Month: February 2021

In this interview Jamie Raskin outlines in clear terms what they thought Trump was up to on January 6th:

Placing former vice president Mike Pence front and center was not a strategic choice for the impeachment managers; it was a recognition that Pence was the central player in the former president’s attempted coup. “There was a method to all [his] madness. This was the counting of the electoral votes,” Raskin said. Trump seemed to think that if he could just get Pence to throw out votes from a few states, that would stop the election’s certification and “he could deny the election to Joe Biden.”

Under this thinking, the election’s outcome would go to a vote in the House, and Trump could “declare martial law” to put down the violence. “Vice President Pence became the linchpin” in this fanciful scenario. That is why Trump called Pence the morning of Jan. 6 and reportedly told him, “You can either go down in history as a patriot” or as an epithet[a pussy].

Raskin said, “The American people understand who Donald Trump is. That kind of authoritarian relationship is a threat to democracy.”

Mike Pence knows this first hand, as does Rudy Giuliani and any number of Trump’s confidantes. It really was an attempted coup. And when Pence refused to go along, Trump sicced his violent mob on him, hoping that would delay the vote and persuade him to change his mind out of fear for his life.

This happened.

This interview with Evangelical superstar preacher Eric Metaxas is mind-blowing. Seriously looney tunes, off the charts crazy:

The PR pitch was brazen: Eric Metaxas, it declared, is “America’s #1 Bad Christian.” The Christian writer and radio host has been promoting doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, including ata prayer rally he emceed on the National Mall in December. Metaxas has tweeted “martial rhetoric” in defense of former President Donald Trump, his publicist wrote cheerfully. He even appeared ina New York Times article about Christian extremism. Oh, and by the way, he has a new book out…

Metaxas sees himself and other evangelical Trump supporters as part of a long line of Christians who stood up against grave wrongdoings in history: William Wilberforce, the slavery abolitionist and evangelical; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran theologian who was arrested and later hanged for his dissent against the Nazi regime. Metaxas has spent his career writing books about these figures and has a tendency to describe current events in dramatic historical terms. “If this isn’t our ‘Reichstag Fire’ I don’t know what is,” he tweeted on January 27, commenting on the Department of Homeland Security’s warnings about the potential for domestic terrorism following the Capitol attack. In 1933, Hitler’s government used a fire at the Reichstag, which housed the German Parliament, as a pretext to consolidate power and suppress dissent. Metaxas’s tweet suggested that he thought the Biden administration was using the Capitol attack to do the same.

President Joe Biden’s inauguration has not made Metaxas and the Trump supporters who agree with him go away. In fact, Metaxas has become only more vocal—and seemingly fearful—in recent weeks. He believes, without evidence, that there was significant fraud in the 2020 election. (Some three-quarters of Republicans agree, according to a December poll.) And like roughly one-third of registered voters, he doesn’t believe that Biden’s victory was legitimate. I wanted to understand why Metaxas, who lives in Manhattan and has spent much of his life among journalists and his fellow Yale graduates, has come to believe that he is righteous for questioning the 2020 election. Our conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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Emma Green: Do you see yourself as a rebel against elite consensus?

Eric Metaxas: I grew up in a working-class, immigrant environment. When I went to Yale, that was the first time I was among the so-called cultural elites. There really is a kind of enforced consensus. If you don’t think that way, you can quickly become persona non grata.

I wasn’t in D.C. for the Capitol riots. But I was blown away at how instantly anybody who supported Trump—which is, you know, half the country—was demonized as potential white domestic terrorists. I just thought, Holy cow. What am I, in Nazi Germany? This is really sick. That’s not what we do in America.

Green: You brought up Nazi Germany there, and I want to make sure I understand how you’re using the metaphor.

Metaxas: You have to forgive me. Part of the reason I bring up Germany, always, is because I spent a huge part of my life studying that period. I wrote a 600-page book on Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

We can’t allow people to be silenced. People immediately say, “You bring up the Nazis? That’s out of bounds.” But it’s the principle of the thing. When you start pushing people around and telling them what they can say—and they better say, “Heil Hitler,” loudly—that should be a warning sign.

