Every Congressman that took part in this seditious act should be censured on the floor of the House.

[kentuck]

That is the least that should happen to them.

They put Donald Trump above our democracy and above our country. Their actions were a disgrace.

126 Republicans joined in this dangerous game. Now, after the fact, they say they were just following their judicial options. They were not. They were following the dictates of Donald J Trump.

They deserve a much worse punishment. They deserve to be thrown out of Congress. Their seditious and treasonous act should never be forgotten.

[William769]

1. I'll do you one better

Nancy Pelosi should not seat them!

[Chin music]

2. +1z

Seems like seating them absolves them somehow.

[kentuck]

3. That would be preferable but...

...the people did vote them in. They brought dishonor upon the House.

[William769]

4. Did they?

[kentuck]

5. According to "them"...

they won in a fraud.

[sheshe2]

6. Exactly!

[StarfishSaver]

11. For the umpteenth time, neither the Speaker nor the House has authority to refuse to seat them

No matter how much some want it to be so, it can't happen.

[William769]

12. We just love hearing you say it though.

[StarfishSaver]

13. Ha ha

[Wellstone ruled]

7. You all know,

2022 campaign Ads are going to be all about Treason and what Country do you support. The GOP is now long gone to the Hinterland's for five decades.

[The Roux Comes First]

8. From What I Can Tell, the Most We Can Hope For

in the short term is little flaming bags on their doorstep - or maybe on their seats in Congress, though that would be tougher and likely involve smoke alarms.

[blueinredohio]

9. Nothing will be done to them and they know it.

Nothing was done when they barged into scifs and had cell phones.

[StarfishSaver]

10. I agree

[Pepsidog]

14. Put the bastards on trial for sedition. Public trial.

[onenote]

25. The DOJ isn't going to put anyone on trial for breaking a law they didn't come close

to breaking.

Under US law, a prosecution for sedition requires evidence of the use of force. Filing a brief doesn't qualify.

As has been pointed out numerous times here.

[Pepsidog]

29. I know DOJ isn't going to do anything even if there were elements of an offense and all trials

are public. My comment was more of an expression of aggravation that these traitors would nit face consequences for their actions rather than a suggestion. As a former prosecutor and current criminal defense attorney for over 30 years, the Trump years exposed how one immoral, lawless president could commit crimes in plain sight, destroy our institutions, create chaos worldwide and bust norms aided by a complicit Senate to the point of nearly destroying our Republic. Worse yet, the fundamental unfairness of our electoral system will guarantee that the ignorant minority will continue to rule over the majority of Americans who just want to live a better life. So yes you are correct they will not be tried for sedition but make no mistake, if Democratic lawmakers did what the Republicans did they for sure would be tried for sedition, regardless of the law. Is that in doubt? My goodness, they impeached Bill Clinton over a lie about sex. If Republicans and the lawyers who pushed these baseless claims over voter fraud are not held to account then they will do it again and maybe next time they will succeed.

[ancianita]

15. All that can happen is censure. I'll take it. The rest can't be done w/o 2/3 votes.

[Hortensis]

17. Yes. This posture of sedition will cost them

and their party, a shame that will be a lead item in all their obituaries.

[ancianita]

18. I'd love to believe that. But the only way for them to bear a cost is for Dems to really take

control of the Master Narrative about Republicans.

After the congressional confirmation mini-drama on Monday, Democrats and leadership should slam into our version of their old school master narrative, which is "Stoke negative partisanship."

Americans must go to the 2022 and 2024 polls with a strong, valid, permanent fear of letting the GOP back into power.

The party must be negatively branding the GOP in the eyes of swing and persuadable voters 24/7.
Pre-empt Republicans drama that's media worthy. Keep Republican media in reactive mode.

Approaches are arguable, but the master narrative is:

-- The Republican Party can no longer be trusted with power.
-- Repeat this endlessly, verify this narrative with public record misdeeds, criminality and seditious acts.
-- Brand the Republican Party as the party of misdeeds and blind followers of any power, foreign and domestic, not just as current aberrant Trumpist corruption that defines their current loyalty platform.
-- Call the disastrous Republican economy that Biden will inherit “the disastrous Republican economy.”
-- Call the Republican pandemic crisis “the Republican pandemic crisis.”
-- Always trumpet the success of Democratic initiatives.
-- Always trumpet the danger of letting Republicans back into power -- constantly remind Americans of economic, religious, corruption of pandemic response under Trump.

7 messages rotated every seven days a week.

They did it for 40 years and so must we.

We'll have the power and we'll need to use it.

