Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      State Capitols ‘on High Alert,’ Fearing More Violence

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutliveLatest UpdatesInside the SiegeInauguration SecurityNotable ArrestsIncitement to Riot?AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyState Capitols ‘on High Alert,’ Fearing More ViolenceOfficials around the country are bracing for any spillover from last week’s violent assault on the U.S. Capitol. State legislatures already have become targets for protesters in recent days.A member of the Georgia State Patrol SWAT team looked on outside the Georgia State Capitol after the opening day of the legislative session on Monday in Atlanta.Credit…Brynn Anderson/Associated PressNeil MacFarquhar and Jan. 11, 2021Updated 8:22 p.m. ETIt was opening day of the 2021 legislative session, and the perimeter of the Georgia State Capitol on Monday was bristling with state police officers in full camouflage gear, most of them carrying tactical rifles.On the other side of the country, in Olympia, Wash., dozens of National Guard troops in riot gear and shields formed a phalanx behind a temporary fence. Facing them in the pouring rain was a small group of demonstrators, some also wearing military fatigues and carrying weapons. “Honor your oath!” they shouted. “Fight for freedom every day!”And in Idaho, Ammon Bundy, an antigovernment activist who once led his supporters in the occupation of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, showed up outside the statehouse in Boise with members of his organization carrying “wanted” posters for Gov. Brad Little and others on charges of “treason” and “sedition.”“At a time of uncertainty, we need our neighbors to stand next to and continue the war that is raging within this country,” Mr. Bundy’s group declared in a message to followers.State capitals across the country are bracing for a spillover from last week’s violent assault on the U.S. Capitol, with state legislatures already becoming targets for protesters in the tense days around the inauguration of the incoming president, Joseph R. Biden Jr.Gone is a large measure of the bonhomie that usually accompanies the annual start of the legislative season, replaced by marked unease over the possibility of armed attacks and gaps in security around statehouses that have long prided themselves on being open to constituents.“Between Covid and the idea that there are people who are armed and making threats and are serious, it was definitely not your normal beginning of session,” said Senator Jennifer A. Jordan, a Democratic legislator in Georgia who watched the police officers assembled outside the State Capitol in Atlanta on Monday from her office window. “Usually folks are happy, talking to each other, and it did not have that feel.”Dozens of state capitals will be on alert in the coming days, following calls among a mix of antigovernment organizations for actions in all 50 states on Jan. 17. Some of them come from far-right organizations that harbor a broad antigovernment agenda and have already been protesting state Covid-19 lockdowns since last spring. The F.B.I. this week sent a warning to local law enforcement agencies about the potential for armed protests in all 50 state capitals.In a video news conference on Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said that “everybody is on high alert” for protests in Sacramento in the days ahead.The National Guard would be deployed as needed, he said, and the California Highway Patrol, responsible for protecting the Capitol, was also on the lookout for any budding violence. “I can assure you we have a heightened, heightened level of security,” he said.In Michigan, the state police said they had beefed up their presence around the State Capitol in Lansing and would continue that way for weeks. The commission that oversees the Statehouse voted on Monday to ban the open carry of firearms inside the building, a move Democratic lawmakers had been demanding since last year, when armed protesters challenging government Covid-19 lockdowns stormed the building.Two of those involved in the protests were later arrested in what the authorities said was a plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and put her on trial.Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, took to Twitter to warn the public away from the Statehouse, saying it was not safe.Images from the Wisconsin state legislature in Madison showed large sheets of plywood being readied to cover the ground-floor windows. In St. Paul, Minn., the Statehouse has been surrounded by a chicken-wire fence since early last summer, when social justice protests erupted over the killing of George Floyd in neighboring Minneapolis.Workers boarded up the Wisconsin State Capitol building in Madison on Monday.Credit…Todd Richmond/Associated PressPatricia Torres Ray, a Democratic state senator, said the barrier had served to protect the building and the legislators, but concerns remained about possible gaps, such as the system of underground tunnels that link many public buildings in Minnesota to allow people to avoid walking outdoors in the winter.Gov. Jay Inslee in Washington ordered extra security after an armed crowd of Trump supporters breached the fence at the governor’s mansion last week while he was at home. State troopers intervened to disperse the crowd.In Texas, Representative Briscoe Cain, a conservative Republican from the Houston suburb of Deer Park, said that the legislature in Austin was likely protected by the fact that so many lawmakers carry firearms.“I have a pistol on my hip as we speak,” Mr. Cain said in a telephone interview on Monday. “I hope they’re never necessary, but I think it’s why they will never be necessary.”The Texas Legislature, dominated by Republicans, meets every two years and was scheduled to begin its 140-day session at noon on Tuesday.There may be efforts to reduce the presence of guns in the Capitol, Mr. Cain said, but he predicted that they would be doomed to failure given widespread support for the Second Amendment.In Missouri, Dave Schatz, the Republican president of the State Senate, said hundreds of lawmakers had gathered on Monday on the Statehouse lawn in Jefferson City for the swearing-in of Gov. Mike Parson and other top officials. Although security was tight, with the roads around the building closed, the presence of police and other security officers was normal for the day, Mr. Schatz said, and no fellow legislators had buttonholed him so far about increased security.