Green: Do you believe that Trump supporters are like Jews in Hitler’s Germany?

Metaxas: Now, Emma, you’re trying to get me to say something. That’s a good journalistic tactic. I can see the quote, right? That’s not really going to be helpful, because: Of course not.

The point is, in Germany, if you didn’t go along with the party line, you would be demonized. You would get in trouble. People just think, I hope I don’t get in trouble, so what do I have to say or not say to get in trouble? At that moment, you cease to be free.

We’re kind of getting there. Even a millimeter in that direction is too close for comfort for me.

Green: You have tweeted about the early actions of the Biden administration being similar to the Reichstag fire. You tweeted that—

Metaxas: No, no, no. The Capitol. I’m referring to that.

This event happens, and before the smoke clears, we are using the opportunity—and I’m not talking about the Biden administration; I’m talking about the Democratic establishment and the media—instantly seizing on it to demonize, in the harshest terms, anyone who would support Trump. That just blew my mind. I thought: You don’t do that in America. That’s what the Nazis did with the Reichstag fire. Before the smoke cleared, they had already figured out who they were going to blame.

Green: I just want to be clear about the metaphor here, because I think it matters. The attack on the Capitol was perpetrated by a group of people who had, in some cases, weapons, and who forcefully broke into the United States Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the Electoral College votes. I don’t think the argument is that anybody who voted for Trump anywhere in America is a violent white supremacist. I think the criticism has been about that act and the way in which President Trump, along with those who have cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election results, encouraged that act.

Metaxas: But it’s our right in America to do that—to question things. And when you are told that by doing that, you are contributing to violence, you are inciting violence—that, right there, is a red flag.

The media landscape was not what you just described. It was an absolute pile-on. You’d think somebody had clubbed a senator to death or something. I was just scratching my head, trying to make sense of whatever happened, if we even know what happened. There are enough questions that it’s so confusing. They were acting like people were shot.

Green: I want to stop you there, because a Capitol Police officer was beaten to death by protesters. He died of his injuries.

Metaxas: Look, I’m not a newshound. But I didn’t even seem to get clarity on who were the human beings that committed murder. I don’t know anybody who is pro-murder. What is there to be said except, obviously, we condemn it. Who the heck wouldn’t condemn that? Why would somebody harm a police officer? Even I can’t make sense of what’s going on. Who did this? Are they in jail? Is there a trial? Is it clear why they did that?

Green: I want to bring up something you said on your radio show in conversation with President Trump. You said you’d “be happy to die in this fight. This is a fight for everything. God is with us.” What did you mean by that? And would you still be willing—

Metaxas: I meant exactly what Nathan Hale meant when he said, “My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country.” When you believe liberty is being threatened; when you believe elections are being threatened; when you believe that any of these things are being threatened—people have died for these things. When you say something like that, what you’re saying is: I would, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer or like Nathan Hale, stand up for what I think is right and true. I am not just going to go with the crowd.

The values that I get out of the Bible have led to American-style self-government and liberty and freedom for all. Of course I said I would be happy to die in that fight.

Green: When you said “that fight,” it seemed like you were referring to the fight to make sure President Trump would be inaugurated to a second term.

Metaxas: No, no, no, no, no. The fight to make sure that all Americans could say, whoever won, we know that really happened.

This is not about Trump. If he lost, good! The American people can elect their leaders. But if that’s not really clear, then you’re harming the whole fabric. I was really upset at how a lot of people just didn’t seem troubled by it. They would say things like, “Oh! There’s no evidence.” I’ve seen enough to make me think that a really thorough investigation is necessary. And that didn’t happen.

Green: But there were investigations into allegations of irregularities. Attorney General Bill Barr said the DOJ looked into all allegations of voter fraud, and they didn’t uncover anything on a scale that would change the outcome of the election. Republican officials at the state level—Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, for example—said things went according to plan.

Is that not persuasive to you? Do you believe President Trump was actually reelected?

Metaxas: I think it’s very possible he was reelected, yeah. And that sickens me, that I could even think that. I’ve seen enough to make me doubt that we had a fair election, that every person’s vote was counted the way it’s supposed to be counted.

