I’m with Joan Walsh on this. Watching Joe Biden welcome Trump to the White House almost made me sick especially since Melania apparently refused to go because Jill Biden “disgusts” her:
Within just a few hours of President Joe Biden’s welcoming President-elect Donald Trump to a cozy two-hour Oval Office meeting (which honestly made me queasy), Trump made any right-thinking American queasy, too. He quickly nominated former Democrat-turned-quisling Tulsi Gabbard his director of national intelligence, accused pedophile Matt Gaetz as attorney general, and womanizing, serial liar, dead-baby-bear-defiling, whale-head-removing, worm-in-his-head anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of Health and Human Services.
That was just after he nominated Christian nationalist Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel.
What to do? Well, if Republicans decide to hold on to their power to confirm the president’s nominees—new Senate majority leader John Thune said he was open to Trump’s demand to make recess appointments—I hope they will not confirm any of them. Obviously, if you’re a Democrat, you make sure every Democrat votes against confirming them.
But before the confirmation dramas begin: Vice President Kamala Harris and second gentleman Doug Emhoff, former president Barack Obama and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton—and honestly, every Democratic member of Congress–must follow the lead of the late Representative John Lewis, who skipped Trump’s first inauguration, and decline their invitation to the inauguration on January 20.
“It will be the first one that I miss since I’ve been in Congress,” Lewis said in January 2017. “You cannot be at home with something that you feel that is wrong, is not right.” Lewis died in July 2020, before he could attend Joe Biden’s inauguration. But I know he’s fine with that. And if he were here now, I know what he would do. This is an ultimately inauthentic government, hateful of knowledge and science. And people. All but the people they see in their boardrooms.
Please don’t legitimize this, Madame Vice President.
Absolutely. No one could blame any of the Democrats for refusing.