“We are far removed from the events that occurred in D.C.,” he said.In Nevada, a Republican leader in Nye County posted a letter on Friday that likened recent protests of the election results across the country to the American Revolution, declaring: “The next 12 days will be something to tell the grandchildren! It’s 1776 all over again!”The letter — written by Chris Zimmerman, the chairman of the Nye County Republican Central Committee — prompted a rebuke over the weekend from Representative Steven Horsford, a Democrat who represents the county.Gov. Mike Parson of Missouri and his wife, Teresa Parson, waved outside the State Capitol in Jefferson City, escorted by members of the Missouri Highway Patrol during the governor’s inauguration celebration.Credit…Jeff Roberson/Associated PressNext door in Clark County, Nev., which includes Las Vegas, Democratic officials sent out a public safety alert on Sunday about potential violence across the state, warning, “Over the past 48 hours, the online activity on social media has escalated to the point that we must take these threats seriously.”While most of the protests announced so far are expected to focus on state capitals, law enforcement and other officials in various cities have said they believe that other government buildings could also be targeted.Federal authorities said on Monday that they had arrested and charged one man, Cody Melby, with shooting several bullets into the federal courthouse in Portland, Ore., on Friday night. Mr. Melby had also been arrested a couple of days earlier when, the police said, he tried to enter the State Capitol in Salem with a firearm.Some of those protesting in Oregon and Washington said they were opposed to state lockdown rules that prevent the public from being present when government decisions are being made.James Harris, 22, who lives in eastern Washington State, said he went to the Capitol in Olympia on Monday to push for residents to be full participants in their state’s response to Covid-19. He said he was against being forced to wear masks and to social distance; the lockdowns are “hurting people,” he said.Mr. Harris is a truck driver, but he said the virus control measures had prevented him from being able to work since March.Georgia already has seen trouble in recent days. At the same time that protesters were swarming into the U.S. Capitol in Washington last week, armed Trump supporters appeared outside the statehouse in Georgia. Law enforcement officers escorted to safety the secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, who had refused President Trump’s attempts to depict the presidential election as fraudulent.Senator Jordan noted that many of the security measures being put in place, including the construction of a tall iron fence around the Capitol building, were actually decided on during last summer’s social justice demonstrations, when protesters surrounded many government buildings.Now, she said, the threat is coming from the other end of the political spectrum.“These people are clearly serious, they are armed, they are dangerous,” Ms. Jordan said, “and from what we saw last week, they really don’t care who they are trying to take out.”Contributing reporting were More

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      This Putsch Was Decades in the Making

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThis Putsch Was Decades in the MakingG.O.P. cynics have been coddling crazies for a long time.Opinion ColumnistJan. 11, 2021, 7:41 p.m. ETCredit…Ted S. Warren/Associated PressOne striking aspect of the Capitol Hill putsch was that none of the rioters’ grievances had any basis in reality.No, the election wasn’t stolen — there is no evidence of significant electoral fraud. No, Democrats aren’t part of a satanic pedophile conspiracy. No, they aren’t radical Marxists — even the party’s progressive wing would be considered only moderately left of center in any other Western democracy.So all the rage is based on lies. But what’s almost as striking as the fantasies of the rioters is how few leading Republicans have been willing, despite the violence and desecration, to tell the MAGA mob that their conspiracy theories are false.Bear in mind that Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, and two-thirds of his colleagues voted against accepting the Electoral College results even after the riot. (McCarthy then shamelessly decried “division,” saying that “we must call on our better angels.”)Or consider the behavior of leading Republicans who aren’t usually considered extremists. On Sunday Senator Rob Portman declared that we need to “restore confidence in the integrity of our electoral system.” Portman isn’t stupid; he has to know that the only reason so many people doubt the election results is that members of his party deliberately fomented that doubt. But he’s still keeping up the pretense.And the cynicism and cowardice of leading Republicans is, I would argue, the most important cause of the nightmare now enveloping our nation.Of course we need to understand the motives of our homegrown enemies of democracy. In general, political scientists find — not surprisingly, given America’s history — that racial antagonism is the best predictor of willingness to countenance political violence. Anecdotally, personal frustrations — often involving social interactions, not “economic anxiety” — also seem to drive many extremists.But neither racism nor widespread attraction to conspiracy theories is new in our political life. The worldview described in Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” is barely distinguishable from QAnon beliefs today.So there’s only so much to be gained from interviewing red-hatted guys in diners; there have always been people like that. If there are or seem to be more such people than in the past, it probably has less to do with intensified grievances than with outside encouragement.For the big thing that has changed since Hofstadter wrote is that one of our major political parties has become willing to tolerate and, indeed, feed right-wing political paranoia.This coddling of the crazies was, at first, almost entirely cynical. When the G.O.P. began moving right in the 1970s its true agenda was mainly economic — what its leaders wanted, above all, were business deregulation and tax cuts for the rich. But the party needed more than plutocracy to win elections, so it began courting working-class whites with what amounted to thinly disguised racist appeals.Not incidentally, white supremacy has always been sustained in large part through voter suppression. So it shouldn’t be surprising to see right-wingers howling about a rigged election — after all, rigging elections is what their side is accustomed to doing. And it’s not clear to what extent they actually believe that this election was rigged, as opposed to being enraged that this time the usual vote-rigging didn’t work.But it’s not just about race. Since Ronald Reagan, the G.O.P. has been closely tied to the hard-line Christian right. Anyone shocked by the prevalence of insane conspiracy theories in 2020 should look back to “The New World Order,” published by Reagan ally Pat Robertson in 1991, which saw America menaced by an international cabal of Jewish bankers, Freemasons and occultists. Or they should check out a 1994 video promoted by Jerry Falwell Sr. called “The Clinton Chronicles,” which portrayed Bill Clinton as a drug smuggler