Corpus Christi Caller – Times

Analysis: State leaders ask Texans to trust the power grid, doubt elections

Ross Ramsey – February 6, 2022

Shaking confidence in something can undermine its success — even when everything is working.

The people who lined up in some of the state’s grocery stores this week were there, in part, because last year’s winter storm and electric blackouts wrecked their confidence in the reliability of the electric grid.

The storm this week isn’t nearly as severe as the one a year ago. Electric companies were on high alert, and prepared in ways they weren’t last year. The state’s politicians, worried that a blackout would be as bad for their reelection chances as it is for the health of Texas residents, were much more diligent. So were the rest of us, which is why we were buying water and food and batteries.

The system is working like it’s supposed to. If it keeps going this way, we could regain our assurance that the people in control can keep the lights on when the weather is nasty.

If only all of us could do that with elections.

Failure isn’t the only way to shake public confidence. You can destroy confidence by attacking an election system that works, just because it turned President Donald Trump out of office.

“We all know who won in 2020,” Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told the crowd at a Trump rally in Conroe last Saturday, repeating the “Big Lie” that is the heartbeat of Trump’s post-presidency. Patrick and state Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller both let the crowd know they want Trump to run again in 2024. Both are themselves up for reelection this year, depending on the support of a Texas Republican Party still in thrall to the former president.

A fair number of those voters can’t believe they were outnumbered in the 2020 election, that the majority of American voters disagreed with them, and that the Electoral College produced the same result as the popular vote. Trump won in Texas, besting Joe Biden by more than 600,000 votes, or 5.6 percentage points. But nationally, Biden got 7.1 million more votes, and won the Electoral College 306-232.

For all of the keening about it, the election wasn’t all that close. But Trump and his supporters won’t let go, protesting the vote counting, launching an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021, pressing forward with new voting laws spurred by unsubstantiated claims of election fraud and holding rallies — like the one on Saturday — promoting the idea that any election they don’t win is corrupted.

At the rally, Trump raised that specter himself, saying Texas is “never, ever turning blue — that is, unless they rig the election.” To Abbott, he added, “Don’t let ’em do it, governor.”

When the 2000 presidential election results were questioned by the Democrats backing Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, Republicans for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney pushed back hard — and successfully. Republican sloganeers turned out satirical versions of the Gore/Lieberman signs that instead said “Sore/Loserman,” and “Enough is enough.”

The 2000 election protest ended before the end of 2000, after the U.S. Supreme Court decided against allowing a Florida recount and Gore conceded. The Democrats weren’t happy about losing, but they didn’t storm the Capitol. The public wouldn’t have supported them if they had tried.

Here we are, a couple of decades later: same shoe, different foot.

This time, the sore losers haven’t given up. Some of them hold state positions in Texas, administering and defending the very system that produced Biden’s win over Trump, and that produced their own wins, too. The state’s top Republicans can rally with Trump and others and cry foul about the elections if they want. But they’re products of the same system they protest.

Protest enough election results, and people will start believing you. It erodes their confidence, just like confidence was eroded when the lights went off last February. The elections didn’t fail like the grid failed. They just didn’t produce the result the minority of voters preferred.

Messing with that is a dangerous thing to do, if your power depends on their confidence in your democracy.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/02/04/texas-electric-grid-elections/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

HuffPost

Conservative National Review Calls GOP ‘Morally Repellent’ For Latest Jan. 6 Response

Mary Papenfuss – February 6, 2022

The conservative National Review magazine on Saturday savaged its usual ally the Republican National Committee as “morally repellent” and “politically self-destructive” for how it recently addressed last year’s violent attack on the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters.

The magazine slashed the RNC for censuring Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) on Friday for daring to serve on the House select committee probing the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

Particularly startling, in censuring the lawmakers, the RNC described the attack on the Capitol as “legitimate political discourse.” Some 140 police officers were injured when the mob stormed the Capitol that day and more than 740 people have been arrested in conjunction with the riot.

“The action of the mob on January 6 was an indefensible disgrace,” the Review flatly declared in its editorial. “It is deserving of both political accountability and criminal prosecution. Aspects of it are also fit subjects for a properly conducted congressional inquiry. It is wrong to minimize or excuse what happened that day.”

The RNC’s massive misstep in labeling the Capitol action “legitimate political discourse” is “political malpractice of the highest order coming from people whose entire job is politics,” the Review noted.

