Glenn Youngkin's victory in VA was largely due to his bogus claim that Critical Race Theory was being taught in VA schools.
Dems were so dumb playing defense on CRT.
Why not go on offense. and put Youngkin on the defensive?I wonder if Senate Republicans realize that in high school and college classes of the future, when the Jan 6th attack is taught, students will learn about DJT's incitement, the Jan 6 results of that incitement, and also the GOP refusal to convict.
Do GOP Senators have no regard for how history classes of the future (in the US and worldwide) will be teaching the Jan 6th assault on the Capitol and its repercussions, and how students of history will view them?
Today's GOP Senators will live in infamy if they fail to convict.
Update February 13th, 2021:
After their vote to acquit, 43 senators can be assured they will be condemned in future history textbooks.
There is a move afoot to make D.C. the 51st state. As many have pointed out, the population of D.C. exceeds that of whole states like Wyoming or Vermont, yet the residents of D.C. do not have the representation in the Senate and Congress that states with smaller populations do. So there is an argument for D.C. statehood.
On the other hand, D.C. is the seat of the Federal government, and it's reasonable to have the core federal institutions outside the boundaries of any one state.
I propose that the boundaries of D.C. be redrawn to include only the key buildings and memorials of our United States: the White House, the Capitol, the EOB, the Supreme Court, Blair House (residence of the Vice President), the Mall, the Lincoln Memorial, the Library of Congress, and similar structures of national significance. This smaller unit could retain the name District of Columbia, or be renamed. (New District of Columbia, maybe?)
The remainder of what is now D.C. could be granted statehood under a new name. North Virginia? South Maryland? An invented name for the new state, perhaps chosen from names proposed by the residents of the newly formed state, perhaps?
The accession to the union of this new state is indeed overdue.
The vote to confirm Amy Coney Barrett was a foregone conclusion.
Democrats had the opportunity during debate to make headlnes and an historic gesture if they had each stood up in turn and addressed the GOP Senators by saying exactly the same thing, and no more, quoting Joseph Welch from the Army-McCarthy hearings:
"Have you no sense of decency, sirs, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
Biden continues to be pressed on whether he intends to "pack" the Supreme Court by increasing the number of justices.
He should be pushing back with something like the following:
Look, we want our courts to decide cases before them fairly and impartially on the law, not on partisan political bases.
Unfortunately, for the last three and a half years the Republicans have been packing the courts with partisans, judges that have been approved by the Federalist Society, a conservative, you might almost say right wing, political organization set up to push the Republican agenda through the federal judiciary.
For the last half of President Obama's term, Mitch McConnell's senate refused to consider nominees out forward by President Obama to fill vacancies, so that President Trump was able to fill about two hundred empty seats with Federalist Society partisan judges, even though some of them were rated unqualified by the American Bar Association.
Most egregiously, Mitch McConnell refused to even grant a hearing to Present Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, a distinguished independent jurist - a lawyer's lawyer, you might say, not a partisan of any political party.
In the last three years, we have seen two justices with pronounced conservative views appointed to the Supreme Court, and a third about to be appointed. The federal judiciary has been well and truly packed, so it has become more and more a way for the Republican Party to advance its agenda by, in effect, legislating from the Bench. It is not controversial for me to say this - Mitch McConnell has openly boasted of his success in packing the federal courts.
As president, I will have to find a way to begin restoring the principle of an independent judiciary that desides cases solely on the law and the facts before them, not on political and ideological prejudices. How to overcome this wave of court packing is not yet clear to me, but for the sake of the country, we need to make a start.