I think a lot of people thought it was too much trouble to get into these weeds—“Let’s just let it ride and leave it alone.” And a lot of courts didn’t look at the evidence, because they made a call, which was actually a political call, to say, “We just don’t want to stick our necks out on this.”

Green: But many of the courts you’re talking about are ones where judges appointed by Trump were looking at the evidence. Why do you think even people who were vetted by President Trump’s team would make a political calculation that it wasn’t worthwhile to consider challenges of the highest order and seriousness in America, which is that our elections weren’t free and fair?

Metaxas: I’m not the sort of person who followed this the way you did. Most Americans have less time to follow it than I did. And so if there is the impression that some of what I’m saying is true, people need to deal with that. In America, we don’t push that stuff aside.

It gets even nuttier> It’s quite clear he believes Trump is a martyr, maybe even the second coming.

Green: Some people have argued that the reputation of Christianity has been damaged by evangelicals’ wide support of President Trump. I take it you don’t agree with that.

Metaxas: I think that’s preposterous! Of course not. That’s just such a silly thing. The idea that I’m supposed to bury all of my thoughts for the hope of perhaps persuading somebody in the future that Christianity is palatable or something—Christians have traditionally stood up for human rights! When you stand up against the slave trade, you become incredibly politically unpopular. I mean, Wilberforce was totally demonized in his day. But he was doing what he felt was the right thing. What kind of a Christian would he have been if he said, “Well, I don’t want to be divisive”?

Defending Trump, a blatant, unreconstructed racist and xenophobe, to Wilberforce who fought to end the slave trade in England is just:

I don’t have the energy to take apart his argument and I’m sure I don’t need to. It’s obvious that he’s completely deluded.

He’s also a violent asshole. Here’s footage of him sucker punching a protester in the back of the head at the White House RNC convention in August:

https://twitter.com/JustInTime_2020/status/1299365181898797058?s=20

They arrested the guy he punched.

Trump pretty much put out a hit on him on January 6th and Pence hasn’t had a word to say about it:

On January 6, a horde of pro-Trump rioters breached the United States Capitol with one bloodthirsty mission in mind: to stop Vice President Mike Pence from carrying out his constitutional obligation to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory.

Even if it meant killing him.

Makeshift gallows were erected on the West side of the complex. Members of the mob shouted “Hang Mike Pence!” as they stormed the halls of Congress, hunting for the vice president, as well as any other officials they could get their hands on. Well over 100 police officers were injured and maimed by the mob; Capitol Hill Police Officer Brian Sicknick was killed. Two Capitol Hill Police officers later committed suicide.

And to this day, the former vice president hasn’t had a word to say about his experience.

Throughout Trump’s impeachment, Pence remained mute. As someone who could provide both important facts—what did Trump know about the situation, when, and what was his reaction—and bear witness to Trump’s state of mind in the days and hours leading up to the attack, Pence was in a rare, possibly even unique, position. Over the course of the weeks following the election, Pence had been a perpetrator of Trump’s big election lie and at the final hour became a target of it. Jaime Herrera Beutler, who was one of the 10 House Republicans to vote for impeachment and who came forward with her blockbuster testimony during the Senate trial, begged Pence to share what he knew.

He refused.

Pence’s silence could easily be chalked up to all manner of causes: submissiveness, cowardice, fear, or naked political calculation.

Or maybe it’s something worse.

Ask yourself: Why would Mike Pence bother lifting his voice in defense of his own life if no one else in his party cares to do so?

If you think about it from this perspective, then Pence’s silence isn’t just complicity. It’s another marker of the nihilism that has taken over the Republican party, whereby nothing matters except for Trump and/or owning the libs.

And in order to further this project, Republicans see themselves as bound to acquiesce in the face of any evil.

Mike Pence was a high-value target for Trump’s shock troops on January 6, all because he was the man with the final hand on certifying Biden’s election victory. This means that the 64 Republican House members and 44 Republican senators who also supported Biden’s certification are marked. After all, if Pence was guilty of a treasonous sin against Trump, punishable by death, it follows to reason that they are, too.

And still, 197 House Republicans voted against the article of impeachment and 43 Senate Republicans voted to acquit.