and serial killer.So what has changed since then? For a long time Republican elites imagined that they could exploit racism and conspiracy theorizing while remaining focused on a plutocratic agenda. But with the rise first of the Tea Party, then of Donald Trump, the cynics found that the crazies were actually in control, and that they wanted to destroy democracy, not cut tax rates on capital gains.And Republican elites have, with few exceptions, accepted their new subservient status.You might have hoped that a significant number of sane Republican politicians would finally say that enough is enough, and break with their extremist allies. But Trump’s party didn’t balk at his corruption and abuse of power; it stood by him when he refused to accept electoral defeat; and some of its members are responding to a violent attack on Congress by complaining about their loss of Twitter followers.And there’s no reason to believe that the atrocities yet to come — for there will be more atrocities — will make a difference. The G.O.P. has reached the culmination of its long journey away from democracy, and it’s hard to see how it can ever be redeemed.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Why Republicans Can't Agree on a Way Back to Power

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutliveLatest UpdatesInside the SiegeInauguration SecurityNotable ArrestsIncitement to Riot?AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyNews AnalysisFractured by Trump, the G.O.P. Can’t Agree on a Way Back to PowerMany Republican leaders and strategists want to prepare the party for a post-Trump future. But the pro-Trump voter base has other ideas.President Trump spoke to supporters at a rally near the White House last week. Some Republican leaders fret that as of now they cannot win with Mr. Trump, and they cannot win without him.Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York TimesJan. 11, 2021, 7:36 p.m. ETThe Republican Party is entering a period of political powerlessness in Washington badly fractured from within, lacking a unifying message and set of principles and missing a clear bench of national leaders — a party with internal divisions and outside obstacles so significant that it may not easily weather the splintering underway.While all parties go through reckonings after losing power, the G.O.P. has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections and, for the first time since Herbert Hoover, ceded the White House, Senate and House in a single term. President Trump is staring down a second impeachment, members of his administration have resigned in protest of his actions, and senators from his party have called for him to do the same.What’s more, the party’s political messaging is likely to be inspected intensely by social media platforms that have already barred Mr. Trump and others on the far right. Business and corporate donors are threatening to cut off the party’s financial spigot, and tech companies are stifling Mr. Trump’s ability to raise money online, the lifeblood of his political operation.But the most acute danger for the health of the party, and its electoral prospects to retake the House and Senate in 2022, is the growing chasm between the pro-Trump voter base and the many Republican leaders and strategists who want to reorient for a post-Trump era.“Have you heard what some of these folks waving MAGA flags are saying about Republicans?” said Representative Peter Meijer, Republican of Michigan, whose first days in Congress this month were marked by evacuations to escape from a mob. “They don’t identify themselves as Republicans.”Mr. Meijer was among the Republicans who voted to affirm President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College victory last week, in the proceedings that rioters incited by Mr. Trump interrupted. The vote set off another round of vitriol and threats.“Our expectation is that somebody will try to kill us,” said Mr. Meijer, an Iraq war veteran. “That is the scenario that many of us are preparing for.”Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist who served as a top adviser for Chris Christie in his 2016 run for president, said the violence at the Capitol represented a breaking point for his party’s relationship with Mr. Trump. “Now the two camps are, who is a Trump sycophant and who is not,” Mr. DuHaime said. “That spells doom until we can get past Trump.”Mr. Trump won 74.2 million voters, a Republican record, even in defeat in 2020. Some party leaders fret that as of now, they cannot win with Mr. Trump, and they cannot win without him. Right-wing voters have signaled that they will abandon the party if it turns on Mr. Trump, and more traditional Republicans will sour if it sticks by him.Members of the Trump-supporting mob scaled walls outside the Capitol last week.Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York TimesThe twin losses last week in Georgia, where the Republican incumbents yoked themselves closely to Mr. Trump and his baseless accusations of election fraud, not only cost Republicans control of the Senate but also offered a warning sign for the future. The dynamics mirrored the 2018 midterm elections, when Mr. Trump’s divisive brand of politics was better at mobilizing Democrats than Republicans when he was not on the ballot himself.In the coming days, the specter of more violence is clear and present. The National Guard said Monday that it was planning to deploy up to 15,000 troops in the nation’s capital for the inauguration, and the F.B.I. warned in a bulletin about the potential for armed protests at all 50 state capitols between now and the inauguration.Mr. Trump is at the lowest point of his presidency, with 60 percent of Americans disapproving of him and a narrower majority wanting him removed from office, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll on Monday. His diminished approval is matched only by the depths of August 2017, when he equivocated after the white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Va., turned violent.And yet.A strong majority of Republican voters still approve of Mr. Trump — more than seven in 10 in the Quinnipiac survey — and similar numbers have bought into his baseless accusation that last year’s election was riddled with fraud. And Mr. Trump’s handpicked choice to lead the Republican National Committee for another term, Ronna McDaniel, won re-election virtually by acclamation last weekend.Some prominent party leaders, after years of supporting Mr. Trump and staying silent about so much of his divisive behavior, have begun to break with him. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, called his vote to affirm the Electoral College victory of Mr. Biden the most important of his more than three decades on Capitol Hill. He warned that backing attempts to subvert the election would send American democracy into a “death spiral.”But a faction of Republicans rebelled, worsening the divisions within the party. Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, was the first to say he would object to the Electoral College vote, and he has been shunned by his colleagues. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who led another group of objectors, has faced rebukes from former close allies. Both are considered possible 2024 presidential candidates.Chad Sweet, who served as chairman of Mr. Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign, wrote in a note on social media over the weekend that he was cutting off support for Mr. Cruz. “In moments like this, all freedom loving Americans must put the survival of our democracy above loyalty to any party or individual,” Mr. Sweet wrote.But the verdict has been very different in the House, where the chamber’s top Republican, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, led a majority of his conference in voting against certifying Mr. Biden’s victory in two states.Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, the first member of his party in the chamber to say he would object to the Electoral College vote, has been shunned by his colleagues.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesIn an ominous sign for the Republicans who want to move past Mr. Trump, many of those with future ambitions within the Republican Party left the president conspicuously absent from their condemnations of the riot last Wednesday, such as Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former White House press secretary, who may run for governor of Arkansas in 2022.George P. Bush, the Texas lands commissioner and the son of a prominent Trump critic, Jeb Bush, made no mention of the president in his statement denouncing the attack. “There is absolutely no place for the violence we are seeing today in Washington,” he said.Allen West, the chairman of the G.O.P. in Texas, which remains firmly Trump country, made the case in an interview for “the way ahead” for the party: “It goes back to the grass-roots.”“We had 12 million new voters vote for the Republican ticket, and we want to make sure we maintain those new voters,” said Mr. West, whose appeals to the anger of grass-roots voters drew attention in December when he embraced secessionist language after Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the election was rejected by the Supreme Court.Republicans have some reason for optimism about their political future. Opposition parties typically perform strongly in the first midterms of a new presidency. Democrats will enter 2022 with some of the slimmest margins possible: a 50-50 Senate and a razor-thin House majority. And Republicans have a structural advantage in the Senate, given that underpopulated conservative states get two Senate seats just as populous liberal states do, while gerrymandered districts have helped House Republicans after the G.O.P. landslide of 2010.But Republicans face a steep climb toward becoming a majority party nationwide after Mr. Trump lost to Mr. Biden by more than seven million votes. In a remarkable statement opposing the effort to overturn the 2020 results, seven House Republicans this month acknowledged the party’s lack of a path to a national majority in the popular vote, warning against “delegitimizing” an Electoral College system that “that could provide the only path to victory in 2024.”Hours before the Capitol riot, the divergent political approaches of Republican leaders were on display in comments by the departing head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Senator Todd Young of Indiana, and the incoming chairman, Senator Rick Scott of Florida.Surrounded by Trump supporters outside a Senate office building, an exasperated Mr. Young defended his decision to certify the election. “The law matters,” he said. “I took an oath under God. Under God — I took an oath. Do we still take that seriously in this country?”Around the same time, Mr. Scott announced that he planned to vote against the electors from Pennsylvania. The primary job of the N.R.S.C. chairman is to raise money, and the growing list of corporations that are pausing or reconsidering G.O.P. donations in the wake of the electoral objections has caused some Republican consternation.Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina has spoken out against Mr. Trump since the riot.Credit…Mic Smith/Associated PressFor some House Republicans, the divisions in the party are hardly ones they expected even a few weeks ago.Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who worked for Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2015 and 2016 and who had pledged to be a Trump “ally” during her own congressional race, began last week on an upbeat note: She brought her two children to Washington for her swearing-in. “How cool would it be to roam the halls of Congress and then do virtual school?” she recalled thinking.But Ms. Mace, who is the first woman to graduate from the Citadel, sent them home after one day. Alarmed by the boiling-hot language from her own party about fraud, she feared violence, and her fears were realized in Wednesday’s rampage.“There is no way we can go down that rabbit hole again,” said Ms. Mace, who voted to certify Mr. Biden’s victory and urged a break from Mr. Trump. “We have to rebuild our party. We are starting from scratch. And if we don’t recognize that now, we are going to be in denial for a very long time.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Impeach Trump Again

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyImpeach Trump AgainIt is a dark day for the nation when the president’s behavior forces Congress to hold him accountable.The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.Jan. 11, 2021, 7:03 p.m. ETCredit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesPresident Trump’s efforts to remain in office in defiance of democracy cannot be allowed to go unanswered, lest they invite more lawlessness from this president or those who follow.The attack on the Capitol on Wednesday was not a spontaneous eruption of violence. It was the culmination of a campaign waged by the president of the United States and his allies in Congress and the right-wing media to overturn the results of a free and fair election that began even before the ballots began to be counted on Election Day.That campaign involved a barrage of lies about the integrity of the voting process from the president, his allies and other elected Republicans. It included farcical legal challenges that were laughed out of court even as they sowed doubt in the minds of a majority of Republicans about whether Joe Biden won fairly. It involved the president and his allies strong-arming state election officials to change the vote count outright. When it all failed, the president held a rally on the National Mall and sent the angry crowd to march on the Capitol and stop Congress from declaring Mr. Biden the winner of the presidency. The riot came at the cost of at least five lives and shook the confidence of the nation and the world in