Friday, January 08, 2021

The GOP Owns This

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Thugs 'R Us. Getty Image

The thugs have gone home - shamefully, mostly unmolested - while the country sifts through the rubble. Many remain stunned by the racism and incompetence of Capitol police who sat back and did nothing - "It's like watching a real-life horror movie - we train and plan and budget every day, basically, to have this not happen” - amidst firings, resignations and calls for  investigations. Videos of rampaging yahoos surface: Unruly crowds chasing a black officer; entitled neo-Nazis hurling f-bombs around the People's House; the Arkansas guy who put his feet on Nancy Pelosi's desk and took a letter from it - and, it seems, earlier got a PPP loan from the government he was rioting against - bragging, "I put a quarter on her desk, even though she ain't fucking worth it, and left her a note that says 'Nancy, Bigo was here you bitch.'" Pelosi herself focused on the madman who poked and prodded and incited it all, calling for Trump's removal and declaring, "This man is deadly, to our democracy and our people." Unsurprisingly, he kept proving it: As the mobs surged, he was still railing: "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots." On Thursday, reports surfaced he had "lost it," was "out of his mind," was “unstable, ranting and raving” and “bent on destruction in his final days.” Meanwhile, as far as anyone knew, the guy deemed too dangerous to be allowed on social media still had the nuclear codes.

It is not, of course, just the mad king who's brought us to the brink. Even as debates rage about the efficacy of the 25th Amendment vs. impeachment, there's broad consensus the cursing, flag-draped MAGA hoodlums assaulting the Capitol were inseparable from the pandering, well-groomed GOP suits abetting the sociopath who'd spurred them on. From the National Review blasting the "mindless tyranny" and "nihilistic lawbreaking" - "Trump must pay" - to Mother Jones declaring "Trump is now a terrorist leader," a broad swath of America views the riot as the inevitable result of a toxic, complicit, ever-more  authoritarian Republican party that for four years has coddled and propped up a sociopathic tinpot dictator - and whose standard-bearers - McConnell, Cruz, Rubio, now Hawley - were "never confused about what they were doing." "Inside and outside were two faces of the same thing," writes Rebecca Solnit. "The mob outside would not exist without the politicians inside. Those insiders will make noises of horror and repudiation, but they own this." The GOP's claim to be the party of law and order, Solnit notes, is part of an authoritarian "ideology of inequality: I make the rules, you follow them," born of white male rage against the notion other people might be equal under the law. "Entitlement is too demure a word for this," she writes, adding "the mob was always going to happen" because Trump craved infinite power, whipped up a dutifully deranged army to achieve it, and lit the fuse: "This is what he wanted... and this is what we got." Hopefully, eventually, his enablers will pay the price. For now, urges David Frum, "Impeach. Remove. Indict. Incarcerate."

Taking a stand. New social media star Adam Johnson of Florida hauls off Pelosi's lectern. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Image

Class act: "Nancy, Bigo was here you bitch."

New Jersey's Democratic Rep. Andy Kim, first-generation American, son of Korean immigrants and Rhodes Scholar,  helps clean up the Capitol. Twitter photo

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Thursday, January 07, 2021

The United States Has Entered a Frightening Weimar Era

The violent storming of the Capitol by pro-Trump extremists underlines the face of crises to come.

by Walden Bello



Pro-Trump extremists storm the U.S. Capitol (Photo: Shutterstock)


By mid-February 2021, American deaths from COVID-19 may well surpass the country’s 405,400 deaths during the Second World War. By around mid-May, more Americans will have died from the virus than during the Civil War, which killed 655,000, and the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, when 675,000 are estimated to have perished.

Yet America’s largely self-inflicted COVID-19 disaster may be eclipsed by the country’s political unraveling, which has proceeded with warp speed in the last few weeks, with the once celebrated American way of succession in power via the ballot box dealt a body blow by a large sector of the electorate that has marched in lock step with their leader in refusing to accept the results of the presidential elections.

Joe Biden will be seated this time around, but he may be regarded as illegitimate in the eyes of the 74 million Americans under the spell of Donald Trump. Future electoral contests for power may well end up being decided by a strong dose of street warfare, as the U.S. goes the way of Germany’s ill-fated Weimar Republic. The violent storming of the Capitol by a Trumpian mob underlined the face of crises to come.

