Thread by @bowlrundad

Can we please just knock it off already with normalizing small-t #treason? (1/)

We're a republic, and we're a democracy. You'll get some disingenuous folk who'll deny the latter because they fail to see distinction between "democracy" and "direct democracy". But even they'll acknowledge the way we select who represents us, is via democratic elections (2/)

The backbone of this is that when there's an election, the winner of that election gets to take office. This was never controversial until the last couple of years (3/)

But after the 2020 Presidential election, there were organized efforts to nullify the Presidential election. There's been tremendous coverage, congressional hearings, prosecutions, etc around the J6 attack. But it was not the only one (4/)

There were the famous 60 lawsuit the Trump campaign team lost. Mostly that's on them, and they're paying some consequences for it -- no "normal" person hears the names Guiliani, Powell, Lindell, etc without thinking "this is not a person to be trusted with ANYTHING" (5/)

But there was also the AG lawsuit originally filed by Ken Paxton. This was not a protest thing, this was a genuine attempt to take a presidential election, disregard what the voters had voted for, stop the winner from taking office, and instead hand power to the loser (6/)

It's not illegal to file a lawsuit. The people who participated in this shouldn't go to jail for it. I don't have enough working knowledge of the insurrection clause of the 14th amendment to have an opinion if it should apply here (7/)

But let's be clear here. This was an open attempt to steal an election. A fundamental betrayal of our country. Of our democracy. One of the most blatantly anti-American acts of my lifetime. And because it WASN'T illegal, our citizenry and our institutions have a duty (8/)

To never again treat the participants as if they're fit to hold power. If we want to continue to live in a democracy, we can't forget what these people did. They participated in an attempt to sieze power. They betrayed our country. We CAN'T treat them like normal leaders (9/)

Every. Time. Their. Names. Are. Brought. Up. it should be noted that they tried to undo a presidential election. Every time. These are not normal conservatives. These are people who openly betrayed our democracy (10/)

Basically, all the people you think of as the batshit fringe edge of the Republican party, Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks, Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Steve King, of course they signed onto it (MTG and Lauren Boebert were not yet Members of Congress in December 2020) (11/)

But so did a bunch of the people that the press, and even the mainstream left, treats as different from "Big Lie" pushers or "election deniers". Kevin McCarthy. Steve Scalise. Dan Crenshaw. Louie Gohmert, Elise Stefanik, Lee Zeldin (12/)

There is an anti-democratic fringe in this country who support and like these people BECAUSE they are willing to betray democracy. That's not new, and it's not the real problem (13/)

The problem is the rest of us (14/)

"Reasonable" Republicans who didn't participate, who voted to impeach Trump for J6, but who also cast a Speaker vote for McCarthy as if a coup attempt isn't an uncrossable line in a democracy. Like @RepFredUpton, @RepKinzinger, and @RepMeijer (15/)

@RepFredUpton @RepKinzinger @RepMeijer Or Liz Cheney who, for all her good work on the J6 committee, not only voted McCarthy for Speaker AFTER he openly tried to undo the election, also explicitly said in her primary concession speech that filing lawsuits to try and thwart the will of voters is absoulely fine (16/)

@RepFredUpton @RepKinzinger @RepMeijer Folks who call people "election deniers", as if the worst they've done is tell lies in public about elections, when they actually tried to seize power for the loser (17/)

@RepFredUpton @RepKinzinger @RepMeijer Or MSM journalists, the ones the rest of the country think are radical left, who routinely talk about McCarthy/Scalise/Stefanik/etc without noting they literally tried to steal the 2020 election. Like @SlateGabfest, @emilybazelon, @davidplotz, @jdickerson (18/)

@RepFredUpton @RepKinzinger @RepMeijer @SlateGabfest @emilybazelon @davidplotz @jdickerson @FiveThirtyEight, @nprpolitics, @UpFirst (19/)

@RepFredUpton @RepKinzinger @RepMeijer @SlateGabfest @emilybazelon @davidplotz @jdickerson @FiveThirtyEight @nprpolitics @UpFirst If you are in a position of influence, and you're talking about people who betrayed our democracy without NOTING that they betrayed our democracy, you need to do better (20/)

@RepFredUpton @RepKinzinger @RepMeijer @SlateGabfest @emilybazelon @davidplotz @jdickerson @FiveThirtyEight @nprpolitics @UpFirst If you're talking about the Speaker election as a contest between mainstream conservatives vs the radical fringe, rather than people who betrayed our democracy vs people who wanted them to betray it even more, you need to do better (21/21)