the stability of American democracy.Each of these efforts amounts to an unprecedented assault on the rule of law. Taken together, they constitute a crime so brazen that it demands the highest form of accountability that the legislature can deliver. As regrettable as this moment is for the nation, there is no other option but to vote to impeach the president for a second time.Mr. Trump began undermining November’s election before the first vote was cast. Throughout the spring and summer, as the pandemic forced states to be more flexible with mail and absentee voting, he claimed repeatedly and without evidence that mail-in balloting would be rife with fraud.Then, after it was clear Mr. Biden was the victor, and after weeks of public and private attempts to get states to change their vote totals and deliver him a second term, the president encouraged his supporters to converge on Washington on Jan. 6. (“Be there, will be wild!” he tweeted.) Tens of thousands of them, from all over the country, answered his call.Mr. Trump took to the stage and gave perhaps the most un-American speech ever uttered by a president.“We will not take it anymore,” Mr. Trump told the crowd. “We will stop the steal.”“States want to revote. The states got defrauded. They were given false information. They voted on it. Now they want to recertify,” Mr. Trump said to cheers. “They want it back. All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify, and we become president.”“Fight for Trump!” the crowd bellowed.Mr. Trump said that he’d just spoken to the vice president, who was due to oversee the ceremonial counting of electoral votes. “I said: ‘Mike, that doesn’t take courage. What takes courage is to do nothing — that takes courage.’ And then we’re stuck with a president who lost the election by a lot, and we have to live with that for four more years. We’re just not going to let that happen.”“We’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down,” Mr. Trump said, “to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and -women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.” He continued: “Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.”“We fight. We fight like hell,” the president said. “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”With that, the crowd struck off and some of the president’s loyalists stormed the Capitol.The charges against Mr. Trump are clear: inciting an insurrection. The House could give him fair consideration without the lengthy hearings it required to impeach him in December 2019 after he strong-armed the Ukrainian president. The evidence now is not secondhand accounts of meetings and phone calls. The offenses occurred in public for weeks and then live on national television.Significant support from Republicans would be necessary to achieve the two-thirds majority in the Senate required for a conviction. But the deadly attack on Congress finally seems to have shaken some of them from their reflexive backing of the president who incited it. Senators were driven out of their own chamber, and into hiding, while they were in the middle of performing their constitutional duty of counting the electoral votes.Mr. Trump may not have called directly for this behavior, but there is no question that he encouraged it and then refused for hours to condemn it, even as the whole world watched in horror. When he finally asked for rioters to stop and go home, he continued to claim the election had been stolen.So far, among Republicans, only Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who described the president’s behavior as “wicked,” has said he would consider impeachment. Others are said to be privately discussing voting for it. Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania have called on the president to resign. If Republican senators refuse to convict Mr. Trump, they would go on the record — for their constituents to see and reconcile — defending a man who was happy to put their lives, and the nation’s democratic future, at risk for nothing but his own quest to hold on to power.The arguments against impeachment — that it could actually sow more division or further embolden Mr. Trump and his allies politically, that it could distract from Mr. Biden’s agenda in his first several weeks in office, that the Senate may ultimately fail to convict — are worth considering. There could be more unrest and even violence. In many ways, it would be easier to let Mr. Trump leave office and attempt to consign the storming of the Capitol to the past.But, ultimately, there can be no republic if leaders foment a violent overthrow of the government if they lose an election.Mr. Trump is not the only person at fault. Many Republican lawmakers riled up his supporters for weeks with false claims of election rigging and continued to object to the electoral vote even after the attack. The 14th Amendment bars from office any federal or state lawmaker who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” or given “aid or comfort” to those who have. Congressional leaders will need to reckon with which of their colleagues require censure for their actions, and perhaps even expulsion.Any and all rioters who broke laws on Wednesday need to be identified and prosecuted. Attempting insurrection is as serious a crime as there is in a self-governing republic. As more of the rioters are arrested, it will also be essential to get to the bottom of how they were allowed to wreak havoc and yet, for the most part, walk away unscathed. That will require investigations by both Congress and the Justice Department.Yet it can’t be lost that the violence on Wednesday was the nadir of a coordinated, relentless campaign to cast doubt on the strength of American democracy. In the end, the driving force behind the lies, the chaos and the bloodshed of the past few days and weeks is Mr. Trump. As long as he is not held fully to account, any future chief executive might feel equally unbound by a lawless precedent.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Georgia Senate Race Is Proof: The South Is Really Changing