Or, to put it another way: More than twice as many Republicans voted to defend Trump in impeachment than voted against the coup. Most of the people marked by the mob voted to excuse Trump’s role in summoning the mob.

“Move on,” they say.

An attack on their lives isn’t enough for them to break with Trump.

Say what you will about Mike Pence: He knows his tribe.

That’s Amanda carpenter at the Bulwark. Yes, the great evangelical hope who won’t even be alone in the presence of a woman not his wife, has acquiesced to evil.

This needs to happen. I don’t know who the “impartial non-partisan” people might be and anyway, it doesn’t matter because the right wingers would smear Washington and Franklin if they needed to:

 Lawmakers fresh off the impeachment acquittal of former President Donald J. Trump are issuing growing calls for a bipartisan commission to investigate the administrative and law enforcement failures that led to the mob attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 and recommend changes to prevent another siege.

Such a commission appears to be the primary remaining option for Congress to try to hold Mr. Trump to account for his role in the assault. Top lawmakers have quashed the idea of a post-impeachment censure of the former president, and the possibility of barring him from future office under the 14th Amendment, which prohibits any official involved in “insurrection or rebellion” from holding office, seems remote.

Lawmakers in both parties have called for a commission modeled on the bipartisan panel established after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Representative Madeleine Dean, Democrat of Pennsylvania and an impeachment manager, described it on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday as “an impartial commission, not guided by politics, filled with people who would stand up to the courage of their conviction.”

President George W. Bush signed a law establishing the 9/11 Commission in 2002, mandated to investigate what caused the attack and what might have stopped it, and to outline how to prevent a similar attack. After a 20-month investigation, the commission offered three dozen recommendations for how to reshape intelligence coordination and congressional oversight.

“We need a 9/11 Commission to find out what happened and make sure it never happens again, and I want to make sure that the Capitol footprint can be better defended next time,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

In the House, rank-and-file lawmakers in both parties have introduced legislation that would establish a commission, with some Democrats proposing a broader examination of the federal government’s response to domestic terrorism and violent extremism.

“We will have an after-action review,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California told reporters late last month. “There will be a commission.” She has since been briefed repeatedly by retired Gen. Russel L. Honoré, who has been tapped to examine security on Capitol Hill, which remains surrounded by fences lined with razor wire and under the watch of National Guard troops.

“In the near future, Congress needs to smartly transition to a more sustainable security presence,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said in late January. “Keeping the Capitol safe cannot and will not require huge numbers of uniformed troops and vast systems of emergency fencing to remain in place forever.”

Democrats, who abruptly dropped what had been a successful demand for witnesses during the final day of the trial on Saturday, framed a possible commission on Sunday as a way to not only understand the failures that had led to the breach of the Capitol but also to underscore Mr. Trump’s role in the events.

“There’s still more evidence that the American people need and deserve to hear,” Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, said on “This Week,” adding that a commission would “make sure that we secure the Capitol going forward and lay bare the record of just how responsible” Mr. Trump was for the attack.

Graham seems to think this would be an opportunity to own the libs. He might be right. But I doubt it.

Heather McGhee (“The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together”) publishes an excerpt in the New York Times that says a lot in a few words about grievance-driven reactionaries attempting to shred the safety net and hold onto an America defined by … well, by them:

On a call with a group of all-white economist colleagues, we discussed how to advise leaders in Washington against this disastrous retrenchment. I cleared my throat and asked: “So where should we make the point that all these programs were created without concern for their cost when the goal was to build a white middle class, and they paid for themselves in economic growth? Now these guys are trying to fundamentally renege on the deal for a future middle class that would be majority people of color?”

Nobody answered. I checked to see if I was muted.

Finally, one of the economists breached the awkward silence. “Well, sure, Heather. We know that — and you know that — but let’s not lead with our chin here,” he said. “We are trying to be persuasive.”