America’s crisis has been building up for decades, and COVID-19 has merely accelerated the march to its dramatic denouement. Central to explaining this crisis is the evolution of white supremacy, a condition that the Republican Party has exploited successfully since the late sixties, through the so-called “Southern Strategy” and racist dog whistle politics, to make the party the representative of a racial majority that is threatened subliminally by the demographic and cultural expansion of non-white America.

An added contribution to the Republican consolidation of its white political bastion has been the desertion by the Democratic Party of its white working class base — the pillar of the once solid New Deal Coalition” put together by Franklin Delano Roosevelt — as “Third Way” Democrats from Clinton to Obama legitimized and led in promoting neoliberal policies.

America Displaced

Neoliberalism has been central to the concurrent and seemingly irreversible economic crisis of the United States. By preaching that it would lead to the best of all possible worlds for America and everyone else if capital were free to search for the lowest priced labor around, neoliberal theory provided the justification for shipping manufacturing capacity and jobs to China and elsewhere in the global South, leading to rapid deindustrialization, with manufacturing jobs falling from some 18 million in 1979 to 12 million in 2009.

Long before the Wall Street crisis of 2008, such key U.S. industries as consumer electronics, appliances, machine tools, auto parts, furniture, telecommunications equipment, and many others that had been the giants of the capitalist global production system had been transferred to China.

With highly paid manufacturing and white collar jobs sent elsewhere, the U.S. became one of the world’s most unequal countries, prompting economist Thomas Piketty to exclaim: “I want to stress that the word ‘collapse’… is no exaggeration. The bottom 50 percent of the income distribution claimed around 20 percent of national income from 1960 to 1980; but that share has been divided almost in half, falling to just 12 percent in 2010-2015. The top centile’s share has moved in the opposite direction, from barely 11 per cent to more than 20 percent.”

Trump smelled an opportunity here that a Democratic leadership tied to Wall Street ignored, and he made anti-globalization a centerpiece of his 2016 electoral platform. And, by tying anti-globalization to anti-migrant rhetoric and dog whistle anti-black appeals, he was able to break through to the white working class that had already given signals it was ready to be racially swayed as early as the Reagan era in the 1980s.

Ironically, the combination of neoliberalism’s ideological conviction and corporate America’s hunger for super profits made China’s state-managed economy the so-called “workshop of the world,” contributing centrally to the creation in just 25 years of a massive industrial base that has made China the new center of global capital accumulation, displacing the United States and Europe. Xi Jin Ping has his pulse on the New China, infusing confidence to millions of Chinese with an ideology that combines the vision of ever rising living standards with nationalist pride that China has forever left behind the “century of shame” from the mid-1850s to the mid-1950s.

America’s Ideological Malaise

Even as an ideologically motivated Chinese population emerges from the Coronavirus crisis, convinced that China’s ability to contain COVID-19 proves the superiority of China’s authoritarian methods of governance, the current spirit of American society is perhaps best captured by William Butler Yeats’ immortal lines: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” American ideology — and there is an American ideology — is suffering from a profound loss of credibility, including among Americans themselves.

Two primordial beliefs undergird this ideology, and both have been irretrievably eroded: the so-called “American Dream” and “American Exceptionalism.”

The American Dream has long lost its sheen, except perhaps to immigrants. To people on the left, the American Dream is now mentioned only in cynical terms, as a lost Golden Age of relative social mobility that was destroyed by neoliberal, anti-worker policies. To those on the far right, the American Dream is one that liberals have taken from whites through all sorts of affirmative action programs and given to racial and ethnic minorities. The subtext of the Trumpian counterrevolution has been, in fact, restoring the American dream, the bright prospects of social ascent, to its rightful owners — that is, to white Americans, and to them only.

As for American Exceptionalism, the idea that America is God’s own country, this has had two versions, and both have long lost credibility among large numbers of Americans.