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyLies, Damn Lies, and GeorgiaThe election of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff is a clear message: The South truly is changing.Contributing Opinion WriterJan. 11, 2021A public art installation in Atlanta.Credit…Damon Winter/The New York TimesNASHVILLE — It’s impossible not to notice how many members of Congress who voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election were white Southerners — more than half the legislators who professed to believe Donald Trump’s lie that the election was stolen are people who represent the American South. Even after his supporters, egged on by the president himself, staged a violent insurrection inside the United States Capitol, these craven, feckless legislators would not vote to certify the results of an election that has survived the scrutiny of more than 60 baseless challenges in various courts.Others, including my own state’s two senators, entered the Senate chamber on Jan. 6 fully intending to join them but were moved by the violent attack on the Capitol to reverse course. “These actions at the US Capitol by protestors are truly despicable and unacceptable,” tweeted Marsha Blackburn, a Republican senator from Tennessee. “I condemn them in the strongest possible terms. We are a nation of laws.”We are also a nation of free and fair elections, but somehow Ms. Blackburn had managed to ignore that necessary part of our democratic compact. She was not alone in her tardy about-face. All across the Southern states, politicians scrambled to reassert their own faith in the rule of law after publicly flouting it for weeks — or years, depending on when you start counting.Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, belatedly recognizing the nature of his own constituency, called the insurrectionists “terrorists, not patriots.”“Violence is abhorrent and I strongly condemn today’s attacks on our Capitol,” tweeted Senator Kelly Loeffler, Republican of Georgia, who had just spent two months running for re-election while simultaneously joining the president in insisting that the election was rigged.With such elected “leaders” representing this region — and with the insurrectionists parading through our nation’s Capitol carrying Confederate battle flags and other symbols of white supremacy — it’s not surprising that so many people outside the South seem to believe that the voters who support Marsha Blackburn, Lindsey Graham and Kelly Loeffler, not even to mention Donald Trump, are the only people who live here.All I can say is thank God for Georgia.In the runoff elections last week, the good people of Georgia sent two Democrats to Washington, D.C.: the Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once served as a co-pastor, and Jon Ossoff, a Jewish film executive who ran for Senate with the blessing of John Lewis, the civil rights activist and longtime member of Congress who passed away in July. In electing them, Georgia delivered the Senate to Democrats and at the same time offered a clear illustration of something Southerners, liberal and conservative alike, have known for years: The American South in the midst of profound change.This is not a story of 21st century carpetbaggers moving to the South to take advantage of our cheap cost of living and then blowing up our longstanding election patterns, an argument I’ve heard from more than one conservative Southerner.Partly, as other writers have noted, what is changing in the South is the demographic makeup. Urban and suburban voters, and the residents of college towns, are more apt to be progressive, and that’s true whether they’re homegrown or new residents. Every red state in the region has them. Think of Memphis and Nashville. Think of Chapel Hill and Birmingham and Louisville and New Orleans and Austin. As small towns dry up and jobs in the countryside disappear, it only stands to reason that these ever-growing cities and their suburbs will eventually loosen the stranglehold that rural voters have always had over elections in the South — at least in statewide elections, where gerrymandered districts don’t matter.But Republicans still hold the power in almost all Southern state legislatures (Virginia’s is the exception, and only since 2019), and they will continue to do everything possible to make it harder for Democrats to vote. In Georgia, state legislators are already eyeing new ways to avoid a repeat of the elections that turned Georgia blue. Consequently, change in the South may always be of the two-steps-forward-one-step-back variety.Which brings us to the other major explanation for why the South is changing: Liberals and progressives keep fighting back. Stacey Abrams is the face of this fight, and she is rightly credited with flipping Georgia two years after unapologetic voter-suppression tactics ended her own hopes of serving as governor. But the New Georgia Project, the mighty voter-outreach organization that Ms. Abrams and her colleagues have built to register new voters and persuade long disenfranchised Black and brown voters not to give up on the democratic process, has analogues across the South. These efforts may be less visible than Ms. Abrams’s, and some of them are still embryonic, but they are growing.That’s why Democrats down here haven’t completely lost heart, despite consistently losing elections to Republicans on one side and despite being chastised by liberals outside the South on the other. (“Everyday Democrats need to see beyond the electoral map to acknowledge the folks pushing for liberal ideas even in the reddest of areas,” the Kentucky novelist Silas House notes in a new essay for The Atlantic. “If they don’t, the cultural divide will grow only wider.”)In addition to voting demographics and voter outreach, a small but not inconsequential explanation for the changing political landscape of the South is that Donald Trump has finally inspired a change of heart in plenty of white Southerners. You won’t find them waving banners at political rallies or posting diatribes on social media, but they are here.Many of them sat out the last election, true, but others quietly, bravely cast their votes for Democrats, often for the first time in their lives, because this president has made them see how thin the veneer of democracy really is in today’s Republican Party. It isn’t easy for them to defy their entire family or their entire church to vote for candidates who stand for fairness and inclusion, but they did it in 2020, and already in 2021, and I believe that their numbers will continue to grow.I hope you’ll remember them, and all the passionate liberal activists here, too, the next time you see a sea of red on an election map. I hope you’ll remember them the next time a Southern statehouse passes another law that constrains the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. citizens or guts public education or makes it harder to choose an abortion but easier to buy a gun. I hope you’ll look beyond the headlines to what is also happening here, often at great risk to those who are making it happen. Because Georgia is the clearest proof yet that this is not our grandfather’s Southland anymore. And it will never be again.Margaret Renkl is a contributing opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South. She is the author of the book “Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      The Roots of Josh Hawley’s Rage