McGhee covered some of this ground in a recent interview with Anand Giridharadas. The parable of the pool is one reason we can’t have nice things in America anymore. It is no accident that support for economic guarantees began to slip the moment the country in the 1960s began including Black people in them. “It’s also no accident that, to this day, no Democratic presidential candidate has won the white vote since the Democrat Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts,” she writes:

Racial integration portended the end of America’s high-tax, high-investment growth strategy: Tax revenue hit its peak as a percentage of the economy in 1965. Now, America’s per capita government spending is near the bottom among industrialized countries. Our roads, bridges and water systems get a D+ from the American Society of Civil Engineers. Unlike our peers, we don’t have high-speed rail, universal broadband, mandatory paid family leave or universal child care.

And while growing corporate power and money in politics have certainly played a role, it’s now clear that racial resentment is the key uncredited actor in our economic backslide. White people who exhibit low racial resentment against Black people are 60 percentage points more likely to support increased government spending than are those with high racial resentment. At the base of this resentment is a zero-sum story: the default framework for conservative arguments, rife with references to “makers and takers,” “taxpayers and freeloaders.”

Read: white conservatives and all Others; Us vs. Them; if They get more, I get less.

Soon after integration finally came to South Carolina schools in 1970, some guy named “Red” formed a county “property owners’ association” where I lived. Its primary mission seemed to be preventing tax increases for funding local schools under the rubric of accountability and thrift. That his children faced a sadder future in that then-dying textile town seemed not to register. (Things got better anyway when foreign companies brought in jobs, demanded better, and got better.)

Did white people win in pushing back against Black equality? No, says McGhee. Many lost economic opportunity and social mobility, seeming not to care so long as they saw themselves higher in the social pecking order.

The task ahead, then, is to unwind this idea of a fixed quantity of prosperity and replace it with what I’ve come to call Solidarity Dividends: gains available to everyone when they unite across racial lines, in the form of higher wages, cleaner air and better-funded schools.

Or we could just burn it to the ground to keep Them from having shares in the same opportunity. A mob of insurrectionists who wanted things to be “great again” tried that just last month. Unwinding that idea will take some doing.

“We have been doing three things at once,” Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. Now with the second Trump impeachment trial ended and the Republican Party even more fractured, Democrats led by President Joe Biden shift to filling out his cabinet and delivering badly needed relief to the country. Not all of it will take legislative action.

Biden declared Sunday “an emergency exists in the State of Texas and ordered federal assistance to supplement state and local response efforts due to the emergency conditions resulting from a severe winter storm beginning on February 11, 2021, and continuing.”

The declaration authorizes the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to coordinate disaster relief efforts in 254 Texas counties. FEMA will support mass care and shelter with 75 percent federal funding.

Biden even did so without complaining Texas did not vote for him and “without even a little insinuation that it’s really kind of their fault,” snarked Bob Schooley.

Hey guys, I'm in Central Texas and this storm is no joke. Rolling blackouts all night because WIND TURBINES are FROZEN. Roads are impassable, 5" snow with ice under it, 6° as I write this.

Plenty of Democrats + seniors here who are COLD.

— Cyndee Millichamp 🇺🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🌻 (@CMillichamp1) February 15, 2021

With the spotlight off the former president for a moment, the current one has chances like this to shine. His $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan is still urgently needed even as infection rates sink across the U.S.

Stephen Collinson writes at CNN:

There is no time to lose since the success of Biden’s presidency — and the nation itself — will depend on his capacity to end the pandemic and rescue the economy. And the crisis is at a pivotal point. Cases of the virus are falling fast and death tolls, which typically lag new infections, will soon do the same. But new variants of Covid-19 that appear more contagious are spreading. This makes new funds for a vaccination drive contained in the congressional package increasingly crucial. With extended unemployment benefits set to run out in March, millions of Americans are relying on Congress. The bill also includes billions of dollars in funding to safely reopen schools — an increasingly troublesome political issue for the White House and a paramount concern for desperate parents.

Biden and the Democrats may face Republican opposition in Washington, D.C., but the Washington Post reports they have support among Republicans in places like Fresno, Calif. where unemployment is over 10 percent, crime and homelessness are up, and loss of tax revenue means the city may have to lay off 250 employees:

“That,” said Jerry Dyer, mayor of the half-million-strong city in the Central Valley, “is going to be devastating.”

