Remembering the Heroes of the January 6th Capitol insurrection and calling out the Republican cowards

 What January 6 in the US Capitol Taught Me About Courage and Cowardice. Published in Maria Shriver's Sunday Paper.

Adam Kinzinger

Seated to his right is Congresswoman Liz Cheney who said "Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy," and that the former president "spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down to the Capitol and subvert American democracy." Addressing her Republican colleagues directly, Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) said that those who "are defending the indefensible, there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain."

Former representative Adam Kinzinger reflects five years later on resilience, resolve, and the Americans still choosing to defend democracy. By Former Congressman Adam Kinzinger January 03, 2026 Architects of Change

Five years ago today, I walked into the U.S. Capitol with a knot in my stomach that I still struggle to describe. 

In fact, I had served in that building for years. I knew its rhythms, its quiet corners, the way the marble echoes when the halls are empty. January 6, 2021, shattered all of that. It didn’t just break windows or doors. It broke an illusion many of us had carried—that the foundations of American democracy were so solid they could never really be shaken.

I remember standing there afterward, surrounded by debris and disbelief, thinking: "This is not who we are." And yet, it was. Or at least, it was a part of us we had long refused to confront.

On the fifth anniversary of January 6, the memories are still raw. Not because of the violence alone, but because of what it revealed. The anger. The lies. The willingness—by too many in positions of power—to light a match and walk away while others watched the fire spread.

I often think about fear. Not the fear I felt that day, but the fear that drove people there in the first place. Fear of losing status. Fear of demographic change. Fear that was carefully cultivated and weaponized by those who knew better and chose ambition over truth. That fear didn’t come from nowhere, but January 6 exposed how dangerous it becomes when leaders refuse to challenge it.

What stays with me most, though, is not just the mob. It’s the aftermath. The silence. The rationalizations. The quiet deals made in the days and weeks that followed. I watched colleagues—people who knew exactly what had happened—decide that the safer path was to move on, to minimize, to rewrite. I learned then that democracy doesn’t just die from violent attacks. It erodes when cowardice becomes policy.

Leaving Congress forced me to reckon with that reality in a deeply personal way. Public office teaches you many things, but one of the hardest lessons is this: institutions are only as strong as the people willing to defend them when it costs something. January 6 clarified the price of principle. For some, it was too high.

I’ve been asked many times if that day made me cynical. The honest answer is complicated. It stripped away naïveté, certainly. It ended any lingering belief that norms alone will save us. But cynicism implies detachment, and I feel anything but detached. If anything, January 6 bound me more tightly to the idea of this country—not as a myth, but as a responsibility.

I think about the police officers who stood their ground that day. About the staffers who barricaded doors and texted loved ones, unsure if they’d make it home. About my wife, who learned all too personally that being in politics includes the whole family. About the election workers across the country who kept counting votes despite threats. They didn’t have cameras or applause. They simply did their jobs because they believed in something bigger than themselves. That, too, is America.

Five years later, the danger hasn’t vanished. The lies haven’t evaporated. Accountability has been uneven, and the temptation to “just move on” remains strong. History teaches us that forgetting is often more comfortable than learning. But comfort is not the same as peace, and denial is not unity.

What gives me hope—real, grounded hope—is not the absence of threats but the presence ofresilience. I see it in young people who refuse to accept that politics must be cruel or corrupt. I see it in Republicans, Democrats, and independents who understand that democracy is not automatic. I see it in veterans who know that loyalty to country is not loyalty to a man, and in citizens who show up, again and again, to vote, to organize and to speak.

January 6 was a moment of national trauma, but trauma does not have to define the future. It can clarify values. It can sharpen resolve. It can remind us that the American experiment has always been fragile—and that its survival has always depended on ordinary people choosing courage over convenience.

Five years on, I still believe in this country. Not because it is perfect, but because it is unfinished. 

Because each generation is handed a choice: to inherit democracy passively, or to actively defend it. January 6 reminded us what happens when too many abdicate that duty. The years since have reminded me that many more are ready to pick it up.

The work ahead is not glamorous. It won’t always be televised. It requires telling the truth when it’s uncomfortable, rejecting lies even when they flatter us, and remembering that losing an election is not the same as losing a country. Democracy asks something of us—not just every four years, but every day. It asks us to make an alliance with people we normally wouldn’t, because when we are threatened, small political differences become meaningless.

On this anniversary, I don’t feel despair. I feel resolve. The same resolve I felt walking out of the Capitol that night, determined that violence and lies would not have the last word. Five years later, they still haven’t. And as long as we are willing to learn, to stand, and to choose country over self, they never will.

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Donald Trump and the maga Republicans must stop the unending indefensible cruelty against our nation's human dignity

The second Donald Trump administration has been unprecedented in myriad ways, perhaps above all in the way that he has managed to cajole, cow, or simply command people in his Administration to carry out even his most undemocratic wishes with remarkably little dissent. Some civil servants and senior officials, however, are experiencing bouts of conscience. 

In March, Erez Reuveni, a veteran Justice Department lawyer, was promoted to the position of acting deputy director of the Office of Immigration Litigation. 