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Roots of Josh Hawley’s RageWhy do so many Republicans appear to be at war with both truth and democracy?Ms. Stewart has reported on the religious right for more than a decade. She is the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.”Jan. 11, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETSenator Josh Hawley on Wednesday, as the crowd that would storm the Capitol marched.Credit…Francis Chung/E&E News and Politico, via Associated PressIn today’s Republican Party, the path to power is to build up a lie in order to overturn democracy. At least that is what Senator Josh Hawley was telling us when he offered a clenched-fist salute to the pro-Trump mob before it ransacked the Capitol, and it is the same message he delivered on the floor of the Senate in the aftermath of the attack, when he doubled down on the lies about electoral fraud that incited the insurrection in the first place. How did we get to the point where one of the bright young stars of the Republican Party appears to be at war with both truth and democracy?Mr. Hawley himself, as it happens, has been making the answer plain for some time. It’s just a matter of listening to what he has been saying.In multiple speeches, an interview and a widely shared article for Christianity Today, Mr. Hawley has explained that the blame for society’s ills traces all the way back to Pelagius — a British-born monk who lived 17 centuries ago. In a 2019 commencement address at The King’s College, a small conservative Christian college devoted to “a biblical worldview,” Mr. Hawley denounced Pelagius for teaching that human beings have the freedom to choose how they live their lives and that grace comes to those who do good things, as opposed to those who believe the right doctrines.The most eloquent summary of the Pelagian vision, Mr. Hawley went on to say, can be found in the Supreme Court’s 1992 opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Mr. Hawley specifically cited Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words reprovingly: “At the heart of liberty,” Kennedy wrote, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The fifth century church fathers were right to condemn this terrifying variety of heresy, Mr. Hawley argued: “Replacing it and repairing the harm it has caused is one of the challenges of our day.”In other words, Mr. Hawley’s idea of freedom is the freedom to conform to what he and his preferred religious authorities know to be right. Mr. Hawley is not shy about making the point explicit. In a 2017 speech to the American Renewal Project, he declared — paraphrasing the Dutch Reformed theologian and onetime prime minister Abraham Kuyper — “There is not one square inch of all creation over which Jesus Christ is not Lord.” Mr. Kuyper is perhaps best known for his claim that Christianity has sole legitimate authority over all aspects of human life.“We are called to take that message into every sphere of life that we touch, including the political realm,” Mr. Hawley said. “That is our charge. To take the Lordship of Christ, that message, into the public realm, and to seek the obedience of the nations. Of our nation!”Mr. Hawley has built his political career among people who believe that Shariah is just around the corner even as they attempt to secure privileges for their preferred religious groups to discriminate against those of whom they disapprove. Before he won election as a senator, he worked for Becket, a legal advocacy group that often coordinates with the right-wing legal juggernaut the Alliance Defending Freedom. He is a familiar presence on the Christian right media circuit.The American Renewal Project, which hosted the event where Mr. Hawley delivered the speech I mentioned earlier, was founded by David Lane, a political organizer who has long worked behind the scenes to connect conservative pastors and Christian nationalist figures with politicians. The choice America faces, according to Mr. Lane, is “to be faithful to Jesus or to pagan secularism.”The line of thought here is starkly binary and nihilistic. It says that human existence in an inevitably pluralistic, modern society committed to equality is inherently worthless. It comes with the idea that a right-minded elite of religiously pure individuals should aim to capture the levers of government, then use that power to rescue society from eternal darkness and reshape it in accord with a divinely-approved view of righteousness.At the heart of Mr. Hawley’s condemnation of our terrifyingly Pelagian world lies a dark conclusion about the achievements of modern, liberal, pluralistic societies. When he was still attorney general, William Barr articulated this conclusion in a speech at the University of Notre Dame Law School, where he blamed “the growing ascendancy of secularism” for amplifying “virtually every measure of social pathology,” and maintained that “free government was only suitable and sustainable for a religious people.”Christian nationalists’ acceptance of President Trump’s spectacular turpitude these past four years was a good measure of just how dire they think our situation is. Even a corrupt sociopath was better, in their eyes, than the horrifying freedom that religious moderates and liberals, along with the many Americans who don’t happen to be religious, offer the world.That this neo-medieval vision is incompatible with constitutional democracy is clear. But in case you’re in doubt, consider where some of the most militant and coordinated support for Mr. Trump’s postelection assault on the American constitutional system has come from. The Conservative Action Project, a group associated with the Council for National Policy, which serves as a networking organization for America’s religious and economic right-wing elite, made its position clear in a statement issued a week before the insurrection.It called for members of the Senate to “contest the electoral votes” from Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and other states that were the focus of Republicans’ baseless allegations. Among the signatories was Cleta Mitchell, the lawyer who advised Mr. Trump and participated in the president’s call on Jan. 2 with Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state. Cosignatories to this disinformation exercise included Bob McEwen, the executive director of the Council for National Policy; Morton C. Blackwell of The Leadership Institute; Alfred S. Regnery, the former publisher; Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council; Thomas Fitton of Judicial Watch; and more than a dozen others.Although many of the foot soldiers in the assault on the Capitol appear to have been white males aligned with white supremacist movements, it would be a mistake to overlook the powerful role of the rhetoric of religious nationalism in their ranks. At a rally in Washington on Jan. 5, on the eve of Electoral College certification, the right-wing pastor Greg Locke said that God is raising up “an army of patriots.” Another pastor, Brian Gibson, put it this way: “The church of the Lord Jesus Christ started America,” and added, “We’re going to take our nation back!”In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection, a number of Christian nationalist leaders issued statements condemning violence — on both sides. How very kind of them. But few if any appear willing to acknowledge the instrumental role they played in perpetuating the fraudulent