The looming cuts explain why Dyer’s eyes are fixed on Washington, where President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan dangles the tantalizing prospect of a reprieve. Though Dyer is a Republican, he’s rooting for the president to successfully push through federal aid that, after a nightmarish year for Fresno, will “help get us to the end.”

No partisans in foxholes

Republican in Congress can be expected to obstruct pandemic relief citing the usual complaints about Democratic policies, but outside the capitol those who actually need the help are more red-blue color blind:

Instead of the “blue-state bailout” derided by GOP lawmakers, Republican mayors and governors say they see badly needed federal aid to keep police on the beat, to prevent battered Main Street businesses from going under and to help care for the growing ranks of the homeless and the hungry.

“It’s not a Republican issue or a Democrat issue,” said Dyer, who became mayor last month following a long career as the city’s police chief. “It’s a public health issue. It’s an economic issue. And it’s a public safety issue.”

And it’s good politics. A Quinnipiac poll earlier this month found 68 percent for the coronavirus relief package. Only a minority of Republicans opposed it. A CNBC|SurveyMonkey Small Business Survey poll finds 63 percent of small business owners support the package, including 46% of Republican entrepreneurs.

Biden brought a bipartisan group of mayors and governors to the White House Friday to explain specifics in the package and to ask “what do they think they need most.”

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez (R) later told reporters from the podium in the White House briefing room that he had spoken with Biden and Vice President Harris more in the first several weeks of their administration “than I had spoken to the prior administration in the entirety.”

There are many uncertainties between here and November 2022. When the pandemic will subside. How much life will get back to “normal.” How much more political tribalism will deepen and violence spread. How the census and redistricting might tilt control of the House against Biden and the Democrats. How much of Biden’s agenda will pass. How much it will help.

What is not uncertain is that Americans of all persuasions are in pain. Almost half a million have died of COVID-19. Their families grieve. Their children go hungry. Their businesses fail and jobs are lost. The party that believes government can still help improve Americans’ lives — all their lives — has a chance to prove their case more concretely than any impeachment trial. They had best make it a good one.

…they seemed fueled by methamphetamines. That’s what one of the cops said about the insurrectionists in this piece by Pro Publica:

The riot squad defending the embattled entrance to the west side of the U.S. Capitol was surrounded by violence. Rioters had clambered up the scaffolding by the stage erected for the inauguration of President Joseph Biden. They hurled everything they could get their hands on at the cops beneath: rebar, plywood, power tools, even cans of food they had frozen for extra damage.

In front of the cops, a mob was mounting a frontal assault. Its members hit officers with fists and baseball bats. They grabbed at weapons slung from the officers’ waists. They unleashed a barrage of M-80 firecrackers. Soaked in never-ending streams of bright orange bear spray, the officers choked on plumes of acrid smoke that singed their nostrils and obscured their vision.

One officer in the middle of the scrum, a combat veteran, thought the rioters were so vicious, so relentless, that they seemed fueled by methamphetamine. To his left, he watched a chunk of steel strike a fellow officer above the eye, setting off a geyser of blood. A pepper ball tore through the air over his shoulder and exploded against the jaw of a man in front of him. The round, filled with chemical irritant, ripped the rioter’s face open. His teeth were now visible through a hole in his cheek. Blood poured out, puddling on the pavement surrounding the building. But the man kept coming.

The combat veteran was hit with bear spray eight times. His experience overseas “was nothing like this,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

Over the last several weeks, ProPublica has interviewed 19 current and former U.S. Capitol Police officers about the assault on the Capitol. Following on the dramatic video of officers defending the building that House lawmakers showed during the first day of the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, the interviews provide the most detailed account to date of a most extraordinary battle.

The enemies on Jan. 6 were Americans: thousands of people from across the country who had descended on the Capitol, intent on stopping Congress from certifying an election they believed was stolen from Trump. They had been urged to attend by Trump himself, with extremist right-wing and militia leaders calling for violence.

Many of the officers were speaking to reporters for the first time about the day’s events, almost all anonymously for fear of retribution. That they spoke at all is an indication of the depth of their frustration over the botched response. ProPublica also obtained confidential intelligence bulletins and previously unreported planning documents.

Combined, the information makes clear how failures of leadership, communication and tactics put the lives of hundreds of officers at risk and allowed rioters to come dangerously close to realizing their threats against members of Congress.