It will be “used against hundreds of elected Republicans who were not consulted” in the drafting of the wording and “do not endorse its sentiment,” the magazine added.

“The RNC bought the entire party a bounty of bad headlines and easy attack ads,” the Review concluded. “It did so for no good purpose, and its action will only encourage those who see riots as legitimate political discourse. A mistake, and worse, a shame.”

Check out the full editorial.

Related…

• ‘Sad Day’: Meager Handful Of Republicans Slam GOP For Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger Censure
• GOP Mocked For Calling Jan. 6 Capitol Riot ‘Legitimate Political Discourse’
• Republican Leaders Vote To Formally Censure Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger

CNN

If a passenger misbehaves, put them on a no-fly list

Buttigieg: No-fly list for unruly passengers ‘should be on the table’

Opinion By Dean Obeidallah – February 6, 2022

Dean Obeidallah, a former attorney, is the host of SiriusXM radio’s daily program “The Dean Obeidallah Show” and a columnist for The Daily Beast. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.

(CNN)Look! Up in the sky: It’s a bird … it’s a plane … it’s an unruly passenger assaulting a flight attendant.

That sums up 2021 for many flight crews across the US, given that last year was the worst on record for the number of unruly passengers. Overall, the Federal Aviation Administration logged a startling 5,981 cases of unruly passenger behavior in 2021, with close to 72% of incidents stemming from mask mandates on planes. As a result, the FAA notes it initiated nearly 1,100 investigations into unruly passengers last year, more than in the previous seven years combined.

The horrible — and, at times, illegal — conduct ranged from verbal abuse to physical attacks. Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants union, testified before Congress last September that an alarming 61% of the incidents up to that point had involved passengers hurling racist, sexist or homophobic slurs at the flight crew.

Worse, flight crew members have been physically assaulted, such as when a Southwest flight attendant had two teeth knocked out by an angry passenger last May. And it’s not just the flight crews on the plane who are facing bad behavior; airline ground workers at the gate have reported being punched in the face, slammed against doors, verbally abused and spat upon.

We can all debate what’s behind the spike in flight passengers’ disruptive and even violent behavior, although it seems clear to me there’s a political component. I wrote about this issue last June, noting nearly three-quarters of these incidents were related to mask compliance after former President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans had publicly mocked mask wearing.

In December, Alaska Airlines Senior Vice President Diana Birkett Rakow told Axios she believed the onslaught of unruly behavior could be tied at least in part to the “politicization” of masks and vaccines.

Regardless of the cause, flight crews who are simply doing their jobs so the rest of us can get to our destinations safely should not have to endure verbal and physical abuse.

That’s why a federal “no-fly” list for unruly passengers is long overdue. The data from the past year says it all: It’s past time for the DOJ to ban reckless passengers from commercial flights to send the message that such conduct will not be tolerated.

Delta CEO Ed Bastian has called for the Justice Department to enact a “no-fly” list not once but twice within the past year, most recently on Friday. In a letter to US Attorney General Merrick Garland, Bastian explained his hope that this type of punishment “will help prevent future incidents and serve as a strong symbol of the consequences of not complying with crew member instructions on commercial aircraft.

“Bastian first requested a federal “no fly” list for bad behavior last September. And while the DOJ did commit to making it a “priority” to prosecute passengers who “assault, intimidate or threaten violence against flight crews and flight attendants,” there still hasn’t been any movement on a “no-fly” list.

Bastian is 100% correct that such a measure is necessary to truly make a difference in flight safety. Delta has already placed nearly 1,900 people on a company “no-fly” list, but this punishment must be industry-wide in order to better deter this type of misconduct.

The FAA installed a “zero tolerance policy” in January 2021 to protect flight crews from disruptive passengers, skipping over lighter measures like warnings in favor of tougher penalties like stiff fines and jail time.

But the reality is that it is clearly not enough: While the rate of unruly passenger incidents has dropped about 50% since last year’s highs, as of February 1 there were still 323 reports of unruly passengers. According to the FAA, 205 of those reports were related to face mask compliance.

That explains Bastian’s renewed push for a “no-fly” list, which has been echoed by flight attendant union president Nelson. In September, she told Congress that there needs to be a centralized “no-fly” list that would suspend a person’s ability to fly on any airline for a period of time.

While the FAA can fine people and, if the conduct rises to a crime, law enforcement can criminally prosecute those involved, the possibility of an industry-wide flight ban could deter more bad conduct than both of those consequences.

