Thread: Impeachment or the 25th before the 20th?

The GOP, a party divided.



Representative Liz Cheney had issued a scathing statement the day before the impeachment vote repudiating President Trump.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

A group of President Trump’s most strident allies in the House is calling on Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican, to resign from her leadership post after she voted to impeach Mr. Trump, dramatizing the bitter rifts within the party and setting up a messy internal feud that could define its future.

Members of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus, including the chairman, Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, as well as Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Matt Gaetz of Florida, are circulating a petition calling on Ms. Cheney to step down from her role as chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, arguing that her vote to impeach Mr. Trump had “brought the conference into disrepute and produced discord.”

Ms. Cheney was one of 10 Republicans to break with the party on Wednesday and vote to charge the president with “incitement of insurrection” for his role in urging on a mob that stormed the Capitol.
“One of those 10 cannot be our leader,” Mr. Gaetz said in an interview on Fox News’s “Hannity” on Wednesday evening. “It is untenable, unsustainable, and we need to make a leadership change.”

Ms. Cheney has brushed aside calls to step down, saying that she was “not going anywhere” and calling her break with Mr. Trump “a vote of conscience.” Several Republicans, including some members of the Freedom Caucus, have begun to circle the wagons around her.
“The entire party would be wise to heed the words of Ronald Reagan: ‘The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally, not a 20 percent traitor,’” said Representative Michael Burgess, Republican of Texas. “Yesterday, Republicans jumped on the calls for unity and healing no matter how they decided to vote. Removing Liz from her leadership position would be divisive and a distraction we cannot afford.”

Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who also voted to impeach Mr. Trump, said that Ms. Cheney in the last week had “gained immeasurable respect,” and suggested that it was Republicans like Mr. Jordan who should be shoved aside in the wake of the siege and the impeachment it prompted.
“Since the discussion is opened, though, we may have to also have a discussion about who in our party fomented this, and their roles as ranking members,” he said.
The debate over Ms. Cheney’s leadership post reflects the deep fractures in the Republican Party over Mr. Trump, who has demanded total loyalty from his party and, up until recently, largely received it.

While prominent figures have recoiled from Mr. Trump’s incendiary brand of politics in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot, worrying that it could spell ruin for their party, a large minority faction — many of them in the House — remains unwilling to abandon him. Republicans are scrambling to determine the political consequences of doing so, and whether they would pay a steeper political price for breaking with the president or for failing to.
Senate Republicans are facing just such a dilemma as they contemplate how to vote in an impeachment trial that could start as early as next week.

Both Representatives Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, and Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the minority whip, voted against impeaching Mr. Trump, though Mr. McCarthy said the president bore responsibility for the siege and deserved a censure.
Ms. Cheney, by contrast, had issued a scathing statement the day before the impeachment vote in which she said: “There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”

But she chose not to speak during debate on the House floor. Many Democrats — who have long reviled her and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney — quoted her approvingly in their own speeches.
— Catie Edmondson

The truth about " Antifa " attending the riot.

Some Republican congressional leaders, including U.S. Reps. Matt Gaetz, Mo Brooks and Paul Gosar, along with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, joined President Trump in trying to pin the violent siege of the U.S. Capitol building on antifa, a loose movement of left-wing, anti-racist and anti-fascist activists.
The FBI negated the baseless claims, and people have recognized the conspiracy theory as a false flag – an act designed to disguise the actual source or responsible party and implicate another.
In contrast, members of extreme right-wing groups like the boogaloo movement and the Proud Boys did in fact infiltrate the George Floyd protests this summer, trying to spark violence between Black Lives Matter protesters and police.
And at the Capitol, it appears Proud Boys members hid their affiliation to better blend in with the crowd.
The guise of mimicry

The most obvious form of deception – mimicry – is emulating the specific tactics and strategies of other groups.Mimicry can also be changing one’s physical appearance. In the case of terrorist operations, groups blend into their surroundings, or don the uniforms of rival groups to sow confusion. They might change their looks and attire to mimic something less threatening – for example, a pregnant woman – to evade detection or invasive searches.
In 2005, Raghab Ahmad ‘Izzat Jaradat of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad armed group detonated an explosive belt aboard a bus near Haifa, Israel. He wore an Israeli army uniform and carried a conscript bag to avoid drawing attention. This became a common tactic used by Hamas militants to infiltrate Israeli hard targets.



Deceiving MAGA

The Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol was not antifa. The arrests thus far have been dedicated Trump supporters, based on their social media posts.
But in the ultimate form of deception, a post allegedly from the Department of Justice’s acting pardon attorney appeared on Parler, the now-suspended social network app popular with the far right and people who’ve been kicked off of Twitter. It requested individuals who had stormed the Capitol to provide their name, address, license information and details of what they did that day in order to receive a pardon.
The real Justice Department hastily issued a statement advising Trump supporters that “the information circulating on social media was inauthentic and should not be taken seriously.”
A few days later, the FBI opened numerous investigations of assault and seditious conspiracy based in part on information gleaned from social media.
Mimicry is both offensive and defensive. Just like with predators and prey in nature, when it comes to acts of terrorism, what you see is not always what you get.



The far-right rioters at the Capitol were not antifa – but violent groups often blame rivals for unpopular attacks (theconversation.com)