He decided to personally take on the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been wrongly sent back to El Salvador, in violation of a 2019, court order. On April 5th, Reuveni told his supervisor he would not sign an appeal brief that said Abrego Garcia was a “terrorist.” According to a whistle-blower complaint that Reuveni later filed, he said, “I didn’t sign up to lie.” He was suspended and then fired.

Other career prosecutors have chosen to step down. In February, when Trump officials moved to dismiss corruption charges against New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams, it triggered resignations from Danielle R. Sassoon, the interim United States Attorney in Manhattan, and from Kevin O. Driscoll and John Keller, the two officials in charge of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section. In September, Erik Siebert, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, resigned, after his investigations into Letitia James and James Comey stalled and Trump demanded that he be fired.

There has been turnover in senior ranks of the military as well. In October, Admiral Alvin Holsey, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, abruptly announced that he would retire at the end of the year. Tensions had reportedly been mounting between Holsey and the Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, particularly over the admiral’s concerns about the legality of drone strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean. Now military experts have raised the possibility of war crimes, as lawmakers investigate a drone operation on September 2nd that destroyed a boat and killed everyone on board.

The excesses of this corrupt Donald Trump Administration are escalating. A ProPublica investigation, published in late October, found that ICE had arrested more than a hundred and seventy American citizens, nearly twenty of whom were children. In November, after the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., allegedly by an Afghan national, Trump suspended the issuance of visas for people travelling on an Afghan passport, halted the processing of all asylum claims, and vowed to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries.”

Anyone still serving in the Trump Administration must reckon with the reality that, when the government has previously perpetrated egregious miscarriages of justice, history has not been forgiving to those who’ve gone along, however reluctantly. 

Consider the incarceration of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. On the morning of December 7, 1941, when Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii, more than a hundred and twenty-five thousand people of Japanese ancestry lived in the continental United States, most of them on the West Coast. Nearly two-thirds were American citizens. Wild reports—later debunked—of lights signaling to Japanese vessels offshore proliferated. Public fears about a potential enemy attack from within began to spread, even as intelligence officials in Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration believed them to be baseless.

Lieutenant General John DeWitt was the head of the Army’s Western Defense Command. Driven by his own alarmism and his suspicions of members of the “Japanese race,” he began pushing for the removal of people of Japanese descent from the West Coast. The Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, a revered figure in Roosevelt’s Cabinet, initially had doubts about the legality of the plan, as did his deputy, John J. McCloy, though they ultimately supported it, as a matter of military necessity. But lawyers for the Justice Department, who bore responsibility for the handling of “alien enemies,” argued that a mass evacuation was unnecessary and likely unconstitutional.

The debate culminated in a tense meeting, on the evening of February 17, 1942, at the Georgetown home of the Attorney General, Francis Biddle, who had joined the Cabinet only a few months earlier. Edward J. Ennis, the head of the Justice Department’s “aliens” division, and James H. Rowe, the Assistant Attorney General, were forceful in their opposition to the plan. But Biddle, who had also been opposed, was noticeably reticent, Rowe later recalled. Then an Army official drew from his pocket a draft evacuation order, and Biddle revealed that he had dropped his objections to it. Ennis nearly wept.

Two days later, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 9066, which led to the U.S. government dispatching the entire Japanese American population of California, Oregon, and Washington to ten concentration camps, as Roosevelt initially termed them, in the interior of the country. (The final camp did not close until early 1946.) Justice Department lawyers went on to defend the policy in court and, most controversially, took steps to obscure from the Supreme Court reports that cast doubt on the military justification and showed that Japanese Americans were overwhelmingly loyal to the United States.

In the decades since, numerous historians, as well as members of a federal commission that, in 1981, held hearings across the country, have studied the path to the executive order. The circle of blame has included not just Army and War Department officials but Biddle, who chose to “surrender,” as the historian Peter Irons put it, in his book “Justice at War.” Biddle admitted in his memoirs that, being “new to the Cabinet,” he was reluctant to challenge Stimson, “whose wisdom and integrity I greatly respected.” Irons also scrutinized Ennis’s decision to sign on to a misleading brief to the Supreme Court, observing that “institutional loyalty had prevailed over personal conscience.”

Standing firm on principle sometimes sits opposite other factors, such as fealty to colleagues and professional ambition, but it invariably comes from within. During the early days of the first Trump Administration, Sally Yates, who had been Obama’s Deputy Attorney General and had stayed on as the acting Attorney General, directed her staff not to defend an executive order from Trump restricting travel from several Muslim-majority countries—his so-called Muslim ban. Trump fired her. Several months later, Yates delivered a commencement-week speech to graduates of Harvard Law School, in which she talked about the need to hone the “compass that’s inside all of us.” 

Introspection about difficult decisions that involve conscience, she said, helps “develop a sense of who you are and what you stand for.” For those in the second Trump Administration, the time to answer those questions could be now. ♦

Published in the print edition of the December 22, 2025, issue, with the headline “Conscientious Objectors.”

Donald Trump MAGA Repubican cult now victims of cruel racist policies and tariff taxes

Dear Editor, The Pine Bluff Commercial news in Arkansas:


What follows is my personal opinion. I have been reading of the poor abused farmers lately. It seems the markets for their crops have been damaged again by Trump. My checking shows that 79% of farmers voted for him. He's a pathological liar, and they knew that at the time!

