United States Senate

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

This was a good speech on the Biden certification

 

[WiseGirl]

 

[Becky]

46 minutes ago, WiseGirl said:

 

Really?  He is concerned because he is losing Twitter followers?  Pompeo is about to become completely irrelevant, he will be replaced in a matter of days.  Don't let the door hit your backside on the way out.  

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, Becky said:

Really?  He is concerned because he is losing Twitter followers?  Pompeo is about to become completely irrelevant, he will be replaced in a matter of days.  Don't let the door hit your backside on the way out

You're way too nice. I hope that door hits him so hard he falls right into the arms of the officers standing outside who are coming to arrest him for high crimes and misdemeanors.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

Look, people protested, and nobody died.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Trump's policy agenda huh.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

An interesting analysis: "Why Josh Hawley is atop the list of GOP lawmakers getting backlash over the Capitol riots"

Quote

More than 140 congressional Republicans voted not to seat electors President-elect Joe Biden duly won, even after the deadly invasion of the Capitol. One of them, though, has stuck out above the rest for receiving castigation over what happened: Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri.

Hawley has become a symbol of how far the Republican Party went to stay in the good graces of outgoing President Trump’s supporters. And his critics, both on the left and a growing number in his own party, see Hawley’s positions in particular as dangerous. He’s lost major donors and supporters and a book deal; his home state newspaper said he had “blood on his hands”; thousands of law school alumni and students have pushed for him to be disbarred; and at least one Democratic senator has called on Hawley to resign.

Here’s exactly why Hawley is being singled out.

He was the first senator to sign on to challenge the results

We knew for weeks before Congress met Jan. 6 that dozens of House Republicans were going to raise objections to states’ electors, based on baseless election fraud claims. But under the law governing this process, those challenges would immediately fall flat without a senator co-challenging the results. With a senator signing on, it halts the process of counting votes and forces the House and Senate to debate and vote on the challenges.

There was never enough support even in the Republican-controlled Senate to sustain these challenges. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had urged his fellow Republicans not to give them more oxygen anyway. The election was over, and it would only force Republican senators into a politically difficult vote to say as much.

Hawley didn’t listen. He announced a week before Congress was to meet that he’d be challenging the results.

His reasoning was disingenuous for two reasons. He said Democratic challenges to electoral results aren’t out of the ordinary — that is true, but only on the House side. It had been 15 years since a Democratic senator challenged results. Her fellow Democrats voted then-Sen. Barbara Boxer (Calif.) down rather than join in. It also didn’t happen in the context of an outgoing president trying to strong-arm his way into staying in power.

Hawley argued that the results in Pennsylvania in particular — perhaps the most crucial swing state Trump lost — were in question because the state changed its voting laws for the pandemic.

Hawley argued that Pennsylvania wasn’t following “its own election laws,” despite the fact that the GOP legislature and Democratic governor agreed to change them. Hawley argued that because Pennsylvania’s top court threw out a challenge to electoral laws early on, there still could be some questions to whether the changes were constitutional.

Many states — blue and red — changed the way they vote as a result of the pandemic. Especially in heavily litigated Pennsylvania, courts upheld those changes. The courts upheld both the new voting procedures in challenges before the election and the results after Trump’s campaign attempted to challenge them. One of the Trump campaign’s most brutal legal flameouts happened in Pennsylvania, at the pen of a conservative judge.

He broke the dam for other Republicans considering presidential runs

Hawley is widely assumed to be running for president in 2024, and he appeared to calculate that hewing closely to Trump was necessary for his future political ambitions.

A few days later, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) led 10 other senators in announcing that they would also hold up electoral college results by challenging them.

Would Cruz and others have signed on to the objections without Hawley doing it first? Possibly. Trump was in talks with new Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) to do it. But someone had to be first, and it was Hawley.

After the riot, he doubled down rather than back down like other Republicans

Shaken lawmakers got back together in the Capitol hours after the riot — debris still strewn about and windows still broken — to resume their legal duty to count electoral votes and confirm Biden’s win.

Fourteen senators before the invasion had signaled that they’d support challenges. Afterward, a half-dozen of those changed their minds. And it was Hawley still leading the way. Taking to the Senate floor that Wednesday night, he was unapologetic about questioning election results, despite the fact that McConnell had warned earlier in the day that if the objections overturned results, that would put democracy “in a death spiral.”

“I hope that this body will not miss the opportunity to take affirmative action to address the concerns of so many millions of Americans,” Hawley said when debate finally resumed, explaining why he was protesting Arizona’s results.

