Republicans Have Emerged From The Capitol Insurrection United Against Democracy

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Seven Republican members of the U.S. Senate voted to find former President Donald Trump guilty of inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead. By the end of this week, six of the seven may have faced censures from local and state Republican parties back home because of those votes.

Together with the 10 Republican House members who voted to impeach Trump, the seven GOP senators made Trump’s second impeachment the most bipartisan in American history. But if those votes foreshadowed a looming civil war within the GOP, the hasty efforts to censure anyone who crossed Trump are a good indication of which side has the larger army.

As the riot in the Capitol played out, even the GOP lawmakers who helped incite it briefly attempted to distance themselves from the mess they had created. But rather than a reckoning, the Republican Party is attempting a purge. From Congress to state legislatures, and in the state- and county-level parties that make up its base, the GOP’s rank and file has emerged from an insurrection and a second impeachment trial united against American democracy and the few members of the party still willing to stand up for it.

The North Carolina GOP voted Monday to censure Sen. Richard Burr, two days after the Louisiana Republican Party censured Sen. Bill Cassidy. Local Republican parties in Alaska also passed resolutions to censure Sen. Lisa Murkowski, and the Pennsylvania GOP is planning a possible censure of Sen. Pat Toomey after at least one county party already voted to do so. State party leaders in Maine are at least discussing a censure for Sen. Susan Collins. Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, who earned censures from multiple county parties earlier this month after blaming Trump for the Capitol riot, could soon face a statewide censure effort, CNBC reported this week. Some Utah Republicans circulated a petition to censure Sen. Mitt Romney over his vote, but the state GOP announced Monday that it would not move forward with the effort.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/republicans-censure-burr-toomey-trump-impeachment-221846176.html

[dchill]

1. That seems to be undeniable.

[ancianita]

2. Yes, Republicans outright deny democracy.

Republicans have over the past year taken to making clear that democracy was not the intention of the framers of the 18th century Constitution.

The USA, they bluntly insist, is not a democracy; it’s a constitutional republic. And we know that constitution, written by and for rich white men, was designed to prevent democracy.

What’s changed is that the Republican Party under Trump lost some of its shyness about expressing the white-supremacist tropes that have guided its political program on the ground for decades...

That’s why even those Georgia Republicans who refused to buckle to Trump’s pressure to act outside the law have nonetheless for years acted within the law (which provides them considerable leeway) to prevent working-class Black citizens from getting to vote.

Even now, those same state-level Georgia Republican Party functionaries that bucked Trump are trying to use the law to suppress the work of the organization that mobilized the Black vote in Georgia. Somebody needs to explain to Nancy Pelosi that the Republican Party is not a partner in democracy; it’s an obstacle to democracy.

https://tonykaron.substack.com/p/trumps-acquittal-a-tale-of-american

Example: Washington County Republican Chair Dave Ball ripped on Toomey for justifying his vote to convict Trump on the charge of inciting the violent Jan. 6 riot:

"We did not send him there to vote his conscience. We did not send him there to do the right thing or whatever he said he was doing. We sent him there to represent us, and we feel very strongly that he did not represent us."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/02/16/pat-toomey-faces-censure-over-impeachment-vote-republican-party/6759842002/