With nine candidates in the running for Speaker, some Republicans are raising questions over whether their votes on overturning the 2020 election results should be a factor in electing the next lea…
Saved you a click: Emmer (Minnesota) and Scott (Georgia) are the non-traitors.
All the rest are insurrectionists; and thus are not actually qualified to be in any federal office at all, much less Speaker.
Unfortunately, voting democratically on an issue, however invalid, doesn’t make one an insurrectionist. An insurrection is a violent uprising, and a democratic vote is about as far away from that as you can get.
Voting in support of insurrection makes you an insurrectionist. If we’re going to move the goal post, we can easily move it back.
Why does this vote exist as a codified procedure then?
Not coincidentally, an entire literature has been written on this by constitutional scholars and historians in the past few years.
Because governments are not absolute, perfect systems. You can have a functionally useful system that still happens to allow bad faith participants to get voted in.
Voting to overturn a democratic election is not “a democratic vote.”
But what if my side lost on the first vote?! Doesn’t that mean that that vote is invalid?!?
Nah. For example, the members of Southern state legislatures who voted to secede from the Union and make war on the United States federal government were insurrectionists.
Ordinarily, I would agree with you. But in this case, there was coordination between at least some of the Members and the angry crowd outside. Was every Member who voted against the certification intending to follow it up by working with the mob to intimidate everyone? No, but enough of them were to make the whole vote suspect.
Heck, they keep doing it. When their guy didn’t get the votes, they had angry mobs clog their phone lines and make threats. They try to get their way through brute force and intimidation. You can’t then make it all better by simply holding a coerced vote and saying democracy still functions.
They
try toget their way through brute force and intimidation.ftfy
They are no doubt fellow travelers to the insurrectionists.
Here’s the tl;dr:
- House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) Did not vote for the coup attempt
- Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.) INSURRECTIONIST
- House Republican Conference Vice Chairman Mike Johnson (R-La.) INSURRECTIONIST
- Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) INSURRECTIONIST
- Rep. Jack Bergman (R-Mich.) INSURRECTIONIST
- Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) Did not vote for the coup attempt
- Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) INSURRECTIONIST
- Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.) INSURRECTIONIST
- Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Ala.) INSURRECTIONIST