Imagine if the length of time a person could be banned from flying was commensurate to the wrong, just like how our criminal justice system tailors the punishment to fit the crime. Not being able to take a commercial flight into, outside of or within the United States for a significant period of time would likely be reason enough to rethink threatening a flight attendant, especially given how many people need to fly as a component of their work.

The concept of a “no-fly” list isn’t new, and it has been controversial: When used to combat terrorism, the vague qualifications used to create the list led to accusations of abuse, particularly targeting Muslim Americans without cause. But a “no-fly” list for unruly passengers would be more straightforward: Violent or rowdy behavior on a flight in violation of federal law and/or FAA regulations would be grounds for being placed on this list.

There should be, though, a clear and accessible procedure that would allow a person to appeal their inclusion on the list to the DOJ and ultimately the courts.

If we want to make air travel safe for all of us, from passengers to the flight crew, it’s time to step up the punishment for unruly passengers. Perhaps in the future, when stuck on a bus for nine hours instead of sitting on a plane for two, they can reflect on why their actions were so wrong. A “no-fly” list sends a powerful message to everyone that you either behave civilly on the plane, or be gone. And that’s not just a win for the flight crews, it’s a win for society overall.

Even Canadians fear US democracy could end soon

Trump’s rally in Texas shows exactly why he’s so dangerous

Fortune

Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio warns the 2024 elections will lead to civil war

Nicole Goodkind – February 4, 2022

Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio has a jolting message for Americans: The U.S. is hurtling toward civil war. Yes, you read that right.

The co–chief investment officer and chairman of Bridgewater Associates warned in a LinkedIn post on Thursday that large deficits, high taxes, and high inflation combined with widespread wealth inequality and unprecedented Washington partisanship will lead to civil war, “though these fights can be more or less violent,” he said.

When foreign powers like China and Russia challenge a country dealing with high levels of disagreement, “it is an especially risky period,” wrote Dalio. “I believe we are in this period now.”

An increase in populism and extremism, plus fights between the left and right, are classic indicators of future warlike conflict, he said. Political extremists see respecting the law as secondary to winning, and internal conflicts become self-reinforcing, added Dalio, alluding to Jan. 6, 2021, when supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the outcome of the presidential election, resulting in the deaths of five people and numerous injuries.

Dalio, who is promoting his new book about economic histories and the rise and fall of nations, also laid out what he described as six stages of internal disorder and order. It begins with the creation of a new government followed by periods of peace and prosperity. Eventually, excess spending and the accumulation of wealth and power weigh on the system, leading to “bad financial conditions and intense conflict,” the stage we’re in now, according to Dalio. The next step, he says, is civil war and revolution, which leads back to step one.

“History shows that raising taxes and cutting spending when there are large wealth gaps and bad economic conditions, more than anything else, has been a leading indicator of civil wars or revolutions of some type,” he said.

Dalio has long voiced concern about issues such as income equality and has called for higher tax rates for the wealthy. In the past, he’s made campaign contributions to late Republican Sen. John McCain, but he has made no contributions in recent years.

In the 2022 midterm elections, Dalio predicts moderates will lose seats while extremists and populists in both parties will gain them. He also predicts that Supreme Court rulings will become more contentious, leading to big tests of power. By the 2024 presidential election, he said, there will be a “battle between the populists of the right and the populists of the left in which neither side will accept losing.”

“Such a sequence of events will be consistent with the typical path that leads to civil war,” he said.

And while Dalio says this civil war could look very different from previous ones, it’s not unfathomable that people will die, just as they did on Jan. 6.

“The most obvious clear marker of going into a bad civil war is people dying,” he wrote. “History shows that when people start dying in conflicts—even just a few of them—that one expects much worse because then emotions and the need for retributions fuel more fighting.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Insider

A former Marine and prosecutor who monitors Trump’s base online has turned over information to the January 6 select committee

Nicole Gaudiano – February 4, 2022

• A criminal-defense attorney began tracking Donald Trump’s base online before the 2020 election.
• He has turned over information to a committee investigating the January 6 siege on the US Capitol.
• He provided “very obscure interviews and podcasts” from those involved in the attack, he tweeted.

Ron Filipkowski, a criminal-defense attorney in Sarasota, Florida, who has been monitoring right-wing extremists online says he’s now helping the House Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

Filipkowski, a former longtime Republican, on Friday tweeted that he and his team have compiled “hundreds of very obscure interviews and podcasts from the planners, leaders and participants” of the siege on the US Capitol, most of which Filipkowski never shared online.