allegations of a stolen election that were at the root of the insurrection.They seem, like Mr. Hawley himself, to live in a post-truth environment. And this gets to the core of the Hawley enigma. The brash young senator styles himself not just a deep thinker who ruminates about late-Roman era heretics, but a man of the people, a champion of “the great American middle,” as he wrote in an article for The American Conservative, and a foe of the “ruling elite.” Mr. Hawley has even managed to turn a few progressive heads with his economic populism, including his attacks on tech monopolies.Yet Mr. Hawley isn’t against elites per se. He is all for an elite, provided that it is a religiously righteous elite. He is a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School and he clerked for John Roberts, the chief justice. Mr. Hawley, in other words, is a successful meritocrat of the Federalist Society variety. His greatest rival in that department is the Princeton debater Ted Cruz. They are résumé jockeys in a system that rewards those who do the best job of mobilizing fear and irrationalism. They are what happens when callow ambition meets the grotesque inequalities and injustices of our age.Over the past few days, following his participation in the failed efforts to overturn the election, Mr. Hawley’s career prospects may have dimmed. Two of his home state newspapers have called for his resignation; his political mentor, John C. Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri, has described his earlier support for Mr. Hawley as “the biggest mistake I’ve ever made”; and Simon & Schuster dropped his book. On the other hand, there is some reporting that suggests his complicity in efforts to overturn the election may have boosted his standing with Mr. Trump’s base. But the question that matters is not whether Mr. Hawley stays or goes, but whether he is simply replaced by the next wannabe demagogue in line. We are about to find out whether there are leaders of principle left in today’s Republican Party.Make no mistake: Mr. Hawley is a symptom, not a cause. He is a product of the same underlying forces that brought us President Trump and the present crisis of American democracy. Unless we find a way to address these forces and the fundamental pathologies that drive them, then next month or next year we will be forced to contend with a new and perhaps more successful version of Mr. Hawley.Katherine Stewart (@kathsstewart) is the author of “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Why We Are Introducing an Article of Impeachment

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyWhy We Are Introducing an Article of ImpeachmentOne of the authors of the impeachment article against President Trump makes his case.Mr. Cicilline is a U.S. representative and a member of the House Judiciary Committee.Jan. 11, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Pete Marovich for The New York TimesSince his resounding defeat in the presidential election in November, Donald Trump has done everything but concede to the democratic will of the American people. He unleashed an avalanche of lies and baseless claims of fraud — conspiracy theories that filled his supporters with a delusional belief that the election had been stolen from him. He filed a bevy of absurd lawsuits. He attempted to cajole and intimidate officials at all levels of government into subverting the election and keeping him in office. And then, running out of recourse, legitimate and illegitimate, he incited an insurrection against the government and the Constitution that he swore to uphold.The attempted coup at the United States Capitol last Wednesday, which took place as lawmakers inside counted the electoral votes that would formalize Joe Biden’s overwhelming election by the American people, marks one of the lowest points in our country’s 245-year experiment in democracy.From Andrew Jackson to Richard Nixon, we have seen presidents abuse their power, but we had never witnessed an American president incite a violent mob on the citadel of our democracy in a desperate attempt to cling to power.We cannot let this go unanswered. With each day, Mr. Trump grows more and more desperate. We should not allow him to menace the security of our country for a second longer.Once the House opens for legislative business, my co-authors — Representatives Ted Lieu and Jamie Raskin — and I will introduce an article of impeachment to remove Mr. Trump from office for incitement of insurrection.As lawmakers who have impeached this president once before, we do not take this responsibility lightly. In fact, it was not our first choice of action. In the midst of last Wednesday’s siege, we were among those that asked Vice President Mike Pence to convene the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to quickly remove Mr. Trump from office. We have called on the president to resign.Days have passed, and it is clear that neither of those possibilities will be realized. So it is Congress’s responsibility to act.The American people witnessed Mr. Trump’s actions for themselves. We all saw his speech on Jan. 6. We watched his fanatics storm the Capitol at his request. Five people died, including a U.S. Capitol Police officer and four of the president’s supporters. We fear what Mr. Trump may do with his remaining time in office.That is why we believe the article of impeachment should be voted on as soon as possible. It is true that even after we act, Senator Mitch McConnell may, as he did one year ago, try to prevent a conviction in the U.S. Senate. It is also true that a trial might extend into the first days of the Biden administration.Neither of those possibilities should deter us in our work. Some argue that another impeachment trial would further divide our country and further inflame Trump supporters. But the truth is that we do not have a choice. This impeachment charge is meant to defend the integrity of the republic. Both Democratic and Republican members of Congress must attend to the duties of their oath. Failing to act would set an irresponsibly dangerous precedent for future presidents who are about to leave office.Further, there can be no healing of the divisions in our country without justice for the man most responsible for this horrific insurrection. The president must be held accountable. That can happen only by impeaching him for a second time and convicting him in the Senate. A conviction that would allow Congress to prohibit him from ever serving in federal office again.What happened last Wednesday was an abomination. There is no question about that. There is also no question that Mr. Trump becomes more of a threat to public safety by the moment.The only question now is what Congress will do about it.David N. Cicilline (@davidcicilline) is a member of the Democratic Party and House Judiciary Committee who has represented Rhode Island’s First Congressional District since 2011. The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More