Lies that lead to an insurrection are not simply points of left-right disagreement

[DonViejo]

Philip Bump 27 mins ago

We will set aside the incongruity of using an front-page essay in a newspaper in the country’s largest city to complain about having been “muzzled” by an out-of-control left-wing culture in the United States. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has generated a lot of political heat with similar contrasts, using his lofty platform to complain that the left is silencing him.

What’s intriguing about his essay published Monday in the New York Post is, instead, how he tried to reframe his effort to block the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6. You’ll recall that Congress convened that day to finalize Joe Biden’s election as president, only to have the counting interrupted first by Republican legislators eager to demonstrate fealty to President Donald Trump’s effort to reverse the result and, then, by a violent mob motivated by Trump’s dishonesty to try to block the count by any means possible.

Hawley made clear his interest in interrupting the vote days earlier. Like the rationale offered by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Hawley’s explanation was slightly tangential to Trump’s false claims of voter fraud. Hawley claimed that a 2019 change to Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting law was unconstitutional, although a court had already determined that any such questions should not affect the result of the 2020 presidential contest. The clear goal — again as with Cruz’s insistence that concerns about voter fraud must be given a hearing — was to be able to boost Trump’s claims that something untoward had happened while providing cover for the inevitable rebuttal that such claims were utterly unwarranted.

The point of Hawley’s essay in the New York Post is to recast the backlash that occurred when he persisted with his effort to interrupt the counting of electoral votes, even after the Capitol had been cleared of the rioters seeking the same thing. That backlash was itself limited: A deal Hawley had signed to publish a book fell through after the riot — only to be picked up by another publisher soon afterward.

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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/lies-that-lead-to-an-insurrection-are-not-simply-points-of-left-right-disagreement/ar-BB1d4Ewe?ocid=uxbndlbing

[dalton99a]

1. Kick

“On behalf of the voters of my state, I raised a challenge to the presidential electors from Pennsylvania after that state conducted the election in violation of the state constitution,” Hawley wrote, although, again, no court has determined those changes to have violated the constitution. The push by corporate America to “cancel” him, he continued, “started with leftist politicians demanding I resign from office for representing the views of my constituents and leading a democratic debate on the floor of the Senate.”

See the shift there? Hawley presents his actions as a sober consideration of what happened in Pennsylvania but conflates that with his “representing the views of my constituents.” His constituents were, of course, not generally or solely concerned about the purported constitutionality of a Pennsylvania law that would be immaterial to the results of the election. Missourians supportive of Trump were instead primarily riled up about false and unsubstantiated claims of rampant fraud. Hawley is the guy caught smoking behind the gym with the cool kids who tells the principal that he was just there to make sure everyone was staying safe.

Except, of course, that what’s at stake here is a serious, violent attempt to subvert the results of the presidential election, an act that was the culmination of months of dishonest rhetoric from Trump and his allies. It was a literal attempt at rebellion, however unlikely to succeed. It was deadlier than the taking of Fort Sumter, though less successful as a trigger for the collapse of the nation. More than 100 law enforcement officers were injured in what the government itself calls an “insurrection.”

This is not an issue on which reasonable people can disagree. It’s understandable why Hawley would want to downplay his role in the events that occurred, but to portray what followed as a politically motivated disagreement is to collapse the events of Jan. 6 into a general left-versus-right split. This is very useful for Hawley, another example of his cynically using the partisan divide to bolster his political position. But some things must stand apart from our all-too-familiar blue-said/red-said dynamic.

Criticizing the actions of the mob while defending the rhetoric that helped bolster its false perceptions is not tenable, but Hawley isn’t the only one to try it. Cruz, for example, was on Fox News the day after the Capitol riot to insist something similar: What he was doing was “debating on the floor of the Senate election integrity,” which “has nothing to do with this criminal terrorist assault.”