage of MAGAmuffins getting arrested at airports and sell it as a pay-per-view with Snoop Dog narrating. I’d pay $49.99 for that
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.” ~~Marcus Tullius Cicero, Orations, The fourteen orations against Marcus Antonius (63 BCE)
On this date at Daily Kos in 2007—The Uniter Divides: Bush plan fractures the DLC:
Well, the reviews are in. Bush’s 11% doctrine speech was a bomb IED.
So now, the scramble is on for politicians of all stripes to distance themselves from his idiotic “plan.” Of course, thatsurge was well underway even before the teleprompter was even hooked up, and Democratic presidential candidates were among the first to find their way to the microphones.
I’d round ’em up for you, but that’s not actually what this post is about. This post is about the few “Democrats” who didn’t distance themselves. No Democratic presidential candidate was that stupid, of course. And no, I’m not even talking about Lieberman.
I’m talking about the DLC wonks.
In yesterday’s LA Times, Will Marshall stunk up the joint on behalf of the DLC, from his perch at the “Progressive Policy Institute,” the DLC’s “think” tank:
“Conventional wisdom says that presidential candidates who want to be responsible on this are going to hurt themselves with the angry, impassioned activist left,” said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank. “But the activist left is out of sync with the American public. Americans don’t want to concede this is a total debacle.”
Monday through Friday you can catch the Kagro in the Morning Show 9 AM ET by dropping in here, or you can download the Stitcher app (found in the app stores or at Stitcher.com), and find a live stream there, by searching for “Netroots Radio.”
While the House of Representatives was in the process of voting to direct Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and relieve the nation of the burden of Donald Trump, Pence was rejecting the effort in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “I do not believe that such a course of action is in the best interest of our Nation or consistent with our Constitution,” he wrote, and went on to literally equate illegally overturning the election with invoking the 25th Amendment. “Last week,” he wrote, “I did not yield to pressure to exert power beyond my constitutional authority to determine the outcome of the election, and I will not now yield to the effort in the House of Representatives to play political games at a time so serious in the life of our Nation.”
He went on to actually reiterate Trump’s latest threats: “I urge you can every member of Congress to avoid actions that would further divide and inflame the passions of the moment.” He said that. “Work with us to lower the temperature and unite our country,” he writes. After Trump sicced his mob ON PENCE. After Trump tried to get HIM killed. Pence’s slavish devotion to the guy who put a hit out on him did not deter the House from passing the resolution, 223-205.
In addition to that, the House passed, in the rule for the resolution, a requirement that every member of the House wear a mask on the House floor. They will be fined $500 the first time they expose their colleagues on the House floor by not wearing a mask, and $2,500 the second time, with the money being withheld from their pay. They will not be able to pay the fines from either expense accounts or campaign funds. So far, three Democrats have tested positive for COVID-19 after sheltering with maskless Republicans during the January 6 siege.
The House unveiled another initiative Tuesday night, attempting to enforce the rule that weapons not be allowed on the House floor by installing metal detectors at the entrances to the chamber. “Effective immediately, all persons, including members, are required to undergo security screening when entering the House chamber,” the members were advised in a memo from the House Sergeant-at-Arms office. House reporters (see thread) watched many Republicans blow past the metal detectors, plowing over and around the Capitol Hill police, the police who put their lives on the line last Wednesday to save their sorry asses. This is the group that keeps demanding “unity” and that Trump not be impeached.
Speaking of impeachment, the process for that starts Wednesday at 9:00 AM ET, and should move quickly, relative to how House votes usually go. Once Pence’s letter was in hand, Pelosi announced the impeachment managers:
Congressman Jamie Raskin, Lead Manager: Congressman Jamie Raskin is a member of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, where he serves as Chair of Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and on the Judiciary Committee, where he serves as Vice Chair of the Subcommittee on the Constitution. He also serves on the Rules Committee and the Committee on House Administration, where he is Vice Chair. Prior to his time in Congress, Raskin was a three-term State Senator in Maryland and a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law for more than 25 years.
Congresswoman Diana DeGette: Congresswoman DeGette serves on the Energy and Commerce Committee as Chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. She is serving her thirteenth term in office. Before serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, DeGette was an attorney focusing on civil rights before being elected to serve two terms in the Colorado House, including one term as Assistant Minority Leader.
Congressman David Cicilline: Congressman Cicilline is a member of the Judiciary Committee, where he serves as Chair of the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. He also serves on the Foreign Affairs Committee. He is serving his sixth term in Congress. Early in his career, Cicilline served as a public defender in the District of Columbia. Cicilline served two terms as Mayor of Providence and four terms in the Rhode Island House of Representatives.
Congressman Joaquin Castro: Congressman Castro serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and on the Foreign Affairs Committee, where he is also Chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. He is serving his fifth term in Congress. Prior to his election to Congress, he served five terms in the Texas Legislature and served as a litigator in private practice.
Congressman Eric Swalwell: Congressman Swalwell serves on House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where he chairs the Intelligence Modernization and Readiness Subcommittee, and on the Judiciary Committee. He is a former prosecutor and is the son and brother of law enforcement officers. He is serving his fifth term in Congress.
Congressman Ted Lieu: Congressman Lieu serves on the Judiciary Committee and the Committee on Foreign Affairs. He is a former active-duty officer in the U.S. Air Force who served as a prosecutor in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, and currently serves as a Colonel in the Reserves. He is serving his fourth term in Congress.
Congresswoman Stacey Plaskett: Congresswoman Plaskett serves on the House Ways and Means Committee. Before she was elected to Congress, she served as an Assistant District Attorney in the Bronx District Attorney’s Office and as Senior Counsel at the Department of Justice. She is serving her fourth term in Congress.
Congressman Joe Neguse: Congressman Neguse is a member of the Judiciary Committee, where he serves as Vice Chair of the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. Congressman Neguse also serves on the Natural Resources Committee and the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. Early in his career, Neguse was a litigator in private practice. He is serving his second term in Congress.
Congresswoman Madeleine Dean: Congresswoman Dean is a member of the Judiciary Committee, where she serves on the Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. She is serving her second term in Congress, before which she served in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for four terms and was a lawyer in private practice.
