Coup-Coup Time
1:15 pm Pacific Time, Wednesday afternoon, January 6, 2021
I was thinking during my walk this morning that there has to be a price for the seditious activities of the United States senators seeking to undermine the presidential election. I even figured out what the price should be: expulsion. Those doing the expelling — what should be a controlling Democratic majority, given yesterday’s historic vote in Georgia — would make clear that they weren’t punishing the Republican party, but the individual senators who had violated their oath of fealty to the Constitution, and that each of the expelled Republican senators should be replaced with another Republican, but one who, as Senator Todd Young (Indiana) told the authoritarian mob assembling near the Capitol, would hold fast to that oath. “Under God, I took an oath. Do we still take that seriously in this country?”
That was before the authoritarian mob took over the Capitol.
I now think it imperative those senators be expelled (Hawley and Cruz at the least). Same for the dozens of Republican House members also seeking to overturn the will of the people as determined by a free and fair election.
I also think that once law enforcement, aided by the National Guard, amasses enough bodies to remove the mob from the Capitol and its grounds, it needs to arrest the perpetrators of this literal assault on democracy — what President-Elect Biden just called a “siege” — and prosecutors need to charge to the maximum.
(More than one reporter has called out the difference between the aggressive law enforcement response to uncontrolled, mostly black mobs in places like Ferguson, Missouri and Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the passive, under-prepared response to the uncontrolled white mob today. Seems like calls for law and order don’t apply to violent acts by right-wing extremists.)
This will pass. The republic will go on. But those who would end our republic must be punished. If we don’t do it now, they’ll be back later — stronger.