[Hortensis]

19. Truth's strengths are that it's TRUTH and that it's proven with time.

Lies have the advantage with dissemination early on, can be tailored to whatever is needed at the moment, but their weakness is that they're LIES, not true, and that they lose power and become disproven with time.

No matter what tactics our leadership chooses in the short term, what you say will happen in the long term.

All these people committed a huge betrayal of their oaths, their nation, their constituents, their families, and everything they were supposed to stand for. That's not going away. Future Republicans, or whatever they call themselves, will disavow them and students will learn about them in high school and college because their actions in this election will "live on in infamy."

We've never had such a low point of betrayal devoid of principle. The secessionists who formed the Confederacy from their own states with strong support from majorities in those states don't even come close.

[ancianita]

20. I'd like to believe your 3rd P. Yet there are 71 million immune to long term Truth, no matter how

much it's revealed.

First, because they forget messaging -- made austerity-busy, and distracted by TV design -- and so opponents have kept it up every generation.
Second, belief in trumpthink for so many humans. And the world knows that Americans -- religious as they claim to be, retrograde as they think -- are the worst.

Taking over their heads' previous tapes is this goal.
By a Christian leader who appeals to mainstream Protestants. Transfer that fear of God into fear of the GOP. Show what your P. 3 lays out daily and never let them forget, which they will want. Getting them used to the facts of their party's misdeeds is important in developing their sympathy for fact.

Wearing down the messaging at state level is the goal.
When will Democratic-owned radio happen? That's the big messaging issue, imo.

[Hortensis]

21. :) Well, Democratic-owned radio won't happen. Apparently those

Democrats inclined are satisfied with public radio and not interested in indoctrination with political bias.

As for the future, remember that change always creates more change, events create reactions, and situations change in many ways to affect them. Nothing's a straight line.

Notably, these despicable people would become almost magically far more decent with more decent leadership. Authoritarians want leaders to assume the burdens of citizenship, which includes deciding matters of conscience for them, and to make them safe. They became very bad with increasingly bad leaders, but they used to have more decent leaders and can again.

Just not tomorrow. Some major adjustments have to happen, and we are at some point in the adjustment period. Just hope it doesn't include crashing the whole nation to hurt them into going into hiding, They've been trying to do that and have done some real damage, including at least 400,000 dead before the holocaust is stopped. But they've also succeeded in waking up more and more of a mostly sleeping citizenry to the danger and in demonstrating the worth and sustainability of our institutions.

And one new development is that previously helpless and unheard responsible conservatives are now able to speak out about the need to reject the wealth-, religion- and Russia-drive, corruption and extremism that purged traditional conservatism from the right.

[ancianita]

22. All of this makes perfect sense. Re major adjustments...

History has shown most Democrats that any new development that has Repubs sounding like Democrats is suspect. But not to Democratic leadership. Democrats still keep denying Republican bad faith. I've seen too many Democratic leaders, including Obama, fall for the Lucy with the football.

Re Repubs, voters as much as leaders, any change of heart that "rejects" what they've done since Reagan would have to show in their actions as much as talk -- for at least two election cycles. I refuse to ever trust them again to remake themselves into the pre-Reagan that actually had some liberal Republicans in it. I want to. But I must discipline myself to refuse for many elections ahead.

Thankfully, even though gerrymandering will again skew representation, we still have a growing urban archipelago, which still might not be enough at state levels to change majority rule. Hopefully we can keep that sleeping citizenry awake and engaged.

Rural America has a mindset that's hardwired to their own parameters of distrust -- over women's and Blacks' equality, science expertise, tech, xenophobia, health care and everything else that wafts through their radios. Add to that the 84 million people in this country, regardless of politics, who don't have broadband access, and the ground work Democrats have to do will be big.

[Hortensis]

24. Oh, yes, to all. Except the "Charlie Brown" image of Democratic

leaders who never learned how vicious their colleagues could be, in spite of their taking almost literally every opportunity to insult, abuse, and inconvenience them. By the end of Clinton's administration, nothing was ever too mean, dishonorable, or small for them. This was a constantly hostile working environment.

Every time they were the majority party since the early '90s, their power expanded exponentially and they'd do everything they could to damage and tear down government institutions, to deliberately run the nation into debt with transfers of wealth to the wealthy, usually impede anything Democrats wanted to do because it was us, and to instill corruption; and of course their ability to deliver spiteful personal hurts and insults up close and personal to their Democratic colleagues also increased exponentially.

We're the ones who had no idea just how bad they'd become, and they just kept getting worse.