The reports show that 83% of the white evangelicals voted for Trump who is shutting down USAID and any foreign aid dispensed through them. Thousands of children are now starving becuse that farm produce raised here used to feed them. Way to go hypocrites.

Trump is forbidding truthful history of America to be taught using any federal funds. White folks wrote that history the way they wanted it taught. Trump and his cabal couldn't care less what American Indians consider to be genocide committed against them.

Hundreds of years of enslaved Black folks❓ Careful what you say in class about that. Some delicate white😳😧😥 kids feelings might be hurt❗

A complete cabinet of the least competent candidates imaginable were approved by the most gutless, integrity deprived, Trump servile specimens that the electorate were offered.

Trump is running rampant over the rights and duties of the Congress. Few of the repulsive specimens have the decency to insist that the Constitution they each swore to uphold will be followed. Trump continues to degrade and disparage our military at all levels, both active and veterans. 

Congress, which has three Arkansas veterans, hasn't the courage or integrity to put a hard and fast stop to that. 

As Liz Cheney said, "Trump, whom you adore and cater to, will die. But your dishonor will endure forever on the pages of history."

From Karl Hansen, in Hensley, Pulaski County Arkansas

Republicans still supporting the dangerous mumbling and fumbling Trump must have their heads in the sand!

Echo opinion essay published the The Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/16/gop-election-denial-liz-cheney-after-trump/- Democracy Dies in Darkness, by Matt Bai:

Let me speak for a minute to all the longtime Republican lawmakers and strategists in Washington, a lot of whom I’ve known over the years. I know you don’t trust any of us in the news media, and you really haven’t done much to deserve good counsel, but I’m going to offer it anyway.

There’s a moment of choosing coming your way — another in a long line of pivotal moments revolving around Donald Trump. And this time, you really ought to make a different choice.

Maybe you saw Liz Cheney’s bracing interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this past Sunday, because she went on the air right after House Speaker Mike Johnson, and maybe you were too lazy to change the channel. Maybe you heard her say that Johnson knew “with specificity” that Trump had lost the 2020 election, and yet he signed his name to legal briefs and refused to certify the election.

“He has a record of repeatedly doing things that he knows to be wrong, that he knows to be unconstitutional,” Cheney said, (and they do this....😦😒) “in order to placate Donald Trump❗”

Republicans who ignore the deteriorating Trump mental decompensation are living with their heads in the sand❗

Like Cheney, I think we’re headed for a rerun this year. I think it’s very possible, though by no means assured, that Vice President Kamala Harris is going to win over enough of the late-breaking voters this time to secure a narrow victory in the electoral college. And if she does, I think the chances of Trump conceding that election are somewhere between zero and negative one.

That’s where your choice comes in, again. That’s when you get to decide whether you’re willing to follow Trump so far down the dark path of fraud and insurrection that it’s almost inconceivable you could find your way back.

You really want to go through this again? (#IDTS❗😔😞😠)

Donald Trump picks a right wing extremist J.D. Vance to be loyal as his "President In Waiting"

Liz Cheney on social media "JD Vance pledged he would do what Mike Pence wouldn’t - overturn an election and illegally seize power. He says the president can ignore the rulings of our courts." 

Echo report published in Politico by Mia McCarthy

He would capitulate to Russia and sacrifice the freedom of our allies in Ukraine. The Trump GOP is no longer the party of Lincoln, Reagan or the Constitution."

‘I’m a Never Trump guy’: All of J.D. Vance’s Trump quotes that could come back to bite him.

Sen. J.D. Vance will officially join the right wing Trumpzi - Donald Trump on the Republican ticket this fall — but he didn’t always have kind words for his running mate.

In the year before Trump took the Oval Office, Vance, who once described himself as a “Never Trump guy,” was quick to criticize the former president, using words like “idiot” and even “Hitler” to describe Trump.

(Awwwww 😧😕😩😢) Since then, Vance said he regrets 😒😲 his past criticism of Trump 😒— especially during his contentious Republican Senate primary in 2021. The Ohio senator, who got Trump’s endorsement in the primary, has also since called Trump a great president. (Not so fast❗......polical ambition is an ego boosting elixir).

“I’m a Never Trump guy,” Vance said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2016, while publicizing his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy.” “I never liked him.”

“As somebody who doesn’t like Trump, myself, I sort of — I understand where Trump’s voters come from,” Vance later said in the Rose interview. “But I also don’t like Trump himself, and that made me realize that maybe I’m not quite part of either world totally.”

During Vance’s Senate Republican primary in 2021, the interview clip was used regularly in ads from Club for Growth Action and USA Freedom Fund, who were backing another Republican candidate and aimed to show discord between Vance and Trump.
“My god, what an idiot.”

Also included in the ads from Club for Growth Action and USA Freedom Fund were some of Vance’s since-deleted tweets criticizing the former president.

“My god what an idiot,” Vance wrote in one of the tweets. It was one of many tweets now deleted.

“America’s Hitler”

Vance once questioned whether Trump could be “America’s Hitler” in a private Facebook message in 2016, to one of his former roommates.