What he and others fail to mention, and what became sharply clear after the violence of Wednesday, is that the “concerns” Hawley speaks of didn’t arise because of how the election was carried out. Trump’s own former attorney general said he saw no major issues, and dozens of court challenges affirmed the results. It was Trump’s unfounded claims that the election was stolen, tacitly supported by lawmakers such as Hawley raising questions about how elections were conducted, that drove such “concerns.” They ultimately manifested in a historic breach of democracy.

“You say it and say it and say it and say it,” Biden said in the wake of the attacks, about Senate Republicans’ culpability in getting to this point. “The degree to which it becomes corrosive is in direct proportion to the number of people who say it.”

Hawley wasn’t the first GOP lawmaker, nor will he be the last, to question democratic norms without evidence in the Trump era and post-Trump era. But he made himself the most prominent, and that’s why he’s being singled out.

 

[Dandruff]

50 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

An interesting analysis: "Why Josh Hawley is atop the list of GOP lawmakers getting backlash over the Capitol riots"

I hope he continues to get lots of attention that results in him leaving politics, and the DC area, for good.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Scott is a piece of work.

 

[The Mother Dust]

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.

Edited January 13, 2021 by The Mother Dust

[The Mother Dust]

I am really screwing up any decent formatting tonight, sorry folks.... the above paragraph is from the new york times https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/opinion/josh-hawley-religion-democracy.html
Edit I just saw the below on twitter.....???sorry if its already been posted. 

Edited January 13, 2021 by The Mother Dust

[Cartmann99]

 

[clueliss]

Hawley continues to bleed donors.

https://abc17news.com/news/2021/01/13/more-companies-pause-contributions-to-hawley-others/

 

Quote

More companies pause contributions to Hawley, others

O'FALLON, Mo. (AP)

Several more companies have suspended campaign contributions to Sen. Josh Hawley in the wake of last week's attack at the U.S. Capitol, and a political action committee of Republicans opposed to President Donald Trump is pressuring remaining Missouri donors to abandon the GOP senator.

Cerner Corp., Ameren Corp., Edward Jones and the law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner have all decided to suspend campaign contributions, and all have previously donated to Hawley.

Ameren is a utlity.  Cerner has a ginormous set of campuses in KC Metro and I believe is in the health/bio tech sort of industry.  Edward  Jones I think is investment related.  

[danvillebelle]

Fuck John Cornyn.  His election ads were atrocious, using childhood sexual abuse as a hot button fear tactic. I couldn't press that button hard enough when I voted for MJ.  I hope he and Slimy Ted both eventually disappear in shame.

[Cartmann99]

 

[Snarkasarus Rex]

This is McConnell’s way of punishing Trump without getting his hands dirty. More GOP senators will vote to ‘remove’ if he’s already gone.

[Dandruff]

13 minutes ago, Snarkasarus Rex said:

This is McConnell’s way of punishing Trump without getting his hands dirty. More GOP senators will vote to ‘remove’ if he’s already gone.

And Trump's behavior will be tethered for that much longer (hoping for acquittal) while Biden begins getting things done.

[Smee]

2 hours ago, Snarkasarus Rex said:

This is McConnell’s way of punishing Trump without getting his hands dirty. More GOP senators will vote to ‘remove’ if he’s already gone.

I think it’s cowardice. Leave it until it’s someone else’s responsibility and that way Trump gets the consequences McConnell knows he deserves, but McConnell doesn’t have to be in charge of delivering them. That’s part of your fucking job, Mitch, what you signed up for and get paid a metric shitton of money to do.

Also, now Trump has 6 more days to plot his next coup attempt while technically President.

[fraurosena]

1 minute ago, Smee said:

I think it’s cowardice. Leave it until it’s someone else’s responsibility and that way Trump gets the consequences McConnell knows he deserves, but McConnell doesn’t have to be in charge of delivering them. That’s part of your fucking job, Mitch, what you signed up for and get paid a metric shitton of money to do.

Also, now Trump has 6 more days to plot his next coup attempt while technically President.

I posted in the other thread that I believe it’s a tactic; McConnell is going to drag out the impeachment hearings as much as he can so there can’t be any confirmation hearings for Biden’s nominees for his administration.

[Snarkasarus Rex]

1 minute ago, fraurosena said:

I posted in the other thread that I believe it’s a tactic; McConnell is going to drag out the impeachment hearings as much as he can so there can’t be any confirmation hearings for Biden’s nominees for his administration.

But McConnell won't but the majority leader once Ossoff and Warnock are seated.  GA certifies on 25 Jan, and they will be seated shortly after.