We all regret the lost opportunities in the beginning of Obama's administration, but I think he was very right to try to bring the nation together, given what was at stake. What they'd already become was a real danger to our nation, and his revolutionary election by a large majority of American voters MIGHT have been an inflection point for the nation, changing the trajectory of the right's decline into implacable corruption and enmity toward everything Democrat and liberal, and against democracy itself. We now know it accelerated it all, but he had to try. And he and the rest of his advisers didn't have our hindsight.

[ancianita]

27. I hear you.

The whole scene is called 'Lucy with the football for a reason' -- the emphasis wasn't about Charlie Brown; it was about the Lucy setup.
This label came up around here at the end of years of our seeing the setups that left Democrats and the president standing with a hand out across the aisle and no one taking it. The impatient younguns called it the Great Obama Disappointment. But they misjudged.
It takes longer than people are used to (the internet-conditioned attention span) for the trusting to take the measure of the untrustworthy. The Obama administration's whole approach was correct and never did I fault it; the problem was always with Republicans, as any honest Republican could see. And so the "Lucy"label. Charlie Brown is the good guy, not the stupid guy.

[Hortensis]

28. :) Lucy's a darling compared to them. Nice people of course saw

it as a kind, homey, albeit maybe gently belittling, simile. Not unkind given that Obama did pass up some important opportunities while repeatedly holding that ball and hoping it'd help rebuild the center.

LW hostiles, though, used it to smear Obama and Democrats in general as intrinsically incompetent and eager to appease and collaborate with RW corruption. More than a little dog whistle to the use, also.

That's an of-course in those who display the exact same kind of corrosive nastiness and irrational dishonesty and implacable hostility toward Democrats as their counterparts on the right, frequently double teaming with them against Democrats while smiling and claiming only the highest principles for all the gullible Charlie Browns in the electorate.

“You have a bowl of shit in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing. It’s still shit.”

Well, time to get back to cleaning the refrigerator. It didn't disappear.

[ancianita]

30. Right, because she's just an image.

For the record, Obama never held the football but did occasionally get it pulled and he fell. If there are LW hostiles, I see them as judgmental perfectionists for improvement, and not corrosive. I've argued loud and long against their falling for anti-liberal criticisms of Democratic Party -- they stupidly call Democrats neoliberals, which I've had to correct them about.

Unfortunately, being against is how some people know their own identities, which traps them into their first adolescent, oppositionally defiant stance that they mistook for being grown, which itself isn't even near being an adult.

Happy cleaning. I've been ignoring some ironing, myself.

[Hortensis]

32. :) No such thing. I'm unfortunately as dysfunctionally wired

against housework as radicals are knee-jerk antagonistic to those on their side with similar goals but more power. More than a little PTSD too. I never browse glossy mags any more without recoiling in horror from 20' "architectural" ceiling details that offer dozens of great new places for dust to accumulate and spiders to homestead.

Have a nice evening. No ironing of course.

[ancianita]

35. Nope. No ironing.

[iluvtennis]

16. The ppl of their districts need to vote them out in 2022. Who would want a representative who

doesn't respect their vote and would try to overturn it.

What they did was absurb.

[onenote]

26. I bet if you checked, the members of Congress that supported the Texas Supreme Court case

all come from districts that voted for Trump over Biden.

They didn't put themselves at risk by signing the brief.

[iluvtennis]

33. Yes, agree. It was just generic statement that if congress person supports taking away the votes

of the people, they shouldn't be allowed to serve. They work for the people.

[onenote]

34. Do you feel that way about Barbara Lee, Sheila Jackson Lee, Jamie Raskin

James McGovern, and Raúl Grijalva?

They are Democrats who tried (unsuccessfully) to raise objections to the counting of the electoral votes cast for Trump in certain states during the January 6, 2017 session tabulating those votes. In other words, they supported taking away the votes of the certified winner in those states.

For the record, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the Democrats attempting to raise objections -- although those objections were DOA since they weren't in writing and didn't have the support of at least one member of the Senate, as required by statute.

Making bad or ineffective arguments against counting the certified votes of a state doesn't (and shouldn't) deprive one of the right to serve in Congress.

[iluvtennis]

36. If they signed onto a lawsuit to throw out the votes of certain states, it would be wrong in my

opinion as it's voter disenfranchisement and that is wrong.

[onenote]

37. How is it different than asking Congress to throw out the results?

How is it different than asking Congress not to allow a state's certified votes to be counted?

[Kaleva]

23. It's not going to happen. People are going to forget about this quickly.

[Demsrule86]

31. Yes...they violated their oath...those that are not new.

[Vinca]

38. 100 years from now descendants will read about their traitorous relatives in history books.

This won't be forgotten.