It was that or a “cynical asshole like Nixon,” Vance wrote in messages to former Yale Law School classmate Josh McLaurin, now a Democratic state senator in Georgia.

It’s a statement Democrats highlighted after Trump was shot at during a rally on Saturday night. Soon after the attack, Vance was quick to post that the Biden campaign’s rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” 

Vance added, “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs.”

Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California was quick to point out Vance’s old text messages on Sunday: “You called Trump “American Hitler” — now show your self back to the kids’ table,” he said on social media.  

It’s a statement the Democrats highlighted after Trump was inured by a shooter during a rally on Saturday night in Pennsylvania. Soon after the attack, Vance was quick to post that the Biden campaign’s rhetoric “led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

David Axelrod on social media "If @JDVance1 is on the short list for VP, this Tweet, sent an hour after the assassination attempt in PA, ought to disqualify him in the eyes of the Trump campaign. Wrong vibe in that moment. And as we now are learning, the gunman's profile doesn't seem to match Vance's premise. But at least wait and see! Trump probably should not want a shoot-from-the-hip VP."

Vote Democrat in 2024 to protect Democracy. President Biden is competent to save the Constitution from Trumpziim

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times:

This 2024, presidential election is not about, say, whether we should put more ethanol in jet fuel or whether we should even be able to control our own bodies. It is about whether we will have the ability to debate or vote on any of these issues ever again.

Although Trump is not clear on issues when evasiveness suits him. But Trump doesn’t have to deal with the issues, because that’s not what this election is about. It is about whether we will have a democracy when the smoke clears.

We as readers and voters need to know about the not-so-secret plans to fill government positions with people whose primary qualification is that they are loyal to Trump. We need to know what this country will look like on the first day of the dictatorship.

If former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is correct in stating that we are “sleepwalking” into a dictatorship — and I believe she is — the media are not safeguarding us with truth, but are instead acting more like a sedative.

From Larry Margo, Valley Village in Los Angeles, California

Republicans against Donald Trump must stand up to defend democarcy to put country over party

Signing the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, a once-in-a-generation investment.

Echo opinion published in The Boston Globe by Kimberly Atkins

Republicans against Trump can banish him with one trip to the ballot box:  If there was ever a moment to really put country over party, it’s now: by voting, just once, for President Biden. 

Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire has a history of speaking frankly about Donald Trump. “He’s (expletive) crazy!” the four-term Republican governor said in 2022 at the Gridiron Club’s dinner roast in Washington.

“I don’t think he’s so crazy that you could put him in a mental institution,” Sununu continued. “But I think if he were in one, he ain’t getting out!”

Less than two months ago, as a surrogate for Trump’s GOP primary opponent Nikki Haley, Sununu was still as blunt while speaking at Politico’s Governors Summit. “Assholes come and go,” Sununu quipped. “But America is here to stay.”

Is it?

America as we know it, based on foundational principles such as democracy and respect for the rule of law, may not last another Trump term. Trump left Washington in 2021 as it reeled from the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol that he helped incite in an effort to hold on to power like a dictator. Now he’s plotting his path back by campaigning on a platform of autocracy, promising a dark, dystopian future for the nation that is built on revenge, hatred, destruction, and even violence.

Trump has promised to on Day One free from jail convicted January 6 insurrectionists, whom he calls “hostages.”😡 He said he would task the Justice Department with locking up his political enemies. He promised to sic the military on American cities. He praises and sidles up to “strongman” leaders like Kim Jong Un of North Korea, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Viktor Orbán of Hungary. His massive debt and carelessness with the nation’s sensitive secrets make him a severe national security threat. He is the polar opposite of what an 

American leader should be.The tone of his bid to return to the White House is summed up by his Truth Social video post featuring an image of President Biden hog-tied in the back of a truck.

Yet among Trump’s endorsers is Sununu, who promised even as a backer of Haley to vote for the eventual Republican presidential nominee. I guess that applies whether that nominee is a lying, insurrection-spurring, election-denying, conspiracy theory-peddling, fraud-committing, criminally charged, rule of law-defying despot or not.

This decision may defy all rules of common sense, but it unfortunately doesn’t defy conventional political wisdom. 

Though Sununu prides himself in — and has been lauded for — his bipartisan approach to governing, he’s still a Republican. And to him, a GOP win is a win.

Here’s a wake-up call for Sununu and other prominent Republicans who have rebuked Trump and Trumpism but have stopped short of promising to do what is necessary in 2024 to stop him: If there was ever a moment to publicly embrace country over party, it’s now.

This presidential election is not just a contest between a Democrat and a Republican. It is not, as some members of the press seem to insist, a choice between two unpopular old men. It is a choice between democracy and its destruction.

To quote Trump directly, “You either have a country, or you don’t.” With Biden, you may not like his policies, but you have a country. If he is defeated, all bets are off.

If GOP Trump foes truly want to end his (strangling❗) reign, they can make a limited, one-time vow to help defeat him in November by voting for Biden, and — perhaps more important — urging others to do so as well.👍

I’m not suggesting Sununu forge this path alone. That would just ensure the kind of banishment he is clearly seeking to avoid. I reached out to Sununu for comment, but got none as of press time.