“At their request, today we turned over all of them to the J6 Select Committee, catalogued and organized,” he wrote.

Filipkowski told Insider on Friday that he interviewed with the committee members about three weeks ago and they asked him to try to put together everything his team thought would be of interest. “So we spent the past few weeks just putting it all together for them,” he wrote in a direct message on Twitter. “Some of these podcasts only about 100 people have seen, but they are from very key players in J6.

“It’s funny what people say doing a podcast with a friend when they think nobody is watching,” he added.

The news that Filipkowski is helping the committee comes the same day as the Republican National Committee voted to formally censure Republican Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois for their participation as members of the committee and criticism of Trump’s role in the Capitol siege.

Committee staff could not be reached on Friday for comment.

Filipkowski thanked his team of “two patriotic moms,” who he keeps anonymous, on Twitter for their hard work. “We don’t self-promote, ask for money, or sell things,” he wrote. “We volunteer this time just because we want to preserve this Republic for our kids.”

The former Marine and state and federal prosecutor and two researchers monitor live-streamed events, podcasts, radio broadcasts, social media, and dark chat rooms. Every day, Filipkowski watches streamed video of the “War Room” podcast with Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist in the White House, whom Filipkowski described in a December interview with Insider as a “chaos agent.”

He said then that his main concern moving forward was the safety of school board members, who have dealt with rowdy protests at meetings across the country over mask mandates, COVID-19 policies, and race and gender education.

Filipkowski is prolific on Twitter, but he said in December that he shares only some of what he sees. The majority of it can’t be shared because it includes “violence, conspiracies, you know, crazy theories,” things that would get him barred from Twitter, he said.

“For everything I post, I’ve seen 99 things worse,” he said.

The Hill

Murkowski criticizes RNC calling Jan. 6 attack ‘legitimate political discourse’

February 5, 2022

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) criticized the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) apparent characterization of the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as “legitimate political discourse” in a resolution to formally censure Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.).

The RNC on Friday voted to censure both lawmakers, with the resolution saying that they have been engaged in the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” by participating in the House select panel investigating the insurrection at the Capitol. The two were also censured for their past criticism of former President Trump.

“What happened on January 6, 2021 was an effort to overturn a lawful election resulting in violence and destruction at the Capitol. We must not legitimize those actions which resulted in loss of life and we must learn from that horrible event so history does not repeat itself,” Murkowski, one of seven senators who voted to convict Trump following the Jan. 6 attack, said on Twitter on Saturday. 

“As Americans we must acknowledge those tragic events, and we cannot allow a false narrative to be created. We cannot deny the truth-to suggest it was ‘legitimate political discourse’ is just wrong,” she added.

RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel on Friday tweeted a photo of a story by The New York Times regarding the RNC’s censure, the headline of which read “G.O.P. Declares Jan. 6 Attack ‘Legitimate Political Discourse.’ “

A subhead underneath it could be shown reading, “The Republican National Committee voted to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the inquiry into the deadly riot at the Capitol.”

McDaniel suggested the newspaper’s story was false and called it “baseless political propaganda.”

“Cheney and Kinzinger chose to join Pelosi in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol,” the RNC chair tweeted, doubling down on the committee’s language.

But not all Republicans saw the censure that way, including a handful of moderate Republicans and those previously affiliated with the RNC who either questioned the move or outright criticized it.

“Shame falls on a party that would censure persons of conscience, who seek truth in the face of vitriol. Honor attaches to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for seeking truth even when doing so comes at great personal cost,” tweeted Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who also voted to convict Trump last year and who is McDaniel’s uncle.

The remarks from Murkowski come as she faces a Senate reelection bid against Trump-backed challenger Kelly Tshibaka, previously Alaska’s commissioner of administration.

Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), the chair of the Senate GOP campaign arm, however, said back in November that he would support Murkowski’s reelection efforts despite the challenge from Tshibaka.

Yahoo! News

Climate change will deplete ocean oxygen, kill fish, studies show

Ben Adler, Senior Climate Editor – February 4, 2022

Climate change is going to wreak havoc on the world’s oceans, according to two new studies, depleting the warming waters of the oxygen that fish and other sea life depend on to survive.

By 2080, around 70 percent of the oceans on the planet will suffer from a lack of oxygen due to warmer temperatures, a study published in November by researchers with the American Geophysical Union’s journal Geophysical Research Letters concluded. The study finds that substantial deoxygenation of the middle ocean depths, where a large percentage of the fish that people eat are found, began occurring in 2021.