Lindsey Graham seems to think this is all Nancy Pelosi’s fault and he wants to know what she knew and when she knew it. Apparently, he wants her to pay for Trump’s rabid mob assaulting the Capitol and trying to kill her.

I guess he figures she was asking for it. Go figure.

He thinks he’s being oh-so-clever by throwing it back on her and suggesting that she should have told the Capitol police to shoot on sight or something, but nobody’s buying it. After all, his Daddy Donald told them all how much he loved them and that they were very special.

It’s possible that the authorities across the board were over-correcting from the over-reaction in June during the George Floyd protests. Failing to take a group of violent insurrectionists seriously is a big mistake and they have to get to the bottom of it. But I have my doubts that Pelosi told law enforcement to stand down from Donald Trump’s MAGA mob doesn’t track for me.

Read the whole harrowing story. I keep hearing rumblings from various quarters that it was just a bunch of tourists who got a little out of hand and took some souvenirs but it really wasn’t. Not by a long shot. It is a miracle that more people weren’t killed.

It’s excellent. Not quite as good as the one by Trump in which he claimed that it’s the Democrats who are causing violence and riots and undermining democracy. But still, it’s pretty good:

I thought this was a good point by Benjy Sarlin:

There’s an interesting implicit response to the “move on for unity” argument at the end, which is identifying truth as the path towards renewed civility rather than deference.

No unity without truth. No healing without accountability. No refusing to look in the rear-view mirror.

I’ve been happy to see a bunch of House members and Senators, including Chris Coons who is Biden’s eyes and ears in the Senate, come out strongly for a 9/11 style commission to look into the events of January 6th and what led up to it. It’s got to be done.

One of the endless parlor games in politics over the last few years is “what in the world happened to Lindsey Graham?” The idea seems to be that he was once a straight-shooting maverick in the mold of his mentor John McCain and he’s now either got some elaborate 12 dimensional chess game going with Donald Trump to “keep him in line” or Trump is blackmailing him. It’s understandable. If you believe that he was once a straight shooter and you see him now, you have to wonder. But I think he’s just a True Believer.

Here he is this morning issuing threats of retribution against Kamala Harris:

Lindsey Graham suggests Kamala Harris will be impeached if Republicans take back the House next year pic.twitter.com/J68Or4k1la

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 14, 2021

"Donald Trump is the most vibrant member of the Republican Party" — Lindsey Graham's interview on Fox News Sunday has major hostage video vibes pic.twitter.com/4vohcotJjK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 14, 2021

During an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Graham first pointed out that former President Donald Trump told him that while he’s “ready to move on and rebuild the Republican Party” following his second impeachment acquittal, he’s also “mad at some folks” in the party

“I think Sen. McConnell’s speech, he got a load off a chest obviously but unfortunately he put a load on the back of Republicans. That speech you will see in 2022 campaigns,” Graham declared, referencing the Senate minority leader’s denunciation of Trump’s “dereliction of duty” in inciting an insurrection.

Graham, a loyal Trump defender who advised the president’s impeachment legal team, went on to decry the impeachment sequel as “unconstitutional” and an “affront to the rule of law” before warning that Republicans will be looking for payback in the near future.

“And if you use this model, I don’t know how Kamala Harris doesn’t get impeached if the Republicans take over the House,” Graham said. “Because she actually bailed out rioters and one of the rioters went back to the streets and broke somebody’s head open. So we’ve opened Pandora’s Box here and I’m sad for the country.”

While Harris tweeted support of the Minnesota Freedom Fund in June, there is no evidence that she bailed anyone out.

Wallace would eventually corner Graham over remarks the pro-Trump senator made the day after the Capitol riot, noting that Graham said at the time that Trump allowed the riot to happen and “the president needs to understand that his actions were the problem, not the solution.”

“It sure sounds like you’re saying that he violated his oath of office,” the Fox News anchor said.

“No, I think what he did is he encourage his supporters throughout the country to fight like hell to take back an election he thought was stolen—a lot of politicians have said that,” the Republican senator responded.