But this message is for all democracy-respecting Republicans who understand the stakes but have stopped short of embracing the only clear solution. I’m talking to you, Senators Mitt Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Also to Haley and other former GOP primary rivals like former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson, and the very man whose life Trump endangered on January 6, former vice president Mike Pence.

I’m hoping that former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who so valiantly worked to ensure the American people and the Department of Justice got the real facts about what happened on Jan. 6, will step up. And given the strength that comes with numbers, that the balance is tipped to allow others to follow suit.

I’m heartened that the group No Labels dropped its third-party presidential ticket bid. Pushing past partisanship, as Sununu does, is a valiant goal, but it is out of step with the reality of the 2024, election if it just helps Trump win. 

And as for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his tin-hat campaign: Shame on you for threatening the nation for which members of your family paid the ultimate price.

The moment Biden is inaugurated into his second term, Republicans and activists can go right back to opposing Biden policies with all the vigor they can muster. That’s how democracy works. But it works only if democracy lives. One vote — just one vote — can help save it.

Kimberly Atkins Stohr is a columnist for the Globe. She may be reached at kimberly.atkinsstohr@globe.com. Follow her @KimberlyEAtkins.

Supreme Court enabling Donald Trump's outrageous immunity declaration. Shame on Chief Justice Roberts

Echo opinion by Greg Sargent published in The New Republic: Delaying the January 6 trial suppresses critical evidence that Americans deserve to hear. Donald Trump attempted to overturn an election and seize power. 

Our American justice system must be able to bring him to trial before the next election. SCOTUS should decide this case promptly.

Digital Disinformation and Vote Suppression

Liz Cheney nukes the Supreme Court vver Trump delay—and hands the Democrats a political weapon. What percentage of voters know that Trump can cancel prosecutions of himself if he wins back the White House?

In the wake of the Supreme Court agreeing to hear Donald Trump’s demand for absolute immunity from prosecution—potentially delaying his insurrection-related trial until after the election—Democrats should take careful note of Liz Cheney’s response to the decision:

Delaying the January 6 trial suppresses critical evidence that Americans deserve to hear. Donald Trump attempted to overturn an election and seize power. Our justice system must be able to bring him to trial before the next election. SCOTUS should decide this case promptly.

The court’s decision is terrible news, to be sure, but it gives Democrats an opportunity to clarify a few crucial points, and they should seize it.

First, Democrats should stress that voters need to know before the election whether Trump committed crimes—and this is due to them as a matter of right. Second, Trump is seeking these delays to end all prosecutions of himself if he regains the White House—to corruptly place himself above the law by pardoning himself or having his handpicked lickspittle attorney general do it. Democrats must say clearly that if the court helps delay the trial until after the election, it will be enabling him to do that.

Liz Cheney’s language provides the beginnings of a template. Democrats, don’t mince words: Just tell the plain, blunt truth❗

As many have noted, the Supreme Court didn’t have to agree to review an appeals court ruling against Trump, who is demanding immunity from prosecution for conspiring to obstruct the official electoral count and defraud the United States, among other charges. The high court could have simply let the lower court ruling stand, given that Republican-appointed and Democratic-appointed judges unanimously ruled that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election don’t constitute official acts—and thus don’t get immunity—a clear-cut legal case.

First, Democrats should stress that voters need to know before the election whether Trump committed crimes—and this is due to them as a matter of right. Second, Trump is seeking these delays to end all prosecutions of himself if he regains the White House—to corruptly place himself above the law by pardoning himself or having his handpicked lickspittle attorney general do it. Democrats must say clearly that if the court helps delay the trial until after the election, it will be enabling him to do that.

As many have noted, the Supreme Court didn’t have to agree to review an appeals court ruling against Trump, who is demanding immunity from prosecution for conspiring to obstruct the official electoral count and defraud the United States, among other charges. The high court could have simply let the lower court ruling stand, given that Republican-appointed and Democratic-appointed judges unanimously ruled that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election don’t constitute official acts—and thus don’t get immunity—a clear-cut legal case.

“This is not a difficult legal question,” Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law professor, told me. “All the Supreme Court has done is to introduce several months of gratuitous delay right before the presidential election.”

The court has set April 22, to hear arguments, and if it takes its time in ruling, the decision may not come until late June. That and pretrial logistics might postpone the trial until after the election.

Perhaps you think the Supreme Court has good reason to weigh in on a matter of such importance. But even if we accept this, the court still has the option of deciding the case in time for the trial to proceed before the election, notes Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at University of Texas at Austin. Though justices likely won’t be influenced by the election schedule, Vladeck says, the trial’s timing is “clearly within the court’s control.”

This is where Cheney and Democrats come in.

Note that Cheney stated unequivocally that voters deserve to know whether Trump committed crimes while trying to overthrow democracy—and deserve a full accounting of those actions—precisely because the sheer gravity of what he did threatens the democratic system itself. As Will Stancil points out, Democrats sometimes hesitate to talk this way, out of fear of being perceived as trying to politicize legal processes.

But in this case, Democrats have an obligation to level with voters about what’s really happening here.