There is the liberal version of America as the “indispensable country,” as former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright put it, where the U.S. serves as a model for the rest of the world. This is supposed to be America’s “soft power,” of which Frances Fitzgerald wrote: “The idea that…the mission of the United States was to build democracy around the world had become a convention of American politics in the 1950s,” so that “it was more or less assumed that democracy, that is, electoral democracy combined with private ownership and civil liberties, was what the United States had to offer the Third World. Democracy provided not only the basis for opposition to Communism but the practical method to make sure that opposition worked.”

Cold War liberals believed that it was America’s responsibility to spread democracy through force of arms, if necessary, and it was this ambitious project’s tremendous cost in lives lost and sovereignty of nations violated that led to the historic emergence of the New Left in the U.S. beginning with the Vietnam War. The effort to resurrect this missionary democracy to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s received widespread repudiation both domestically and globally.

The conservative version of American Exceptionalism was first forcibly expressed in the early 1980s by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations, who said that the United States was indeed exceptional and unique and that its democracy was not for export as other countries lacked the cultural requisites to water it, thus providing the justification of American support for dictators like the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet.

When Donald Trump appropriated the right’s ideological legacy, democracy itself was taken out of what was supposed to be unique to the United States. In his rabidly anti-immigrant and pro-police speech at the Republican National convention in August 2020, not once was the word “democracy” mentioned. What was unique to America, in Trump’s view, was the spirit of conquest of the land and the West by white “ranchers and miners, cowboys and sheriffs, farmers, and settlers,” a white world made possible by the likes of “Wyatt Earp, Annie Oakley, Davy Crockett, and Buffalo Bill.” Those names of television characters that Trump apparently loved as a child did not exactly resonate with non-whites nor with the rest of the world.

Another Hallowed Institution Threatened

With Trump inciting resistance to democracy and his Republican base marching to his tune, as the storming of the Capitol so vividly illustrated, the next four years promise to be an era of unrestrained political strife. And with civilian politicians increasingly unable to break the political stalemate, another hallowed American institution might well become extinct: the subordination of the country’s military leadership to civilian authorities.

To those for whom military intervention in the name of “political stability” is unthinkable, they have only to see how many unthinkable things Trump has done to American political traditions in just the last few months, with undying support from his large mass base. They have only to look at Chile, where that country’s proud tradition of military non-intervention in politics ended in a military coup in 1973, after right-wing resistance to the lawfully elected President Salvador Allende had stalemated the democratic process and led to violent street warfare instigated by right-wing paramilitary gangs like Patria y Libertad that resemble today’s Proud Boys, American Nazis, and the Klan.

In recent days, many American and foreign commentators on U.S. politics have evinced shock that the country that invented modern logistics could only get 4 million of the projected 20 million people vaccinated for COVID-19 by the end of 2020. But there are even more previously “unthinkables” that are likely to occur as a country plunged into the depths of political and economic crises becomes more like the rest of the world, as Americans become more like the rest of us ordinary mortals.


Walden Bello is the co-founder and current senior analyst of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South and the International Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He received the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize, in 2003, and was named Outstanding Public Scholar of the International Studies Association in 2008. His books include: "Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right" (2019) and "Capitalism's Last Stand?: Deglobalization in the Age of Austerity" (2013).
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'Arrest the President': Accountability Demanded After Fascist Mob Incited by Trump Storms Capitol

"He shouldn't just be impeached or removed from office. He should be in jail."


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Protesters gather inside the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C.

Protesters gather inside the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021 in 

Washington, D.C. (Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Demands that President Donald Trump be fully held to account for inciting the fascist mob that rampaged through the U.S. Capitol Building proliferated Wednesday as all hell broke loose in Washington, D.C., with members of Congress and journalists forced to seek shelter as the lame-duck incumbent's supporters shattered windows and clashed with law enforcement.

"Arrest the president," tweeted New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. "I'm not joking. He incited a riot to try to sack the Congress and install himself in office. Our laws mean nothing if he can continue to live a free man."

Progressive activist Kai Newkirk echoed Bouie, declaring that "Trump must be impeached, removed from office immediately, and arrested."

"Enough," said Newkirk. "The Constitutionally-mandated course of our presidential election has been disrupted by a violent insurgency directly incited by a sitting president."