Graham, meanwhile, wrapped up his interview with some over-the-top cheerleading for Trump and the ex-president’s family, claiming Trump and his daughter-in-law Lara were the “future” of the Republican Party. He further asserted that Lara Trump was the “biggest winner” of the impeachment trial as it made her the favorite in 2022’s North Carolina Senate race.

He has just been re-elected, Trump is out of office, and unless he really is being blackmailed, I can’t see a good reason for him to do this except that he just really likes the guy. It’s possible that all of his bootlicking has made it difficult for him to figure out how to leave the cult, but he seems genuinely enthusiastic about being the biggest Trumpian asshole (in strong competition with Ted Cruz) in the US Senate. I think he’s getting off on it.

Here’s CNN’s Harry Enten suggesting that Graham isn’t alone:

A lot of critics of former President Donald Trump want GOP senators to “show some spine.” They think the big reason they have stayed with Trump through impeachment is because they’re scared of him.

There’s good reason to be worried about going against Trump, given how popular he is among the Republican base. But I’d argue this explanation is at least somewhat incomplete. A lot of GOP senators may be willing to vote with Trump because they aren’t against him. They, like their voters, may really like him and his policies or believe he didn’t commit an impeachable offense.

This theory is probably hard for a lot of Trump critics to take, but it does make sense. Trump retrospective approval ratings remain in the 80s with Republicans. A lot of Republican lawmakers are likely reflected in that high approval rating.

Most Republican senators are either retiring or aren’t up for reelection until at least 2024. In fact, at least 34 of 50 GOP senators are not running for reelection in 2022 at this point. (It could be more based on retirements.)That means there would be at least three years until the senators who don’t retire would face electoral consequences for any votes against Trump.Three years is an eternity in politics. Don’t believe me? Ask Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

McConnell’s favorable ratings with Republicans nationwide plummeted from the 50s to the low 30s in 2017, after Trump and the Kentucky Republican tussled over their efforts to end the Affordable Care Act. After a little more than a year, McConnell’s favorable ratings jumped back up into the 50s. He benefited from pushing through the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018.

Other Republican members of Congress have shown you can repair seemingly broken relationships with Trump. Others have demonstrated that you don’t need to be Trump’s biggest fan to win primaries.

There are likely to be many more battles in President Joe Biden’s administration. Politics isn’t static. There’s no guarantee that votes on impeachment will be the determinative factor in primaries well down the road.

Keep in mind that most Republican senators voted against objections to the Electoral College results in January. They did so even as their voters believe, falsely, that there was wide-scale election fraud.Republican senators have shown a willingness to go against Trump. So the idea that they aren’t willing to in this situation just because they fear him seems a little hard to swallow.

So, to me, a plausible possibility remains what I posited at the top: Maybe many GOP senators actually really like Trump or at least buy his arguments on impeachment.

Why would they be any different than the rest of the Trump cult? The GOP alternate universe has been operating for a long time. Fox and Breitbart and Drudge and talk radio were on the same page for decades, spewing out disinformation and lies. They were certainly disseminating a worldview that didn’t accurately reflect reality.

Just because these elected Republicans have access to real information doesn’t mean they believe it or even look at it. Many of them live in the same bubble as their constituents. And they are happy to stay there.

That’s not to say that a good number of them are just cynical opportunists and/or cowardly weasels who care about nothing more than keeping their jobs at all costs regardless of whether they are required to worship a demagogue and sell out the constitution to do it. I’d guess there are more of them than the other, to be honest. But there are true believers among them, for sure.

There is something about Trump that a whole lot of people really, really like and it’s got nothing to do with politics because Trump knows nothing about politics, even now. This is cult stuff. Lindsey Graham and a number of the others seem no different than the most ardent Red Hats at a Trump rally. He’s their Dear Leader.

Truly. This is Lisa Murkowski’s statement. She is a Republican in a very red state that Trump won by 10 points and she’s running for re-election in 2022.

But anyway, this statement is strong and it is true. And she deserves some praise for making this so explicit, particularly in batting down the ridiculous Big Lie:

Any elected Republican with with integrity and intellectual honesty cannot disagree with that. It’s obvious. But now we know exactly how many have neither of those qualities.

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