At this point, the notion that Trump would use presidential power to end prosecutions of himself is so widely accepted that news accounts note it in passing. “He could use the powers of his office to seek to dismiss the election interference indictment altogether,” The New York Times observes, as detachedly as it might report on Trump’s plans to alter the decor in the White House Oval Office.

So ask yourself this: What percentage of voters is aware that Trump actually will have the power to cancel ongoing prosecutions of himself, if he’s elected president again?

Remember, sizable majorities believe Trump committed crimes in trying to overthrow the election and that the prosecutions are holding Trump accountable under the law, as opposed to trying to hurt him politically. Voters do care that Trump committed alleged crimes, and they do think he is being legitimately held accountable.

But how many voters grasp that if the trial is delayed, the election itself will decide whether that process runs to completion? How many understand that the Supreme Court’s handling of this matter will determine whether Trump has the opportunity—should he win the election—to place himself beyond legal accountability in a way no other criminal defendant can?

Democrats need to seize this moment to make those stakes clear.

It’s not unreasonable for Democrats to worry about the implications of being vocal on this matter. It is potentially problematic to demand that the Supreme Court make decisions in keeping with the political timetable. But Trump himself created an unprecedented situation: Trump tried to nullify constitutional democracy to seize power in defiance of lawful processes. He’s demanding total immunity for any crimes he committed toward that end. He’s dismissing any and all prosecutions for those crimes as inherently illegitimate. And he will use his presidential powers to end those prosecutions the second he’s given the chance.

In short, because of Trump and nobody else, the Supreme Court’s handling of the situation will inescapably either create a potential pathway for Trump to render the law moot, or not do that. This is what Democrats have to communicate to voters.

As of now, Raskin told me, “The Supreme Court has bestowed a giant gift on Donald Trump.”

Any efforts by the hard-right faction of the court to delay Trump’s trial render it an “enemy of the Constitution and the rule of law,” Raskin continued. “The Democratic Party has to stand up. It’s up to us.”

Some Democrats will balk at this kind of talk. But there’s a way for them to allow that the Supreme Court shouldn’t tailor its deliberations to the political timetable while also communicating this undeniable reality: How the court proceeds will of necessity dictate whether Trump has a plausible pathway toward placing himself above the law entirely, or whether that pathway is barred to him.

Liz Cheney’s language provides the beginnings of a template. Democrats, don’t mince words: Just tell the plain, blunt truth.
Greg Sargent @GregTSargent

Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic.

Warning about American democracy at risk! Future of democracy is on the 2024 ballot

Democracy is the only ballot issue that matters!

Democracy is at stake if Trump is reelected, Liz Cheney warns in her new book*.

Echo opinion letter published in the Atlanta Constitution Journal:

Dear Editor:  We can debate the age of candidates, issues ranging from the border, Ukraine, Israel, entitlement programs, abortion, healthcare, gun control, pick your hot item.

What we shouldn’t be debating on is whether the press should be free, insufficiently loyal generals should be executed, leaving NATO, abandoning our allies, deep state conspiracy theories, accepting inflammatory xenophobic language and revenge politics.

As we approach the primaries, and if you choose to support a Republican candidate, consider an alternative, vary your sources of news to hear all viewpoints and fact-check.

The only issue on the ballot is the future of democracy. The rest is a distant second. From Barry Davis in Marietta Georgia

*Ms. Cheney released Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning, a no-holds-barred accounting from inside the Republican party during the days before and after January 6, Trump's efforts to remain in office after losing the 2020, election and her often-lonely role in trying to thwart them.

Radicalization of Republicans

Propaganda and disinformation are real and insidious, but I believe that to a large degree, Republicans’ radicalization is willful.

Donald Trump "You are fired!"

The New York Times echo opinion by Charles M. Blow:

Wyoming delivered Liz Cheney a resounding defeat in the primary where the hideous Harriett Hageman defeated her former Republican colleague. 

Ms. Cheney is one of the few Republicans in Congress willing to resist Donald Trump’s election lies, and the Wyoming Republican voters punished her for it.

First, let me say, I have no intention of contributing to the hagiography of Liz Cheney. She is a rock-ribbed Republican who supported Trump’s legislative positions 93 percent of the time. It is on the insurrection and election lies where she diverged.

In a way, she is the Elvis of politics: She took something — in this case a position — that others had held all along and made it cross over. She mainstreamed a political principle that many liberals had held all along.

Excuse me if I temper my enthusiasm for a person who presents herself as a great champion of democracy but votes against the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

Situational morality is better than none, I suppose, but I see it for what it is, and I am minimally moved.

However, her loss does crystallize something for us that many had already known: that the bar to clear in the modern Republican Party isn’t being sufficiently conservative but rather being sufficiently obedient to Donald Trump and his quest to deny and destroy democracy.

We must stop thinking it hyperbolic to say that the Republican Party itself is now a threat to our democracy. I understand the queasiness about labeling many of our fellow Americans in that way. I understand that it sounds extreme and overreaching.

But how else are we to describe what we are seeing?

Of the 10 Republicans in the House who voted to impeach Donald Trump for his role in fomenting the insurrection, four didn’t seek re-election and four lost their primaries. Only two have advanced to the general election, and those two were running in states that allow voters to vote in any primary, regardless of their party affiliation.