The breach of the Capitol Building by Trump supporters came after the president delivered a characteristically deranged speech near the White House, falsely claiming that the election was stolen and vowing to "never concede."

Following the president's remarks, his backers proceeded to march en masse to the Capitol and eventually stormed the building. After his fans began wreaking havoc, Trump tweeted,  "Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!"

At one point, Capitol police drew their guns as the president's supporters attempted to break into the House chamber.

"Donald Trump is responsible for the coup that is unfolding at the Capitol," said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.). "He is a fascist and a direct threat to our country."

The mob of Trump supporters forced Congress to pause the process of officially certifying President-elect Joe Biden's victory as the Capitol was locked down and lawmakers were ordered to seek shelter.

"Trump called on his supporters to march to U.S. Capitol," tweeted Ari Berman of Mother Jones. "He shouldn't just be impeached or removed from office. He should be in jail."

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'Unacceptable!': Probe Demanded After Footage Shows Capitol Police Standing Aside for Pro-Trump Mob


"The images of police officers calmly allowing barricades open, letting the crowd enter, and taking selfies inside the building with those who have stormed it cannot go without investigation and penalty."


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Police seen around Capitol building where pro-Trump supporters riot and breached the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Police seen around Capitol building where pro-Trump supporters riot and breached 

the Capitol on January 6, 2021. (Photo: Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Images and videos of U.S. Capitol Police officers taking selfies with members of the pro-Trump mob that invaded the halls of Congress Wednesday fueled growing calls for an investigation into law enforcement's conduct during the assault, with members of Congress and advocacy groups accusing the cops of actively assisting the coup effort.

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, a free speech and civil rights organization, called for a "fully public investigation into the federal and local police planning and response to today's events, and termination and prosecution of all officers and officials found to have condoned or colluded with the violent mob that attacked the Capitol today."

"What happened at the nation's Capitol today could only have occurred because law enforcement allowed it to happen. Far-right mobs smashed windows and doors, stormed the Capitol behind a traitorous, terrorist Confederate flag, and broke into the Senate chamber," the group said. "The images of police officers calmly allowing barricades open, letting the crowd enter, and taking selfies inside the building with those who have stormed it cannot go without investigation and penalty."

As mayhem engulfed Washington, D.C. Wednesday, footage circulated showing officers removing barricades that were keeping the crowd of frenzied Trump supporters away from the Capitol Building.

Shortly thereafter, the mob swarmed the building, smashed windows, and entered the halls of Congress as law enforcement did little to prevent the invasion. Footage showed law enforcement officials taking selfies with Trump supporters:

"If the federal police did not want far-right protesters to be inside the Capitol, they would not be inside the Capitol," Peter Gowan, a member of the steering committee of Metro D.C. Democratic Socialists of America, wrote for Jacobin on Wednesday. "Last summer, the police and National Guard attacked peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstrators who dared get too close to federal buildings. Countless people, including me, were injured."

"Authorities offered minimal resistance to the mob sent by the president to prevent the counting of electoral votes," Gowan added. "With few exceptions, the response has simply been to let the far-right mob pass, to wait and see rather than to prevent the violence and seizure of federal property that is occurring."

When asked why they were not forcibly removing those who stormed the Capitol, one officer said, "We've just got to let them do their thing now." According to the Associated Press, four people died as Trump supporters rampaged through the halls of Congress and vandalized the building.

Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.) was among the Democratic lawmakers demanding a probe into the law enforcement response, telling the Washington Post that if those who swarmed the Capitol Building "had been Black, they would have been gunned down before they got inside."

"My feelings about this are bolstered by the footage of law enforcement agents taking selfies with these domestic terrorists who had breached security, and of security removing metal barricades in order to allow the mob to get closer to the capitol," said Jones.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) echoed Jones' call:

In a statement late Wednesday, the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) noted that "since May of last year, D.C. police have brutally punished protesters for demonstrating against the state, police violence, and white supremacy."

"This is in sharp contrast to the police response to white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, VA in 2017, where right-wing operatives and loyalists rioted in attempt to reverse a city council decision to remove racist monuments," the group said. "Today, police stood down yet again—as is expected of such an inherently white supremacist institution."