“This zone is actually very important to us because a lot of commercial fish live in this zone,” Yuntao Zhou, an oceanographer at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and lead author of the study, said in a statement.

The study’s models show deoxygenation will begin affecting all ocean depth zones by 2080, and that deoxygenation may be irreversible. Even if humans stopped emitting greenhouse gases and reversed global warming by sucking carbon dioxide from the air, the question of “whether dissolved oxygen would return to pre-industrial levels remains unknown,” Zhou said. This underscores the importance of halting climate change — and the resulting ocean deoxygenation — as quickly as possible, according to scientists.

The reason for the declining oxygen levels in oceans is that warmer waters hold less dissolved oxygen and ocean temperatures are rising at an alarming rate. According to another new study released this week and published in the scientific journal PLOS Climate, a majority of the world’s ocean surface has consistently exceeded the normal range since 2014.

High water temperatures threaten ecosystems such as coral reefs and kelp forests, which fish feed on. Researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, Calif., mapped 150 years of sea surface temperatures to establish the normal temperature ranges. They found that 2014 was the first year in which a majority of ocean surface areas went above what would normally be considered an extremely hot temperature by historical standards. That benchmark has been surpassed every year since then, making what was once extreme heat the new normal.

“Climate change is not a future event,” Dr. Kyle Van Houtan, who led the research team when he was chief scientist for the aquarium, said in a statement. “The reality is that it’s been affecting us for a while. Our research shows that for the last seven years more than half of the ocean has experienced extreme heat.”

While heat in and of itself threatens marine life, declining oxygen levels add an additional danger, and the middle ocean depths are most vulnerable because they do not have additional sources of oxygen. The ocean surface absorbs oxygen from the atmosphere, and the lowest sea depths gain oxygen from the decomposition of algae. But the ocean’s middle depths, which are from about 600 feet to 3,300 feet below the surface and are called mesopelagic zones, will be the first area to lose large amounts of oxygen because they do not get oxygen from either of those sources. They are also home to many of the world’s commercially fished species, including tuna, swordfish and anchovies.

Losing those fish species to deoxygenation could devastate fishing-based economies and cause shortages of seafood for communities that rely on it. “Deoxygenation affects other marine resources as well, but fisheries [are] maybe most related to our daily life,” Zhou said.

The researchers also found that oceans closer to the poles, where warming is occurring faster, are also losing oxygen more quickly.

The Tennessean

The next coup is being attempted, and it’s more sinister than the last | Opinion

Buzz Thomas – February 4, 2022

Coups d’etat come in different flavors. There’s the classic vanilla, where the president is assassinated and the military takes over as we saw recently in Haiti. But there are other ways to slice the pickle.

You cheat. Bend the rules. Bribe the refs. So that even though your side should lose, you win.

Everybody likes to win. And nobody likes to cheat. I should say nobody wants to cheat. We’d all prefer to win without dealing off the bottom of the deck. That way you preserve your money and your dignity, too.

But if you can convince yourself that the ends justify the means — that losing would be catastrophic to the higher good — you just might do it.

But cheating in a national election is no easy task. Each state or province has its own rules about when and how one can vote, how the votes are counted and who confirms the winner.

We should all know by now that the U.S. is not a true democracy. If it were, the Republican Party would have won only one presidential election since 1988. Instead — thanks to the Electoral College — it has won three. But now, the GOP’s chances of winning, even with the Electoral College, have diminished.

So what should the party do? One would hope what political parties have always done. Change the message. Energize the base. Enlarge the tent.

But what’s happening instead is this: In key battleground states still under GOP control such as Georgia, Texas and Arizona, the party is removing the civil servants who confirm who has won and replacing them with party loyalists. I am not making this up. They are replacing the refs with their own players. That way if the other side wins, they can site some evidence of voter fraud — there’s always some small error in a statewide election — and throw out the results. And because the ultimate power to select delegates to the Electoral College belongs to the state legislatures, they can simply send an alternative slate of delegates who will vote the party line.

I feel half-crazy even writing these words, but this is exactly what is going on right now. Not in Egypt or El Salvador. In America.

The point of a coup is to overturn the lawful government and replace it with one of the insurrectionists’ choosing. President Donald Trump’s supporters tried this the old-fashioned way on Jan. 6, 2021, and failed. Now they’re doing it a new way. A smarter and more sinister way.