Polls have consistently shown that only a small fraction of Republicans believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected. He was, of course. (That fact apparently can’t be repeated often enough.)

Donald Trump lost his 2020 bid to be reelected.

And in fact, according to a Washington Post analysis , in battleground states, nearly two-thirds of the Republican nominees for the state and federal offices with sway over elections believe the last election was stolen.

This is only getting worse. Last month, a CNN poll found that Republicans are now less likely to believe that democracy is under attack than they were earlier in the year, before the January 6 committee began unveiling its explosive revelations. Thirty-three percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said the party should be very accepting of candidates who say the election was stolen; 39 percent more said the party should be somewhat accepting of those candidates.

Furthermore, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll published in January found that the percentage of Republicans who say that violence against the government can sometimes be justified had climbed to 40 percent, compared with just 23 percent of Democrats. It should also be noted that 40 percent of white people said that violence could be justified compared with just 18 percent of Black people.

We have to stop saying that all these people are duped and led astray, that they are somehow under the spell of Trump and programmed by Fox News.

Propaganda and disinformation are real and insidious, but I believe that to a large degree, Republicans’ radicalization is willful.

Republicans have searched for multiple election cycles for the right vehicle and packaging for their white nationalism, religious nationalism, nativism, craven capitalism and sexism.

The coming midterm elections

“There’s a stirring of Democratic hearts, a blooming of Democratic hopes, a belief that falling gas prices, key legislative accomplishments and concern about abortion rights equal a reprieve from the kind of midterm debacle that Democrats feared just a month or two ago.”

There was a time when they believed that it would need to be packaged in politeness — compassionate conservatism — and the party would eventually recommend a more moderate approach intended to branch out and broaden its appeal — in its autopsy after Mitt Romney’s 2012, loss.

But Trump offered them an alternative, and they took it: Instead of running away from their bigotries, intolerances and oppression, they would run headlong into them. They would unapologetically embrace them.


This, to many Republicans, felt good. They no longer needed to hide. They could live their truths, no matter how reprehensible. They could come out of the closet, wrapped in their cruelty.

But the only way to make this strategy work and viable, since neither party dominates American life, was to back a strategy of minority rule and to disavow democracy.

A Pew Research Center poll found that between 2018 and 2021, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents gradually came to support more voting restrictions.

In a December NPR/Ipsos poll, a majority of Democrats, independents and Republicans all thought that American democracy, and America itself, was in crisis, but no group believed it more than Republicans.

But this is a scenario in which different people look at the same issue from different directions and interpret it differently.

Republicans are the threat to our democracy because their own preferred form of democracy — one that excludes and suppresses, giving Republicans a fighting chance of maintaining control — is in danger.

For modern Republicans, democracy only works — and is only worth it — when and if they win.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/16/opinion/liz-cheney-wyoming.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik is not liked in NY District 21

Stefanik blatantly misleading public echo opinion letter published in the Daily Gazette, a newspaper covering the communities around Schenectady, NY.

Rep. Elise Stefanik is at it again, lying and gaslighting to cover up the revelations of the January 6 select committee of the House of Representatives.

tRumpzi cult is riding with Stefanik

Stefanik played loose with the truth in telling the public this week that the Jan. 6 committee is devoid of Republican input and is nothing but a dog-and-pony show staged by the Democrats.

Elise Stefanik is ordained into the tRumpzi cult!

Yahoo! Stefanik is in the tRumpzi cult! 

Most of the witnesses called by the committee have been Republicans with an abundance of first-hand knowledge of the lead-up to and execution of the seditious riot. The Republicans initially shunned an attempt to create a bi-partisan investigation.
Many Republican witnesses have defied subpoenas or invoked the Fifth Amendment.

It’s astounding how the Republican base allows Stefanik and the rest of the acolytes to mislead them while taking out their angst on those Republicans who put country over party and have come forward to tell the truth — under oath. Liz Cheney, a pure conservative Republican, has taken a key role in the proceedings.
It’s up to voters to hold Stefanik accountable and recognize her brazen dishonesty in the name of sheer politics. The survival of our democracy depends on it.

From Al Singer,  Ballston Spa

January 6 Committee is protecting democracy as we know it!

Echo letter to the editor published in the Los Angeles Times:

Former Attorney General William Barr and former guy Trump

Transcript excerpt from William Barr as presented at the January 6, 2022 Committee hearings: "The (Justice) department, in fact, when we received specific and credible allegations of fraud, made an effort to look into these to satisfy ourselves that they were without merit. And — and I was in the posture of trying to figure out — there was an avalanche of all these allegations of fraud that built up over a number of days. And it was like playing Whac-A-Mole, because something would come out one day and then the next day it would be another issue. Also, I was influenced by the fact that all the early claims that I understood on — were — were completely bogus and silly and usually based on complete misinformation. And so, I — I didn't consider the quality of claims right out of the box to give me any, you know, feeling that there was really substance here. [End videotape]."

Rep. Liz Cheney (R) of Wyoming is co-chair of the House January 6 Committee 

Dear Editor: Watching the January 6 House hearings has at times been grotesque for what they have visually portrayed, and more so for what each of the interviews and video clips illustrated about what was happening within the Trumpziizm's government. 