"These right-wing operatives are their friends, family, and political brethren," NLG continued. "The difference between the police response to protesters of color just a few months ago and all throughout American history, and the current response to white Trump supporters instigating a coup, lays bare the priorities of U.S. law enforcement."

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Poll Shows Nearly Half of GOP Voters—Lied to by Right-Wing Media—Approve of US Capitol Ransacking

"Among Republican voters, 45% approve of the storming of Capitol, 30% think the perpetrators are 'patriots', 52% think Biden is at least partly to blame for it, and 85% think it would be inappropriate to remove Trump from office after this."


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Published on Thursday, January 07, 2021 
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A worker cleans broken glass from one of the entrances to the U.S. Capitol the day after a pro-Trump mob broke into the building on January 6, 2021. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

A worker cleans broken glass from one of the entrances to the U.S. Capitol the day after a pro-Trump mob broke into the building on January 6, 2021. (Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

A new poll released in the aftermath of Wednesday's violent coup attempt—incited by President Donald Trump and enabled by Republican lawmakers who questioned the legitimacy of President-elect Joe Biden's victory—shows that nearly half of GOP voters approve of the pro-Trump mob's storming of the U.S. Capitol, findings that observers say are inseparable from how right-wing media outlets are lying about the insurrection.

"The right's favored media... offered an alternate reality in which everyone but pro-Trump rioters were to blame for the mayhem at the Capitol."
—Sara Fischer, journalist

YouGov Direct conducted the survey on Wednesday night between 5:17 pm and 5:42 pm. A majority (62%) of the 1,397 registered voters who had heard about the day's events told pollsters that they consider the pro-Trump mob's actions a threat to democracy. But while 93% of Democrats and 55% of Independents perceive what happened as a threat to democracy, only 27% of Republicans see it that way.

In fact, a greater percentage of Republicans (45%) actively support the storming of the Capitol than oppose it (43%). Overall, 71% of registered voters are opposed to the coup attempt, including 96% of Democrats and 67% of Independents.

Among voters who erroneously believe that the presidential election was fraudulent enough to affect the outcome, 56% say the invasion of the halls of Congress was justified.

A majority of registered voters (55%), including 90% of Democrats and 51% of Independents, believe "a great deal of the blame" lies with Trump. Yet, in the eyes of GOP voters, President-elect Joe Biden is the biggest culprit, with 52% assigning some degree of blame to Biden compared to 28% attributing the debacle to Trump.

When it comes to removing Trump from office as a result of what happened at the Capitol—an option that is gaining support among federal lawmakers—50% of registered voters, including 83% of Democrats and 47% of Independents, are in favor. Conversely, 85% of Republicans consider immediate removal inappropriate.

Whereas roughly two-thirds to three-fourths of Democrats deemed the participants "extremists," "domestic terrorists," "criminals," and/or "anti-democratic," 50% of Republicans called them "protestors" and 30% labeled them "patriots."

Republican voters' relatively high degree of support for this week's seditious assault on democracy, progressive critics say, cannot be understood without looking at how right-wing media outlets spewed lies when covering the day's events for their viewers.

Writing in Axios, media analyst Sara Fischer reported that "the right's favored media—conservative TV, websites, and social networks—offered an alternate reality in which everyone but pro-Trump rioters were to blame for the mayhem at the Capitol." Fischer provided a breakdown of "the version of events a good chunk of America got."

"Instead of condemning the pro-Trump mobs that stormed Washington, right-wing media outlets mostly blamed left-wing activists, the media, Vice President Pence—and even police officers—for the riots that some suggested were the start of a 'civil war' in America," Fischer wrote. "Hosts on Fox News, One America News Network, and Newsmaxwent so far as to baselessly suggest that the unlawful protestors at the Capitol may have been members of Antifa."

"Even when it became obvious that the riots were becoming destructive, right-wing networks downplayed the severity of events, calling those marching on the Capitol mostly peaceful protestors," Fischer noted. "Presenters on OANN argued the riots were nothing compared to racial justice protests over the summer."