If you’re like me, you may have thought that the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol was carried out by fringe elements and far-right extremists. It wasn’t. We now know from the more than 700 people who have been charged and arrested that the vast majority of insurrectionists were mainstream Republicans. Many college-educated and white-collar workers. Many with their own businesses.

The common denominator was a deeply held belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen (a belief shared by the majority of registered Republicans despite a battalion of GOP judges ruling otherwise) and a willingness to use all means necessary to right that wrong.

If you’re willing to take up arms against your own government, it’s a baby step to cheat in order to win the next election.

That’s the state of our union in 2022 whatever President Joe Biden has to say about it to Congress in his State of the Union Address on March 1. And you can forget counting on good Christians like Gov. Bill Lee or U.S. Sens. Bill Hagerty and Marsha Blackburn to do anything about it. They seem devilishly delighted by the prospects of a game where their side cannot lose.

Buzz Thomas is a retired minister and attorney, and the former interim superintendent of Knox County public schools.

The Hill

Romney rips GOP censure effort against Cheney, Kinzinger

February 4, 2022

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) on Friday criticized the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) effort to censure Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), saying he considered the move by their fellow Republicans shameful.

Romney, a leading critic of former President Trump within the Senate GOP conference, signaled his support for Cheney and Kinzinger, also both prominent Trump critics, and said in a tweet that “shame falls on a party that would censure persons of conscience, who seek truth in the face of vitriol.”

He praised them for seeking answers despite the professional and personal consequences. Both Cheney and Kinzinger are serving on the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the only two Republicans to do so.

“Honor attaches to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for seeking truth even when doing so comes at great personal cost,” he added.

Romney’s statements stand in stark contrast to those of his niece, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who spoke in favor of the resolution that was passed by the resolutions committee on Thursday. McDaniel has previously condemned her uncle for criticizing Trump.

Trump and the events of Jan. 6 have divided the GOP as the former president continues to exert enormous influence within the party.

Cheney and Kinzinger were among 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump following the attack on the Capitol. Following her vote, Cheney was removed from GOP leadership in the chamber for repeatedly pushing back against Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Romney similarly condemned Trump following the events of Jan. 6, explicitly declaring that the former president had “incited the insurrection” that led to 5 deaths and hundreds of injuries, many of them sustained by Capitol Police officers. The Utah senator was one of seven Republicans in the upper chamber to vote to convict Trump on an impeachment charge after the attack.

Romney was censured by the Weber County GOP in Utah for voting to convict Trump last year.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who also voted to convict Trump following Jan. 6, questioned the RNC’s move toward censuring Cheney and Kinzinger in a Twitter post on Thursday night.

Romney, who tested positive for COVID-19 last week, is also set to participate in a fundraiser for Cheney in March as the Wyoming incumbent looks to protect her seat against Trump-endorsed Republican primary challenger Harriet Hageman. Kinzinger, meanwhile, announced he is leaving the House at the end of his term.

The RNC’s full body is expected to consider the resolution to censure the two Republicans at its winter meeting on Friday.

Both Cheney and Kinzinger issued strong statements in response to the RNC resolution.

In a statement, Kinzinger said he is now “even more committed to fighting conspiracies and lies.”

HuffPost

Conservative Pundit Warns Just How Unhinged A Second Donald Trump Presidency Could Be

Lee Moran – February 3, 2022

Conservative pundit Charlie Sykes suggested people may look back “with a certain sense of nostalgia” at Donald Trump’s first presidency if he wins the White House again in 2024.

Sykes, founder of the conservative website The Bulwark, noted in a column published Wednesday there were certain lines that even Trump’s most loyal enablers wouldn’t cross — such as former Attorney General Bill Barr’s dismissal of 2020 voter fraud conspiracies or former Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to help him overturn the election result.

“For all their many faults, Pence, Barr, and even Giuliani came from a different era of American politics, with lingering (and rapidly fading) memories of the rule of law and a (more or less) decent respect for the opinions of mankind,” Sykes wrote.

“But in a second Trump term, they won’t be there,” Sykes warned. “It will be all Kayleighs, Bannons, Epshteyns, McEntees, Bonginos, D’Souzas, and Stephen Millers.”

“So consider this: In Trump 2.0, we may look back on Bill Barr, Mike Pence, and — God forgive me — Rudy Giuliani with a certain sense of nostalgia, because where are those lines now?”

Read Sykes’ full column here.