Also, it is satisfying to see the unadorned truth and the cause-and-effect relationship between the Trump camp, the then, the former president himself, and the events leading up to and on the day of his leading of the attempted coup.

The remarks by the committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson and vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney were solemn and resolute, the case was laid out well, and it was readily supported by irrefutable statements from multiple participants. And there's much more to come.

If at the conclusion of the hearings, the Republican Party still supports any of the perpetrators of the "Big Lie" that the election was stolen from former President Trump, and if its leaders are elected or reelected to office, then democracy as we know it is ending.

Barry Bauling, Calabasas, California

Americans are paying attention to the January 6 Committee

J/6 Opinion: I thought the January 6 committee wouldn’t matter. 

But I was wrong, essay by Max Boot published in The Washington Post.

I admit to having been skeptical, ahead of time, of the hearings planned by the House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021. What more is there to be said, I wondered? 

Frankly, the evidence of Donald Trump’s guilt in inciting an insurrection was already so obvious that it was hard to imagine that the committee would have much to add. This was not, after all, a situation such as Watergate, where the scandal happened behind closed doors. The entire nation saw Trump’s incendiary remarks and tweets, and the riot that followed, on national television.

I am happy to say I was wrong. The committee’s hearings are exceeding expectations, because it is not behaving like a typical congressional committee. There is no grandstanding and no preening. There are no petty partisan squabbles. There is not even the disjointedness that normally occurs when a bunch of politicians are each given five minutes to question each witness. There is only the relentless march of evidence, all of it deeply incriminating to a certain former president who keeps insisting that he was robbed of his rightful election victory.

The committee’s recent hearings — there have been two (now 6/21 three) in the past week, with more planned — have been organized like carefully choreographed television productions, and I mean that as a compliment. The committee has been focused on doing what all good television productions, whether factual or fictional, do: telling a story that enthralls the viewer.

January 6 Committee hearings Chairman Bennie Thompson and Co-Chair Liz Cheney

Only a few of the committee members have spoken so far. Imagine what heroic self-restraint it takes for elected officials to understand that they can make a greater impact with their silence than with noisy blather. The members are allowing their staffers to play an unusually prominent role not only in questioning witnesses on tape but acting as narrators for mini-documentaries laying out what they have found.

The biggest complaint against the committee, heard at ever-increasing decibels from Republicans, is that it is a partisan hit job — and never mind that two prominent Republicans sit on the committee. Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) are denigrated as RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) because they had the courage to act on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s convictions. (McCarthy initially held Trump responsible for the mob attack but voted against impeaching him.)

Accusations of partisanship have been amply refuted by the hearings, which have been entirely factual and notably free of partisan rancor. There have been no anti-Trump, much less anti-Republican, rants. The committee members are focused with forensic, factual intensity on the question of Trump’s responsibility for the events of January 6. They are making a case beyond any reasonable doubt in the court of public opinion, even if it remains to be seen whether there is sufficient evidence to indict Trump in an actual court of law.

The biggest complaint against the committee, heard at ever-increasing decibels from Republicans, is that it is a partisan hit job — and never mind that two prominent Republicans sit on the committee. Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) are denigrated as RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) because they had the courage to act on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s convictions. (McCarthy initially held Trump responsible for the mob attack but voted against impeaching him.)

Accusations of partisanship have been amply refuted by the hearings, which have been entirely factual and notably free of partisan rancor. There have been no anti-Trump, much less anti-Republican, rants. The committee members are focused with forensic, factual intensity on the question of Trump’s responsibility for the events of January 6. They are making a case beyond any reasonable doubt in the court of public opinion, even if it remains to be seen whether there is sufficient evidence to indict Trump in an actual court of law.

Barr’s statement was seen by some lawyers as evidence of the “criminal intent” that would be needed to convict Trump of crimes, such as sedition. Whether that is accurate or not, Trump’s own aides have made an open-and-shut case that he is not fit to run Mar-a-Lago, much less the United States of America. Either Trump is spectacularly delusional or spectacularly dishonest. Take your choice. Or maybe he’s both? Whichever the case, he has no business returning to the nation’s highest office.

Delusional Republicans deny reality

We keep hearing the Big Lie that tRrump won the election.

January 6th insurrection was sedition led by #FormerGuy

Echo opinion letter published in the South Florida SunSentinel newspaper:

HELLO? Regarding the Jan. 6th (#FormerGuy's) insurrection, initially it was Antifa in disguise. Now we’re told that the rioters were peaceful patriots strolling through the U.S. Capitol as tourists!

😕

Voter suppression laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud — false. The Republican party is a big tent that allows diverse viewpoints — look at Liz Cheney. Covid-19 vaccines are a government conspiracy to control us and take away our liberty.

Florida House Speaker Chris Sprowls told his colleagues that they can address climate change and its danger to our coast now that Rick Scott, a Trump climate denier, is no longer governor*. It is so sad that one of our two major parties is so compromised when it comes to dealing with reality.

Stuart Berry, Delray Beach Florida

*Florida is home to 1 million residential properties at substantial risk of flooding, and hosts seven of the 10 cities with the largest property loss at risk of flooding.