According to Fischer, "one meme that was posted to TheDonald.win, a fringe-right alternative social network, featured a cartoon of a police officer telling a Black Lives Matter protester, 'Please stop, we can work this out'—while holding a police shield, but holding a gun up against a white MAGA protestor," despite the fact that the overwhelmingly white right-wing insurrectionists were given preferential treatment compared to thebrutal repression of multiracial protests against police violence.

Shedding light on GOP voters' relatively high approval rating of this week's deadly mayhem in the nation's capital—and the complicity of hundreds of Republican lawmakers in fomenting it—Fischer reported that right-wing media outlets suggested that "rioters had no choice but to storm the Capitol in order to fight for investigations into a 'fraudulent' election."

In addition to the destructive role played by misinformation-spreading right-wing media outlets, journalist David Sirota on Thursday also pointed out that "we have long known that the far right—and specifically many Trump supporters—are hostile to democracy."

"Polling data from Monmouth University in 2019 found that about one-third of the strongest supporters of Trump scored in the highest ratings for authoritarian tendencies," Sirota wrote. "In all, Democracy Fund data show that roughly one-third of Americans 'say that an authoritarian alternative to democracy would be favorable.' That's what was on display Wednesday."

Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs on Thursday wrote that even if "the invasion of the Capitol was a farce... it should still terrify us," arguing that the history of the rise of fascism in interwar Germany holds important lessons that need to be heeded.

Alluding to Wednesday's right-wing attack on U.S. democracy, historian Mike Duncan tweeted Thursday that while "the people who raided the capitol last night ought to be punished... they are foot soldiers."

"The real threat to the republic," Duncan added, is far-right political leaders and right-wing media outlets "who have whipped up the storm."

Sociologist Samuel Farber argued in Jacobin earlier this week that the "openly authoritarian, racist, xenophobic," and anti-scientific brand of politics known as Trumpism, which is here to stay until its root causes are addressed, is "a right-wing response to the objective conditions of economic decay and a perceived moral decay."

In order to defeat the reactionary force of Trumpism, Farber wrote, it will be necessary to eliminate the conditions of intensifying inequality that fueled it. This perspective is shared by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has written that preventing "another right-wing authoritarian" even worse than Trump depends on pursuing and enacting a bold agenda that improves the lives of working-class people. 

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Omar Trump Impeachment Resolution Charges 'Attempted Coup Against Our Country'

"The urgency of this moment is real," said the Minnesota Democrat.


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 Published on Thursday, January 07, 2021 
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President Donald Trump arrives at a rally on January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

President Donald Trump arrives at a rally on January 6, 2021 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Rep. Ilhan Omar released on Thursday articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, calling the president "the single greatest threat to our democracy."

The privileged resolution (pdf), co-led by fellow Democrats including Reps. David Cicilline (R.I.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Jamaal Bowman (N.Y.), and Veronica Escobar (Texas), comes amid swelling calls for Trump's ouster—using arrest, the 25th Amendment, or impeachment—in the wake of an extremist, pro-Trump mob's Wednesday rampage through the U.S. Capitol in a failed coup attempt. 

"Every day that he remains in the office of the presidency—overseeing the United States military and nuclear arsenal—is a day the safety of the American people and the world are threatened," Omar (D-Minn.) said in a statement.

"The very administration officials who have been complicit in his crimes cannot be relied upon," she continued. "We must impeach and remove him from office immediately so that he cannot threaten our democracy and the world any longer or hold public office ever again. Congress should reconvene immediately to carry out this constitutional duty."

The resolution lists two articles of impeachment, the first of which accuses Trump of violating his constitutional oath to faithfully execute the office of President of the United States through an unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the November election, which he lost to President-elect Joe Biden. The second article addresses Trump's abuse of "the powers of the presidency to incite violence and orchestrate an attempted coup against our country"—a reference to Wednesday's violence in the Capitol.

The resolution further points to Trump's ginning up of the extremists when he told the crowd before the Capitol was breached: "You'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong," and his comments to the mob after the attack on the building: "We love you, you're very special."

"Please call the House to order and let's get it done. Today. Right now," Omar tweeted, a message directed at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). "The world is watching and waiting for us to act."

Cicilline (D-R.I.) also announced Thursday the introduction of a separate impeachment resolution. That effort is being co-led by Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) and also points to Trump's Wednesday incitement of violence. The resolution states that Trump "will remain a threat to national security, democracy, and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office."

Progressive groups including Patriotic Millionaires have backed the call for Trump's impeachment.

In a Thursday statement, Morris Pearl, chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, assessed Wednesday's violence and chaos by saying that Trump "actively recruited and nurtured this group of traitors, whipped them into a violent frenzy, and directed them to attack the Capitol."

"There must be consequences," said Pearl. "They must be immediate. They must be severe. And they must unequivocally affirm our lawmakers' and this nation's commitment to democracy and the rule of law."

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Ocasio-Cortez Says Cruz and Hawley 'Must Resign'—or Be Expelled From Senate

"No 'turning the page,'" said Public Citizen regarding Republicans who helped incite Wednesday's pro-Trump mob. "No abstract 'healing.' Accountability. Immediately."


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 Published on Thursday, January 07, 2021 
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In this screenshot taken from a congress.gov webcast, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) speaks during a Senate debate session to ratify the 2020 presidential election at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. Congress has reconvened to ratify President-elect Joe Biden's 306-232 Electoral College win over President Donald Trump, hours after a pro-Trump mob broke into the U.S. Capitol and disrupted proceedings. (Photo: congress.gov via Getty Images)

 In this screenshot taken from a congress.gov webcast, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) speaks during a Senate debate session to ratify the 2020 presidential election at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 in Washington, DC. Congress has reconvened to ratify President-elect Joe Biden's 306-232 Electoral College win over President Donald Trump, hours after a pro-Trump mob broke into the U.S. Capitol and disrupted proceedings. (Photo: congress.gov via Getty Images)

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday vehemently rejected a call by Sen. Ted Cruz for lawmakers and Americans to put the current "anger and division behind us," 24 hours after the senator himself baselessly contested the presidential election results—an action which helped incite a mob of thousands to storm the Capitol building in what has been characterized as an insurrection. 

Cruz and other lawmakers who challenged the results "must resign," the New York Democrat tweeted. "If you do not, the Senate should move for your expulsion."

In addition to President Donald Trump's repeated false claims that the election was "stolen" from him and that the results in several states were illegitimate, the two months preceding Wednesday's attack on the nation's Capitol—where lawmakers were convening to certify President-elect Joe Biden's victory—were characterized by the refusal of other Republicans in both the House and Senate to accept the results. 

Cruz joined with seven other senators including Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Rick Scott of Florida to vote to overturn the election results on Wednesday night, hours after the insurrection was brought to an end. One hundred and thirty nine Republican House members also voted against certifying the election results despite dozens of federal and state court rulings which have rejected Trump's and other GOP members' challenges.

Amid the challenge, Ocasio-Cortez noted, Trump supporters who believe that Biden's victory is fraudulent—as more than three-quarters of Republican voters now do, according to a recent poll—descended on the Capitol building, forcing lawmakers and journalists to go into hiding while barricades were breached, windows broken, and offices vandalized in an assault that led to the death of four people.

"Sen. Cruz, you must accept responsibility for how your craven, self-serving actions contributed to the deaths of four people yesterday," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.

Government watchdog Public Citizen echoed Ocasio-Cortez's rejection of Cruz's statement, in which he defended his decision to repeatedly challenge the "integrity" of the election—found by the Trump-created Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to be "the most secure in American history"—while also claiming to want a "peaceful and orderly transition of power."

"No turning the page," tweeted the organization, calling for immediate "accountability" for those who stoked the flames that led to Wednesday's violence. 

In addition to calling for the resignations of Cruz and Hawley, who was the first senator to announce he would challenge the election results, Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday joined Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) in calling for the expulsion of other lawmakers who objected to certifying the election. On Thursday, Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) joined the call. 

"The Republican members of Congress who incited the attempted coup our Capitol should be expelled from Congress," tweeted Bowman. 

The congressman urged supporters to sign a petition supporting the resolution, which has garnered more than 141,000 signatures so far. 

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