South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham made a complete jackass out of himself at the second day of confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson on Tuesday.
What caused Graham to pitch a full-scale hissy fit? The fact that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) dared to fact-check some of the absurd things Graham said about detainees at Guantanamo.
When Durbin began reading facts to refute what Graham had just said, Graham shouted:
“The system failed miserably and advocates to change this system like [the nominee] was advocating would destroy our ability to protect this country!”
His voice getting more shrill as he spoke, Graham then continued:
“We’re at war, we’re not fighting crime! This is not some passage of time event. As long as they’re dangerous, I hope they all die in jail if they’re going to go back to kill Americans. It won’t bother me one bit if 39 of them die in prison. That’s a better outcome than letting them go and if it cost $500 million to keep them in jail, keep them in jail because they’ll go back to the fight. Look at the freaking Afghan government made up of former detainees at Gitmo. This whole thing by the left about this war ain’t working.”
Durbin again began to respond with facts, which led Graham to leave the hearing in a huff like a spoiled child who didn’t get what he wanted at the grocery store.
Here’s what we know about Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO): He’s an apologist for the Capitol insurrection and attempted coup that took place on January 6, 2021.
Hawley is also trying to make a name for himself because he plans to run for president one day and doesn’t care how many people he has to slag or destroy in order to get his name in the headlines and pretend that he’s a decent, moral person.
The perfect example of Hawley’s ambition and cutthroat tactics can be found in his attempt to smear Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has been nominated by President Joe Biden to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
Hawley fired off a series of tweets accusing Jackson of being soft on people caught with child porn:
Judge Jackson has yet to address her alarming record on child porn offenders. But rather than ask her questions, the Washington Post is regurgitating White House talking points. Their “fact check” questions & my answers below. Now go ask the person nominated for the Supreme Court pic.twitter.com/jNLt6CArIT
So other than these juvenile histrionics, the White House has no substantive answers for the judicial record of a person they nominated https://t.co/PEE0eB0XNt
When White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki was asked about the disgusting insinuation made by Hawley, it quickly became clear that the administration stands behind Judge Jackson and also that Psaki has some questions of her own for the senator:
“What I would say, though — because there are others in the Senate who have made faulty accusations about Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s record and specifically about her record on child sex crimes, so let me just take the opportunity to clear that up — not that most people have confusion about it.
“But in the vast majority of cases involving child sex crimes, the sentences Judge Jackson imposed were consistent with or above what the government or U.S. probation recommended. For example, there are — there are arguments that have been made out there by Senator Hawley and others that — where he took a snippet of a transcript out of context, when, in fact, Judge Jackson was repeating something a witness said in order to ask a question about their testimony.”
When another reporter asked about Hawley’s tweets, Psaki put the niceties aside and took a verbal tire iron to the Missouri senator, remarking:
“Well, I’m not sure that someone who refused to tell people whether or not he would vote for Roy Moore is an effective and credible messenger on this.”
Remember Roy Moore? He’s the Alabama GOP Senate candidate who was accused of propositioning and having sex with underage girls on several occasions, as the Washington Post reported:
Leigh Corfman says she was 14 years old when an older man approached her outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Ala. She was sitting on a wooden bench with her mother, they both recall, when the man introduced himself as Roy Moore.
Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden, drove her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.
Josh Hawley refused to condemn Moore for that behavior, so maybe it’s time the FBI had a long look at the senator’s computer and cell phone, too.
Donald Trump Jr. (along with his father) is in full panic mode, terrified of what the House Select Committee on the January 6 Capitol insurrection will uncover next.
Just how fearful is Junior? Enough so that he thought it’d be a good idea to attack Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on Twitter just because McConnell dared to say that the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was indeed a “violent insurrection,” according to The Hill:
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) criticized the Republican National Committee (RNC) for its censure of Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and broke with their language on the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, calling it a “violent insurrection.”
“It was a violent insurrection with the purpose of trying to prevent a peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election. … That’s what it was,” McConnell said.
McConnell’s pointed remarks came in response to remarks made by RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, who said the Capitol riots were “legitimate political discourse.”
McDaniel later tried to walk back those comments, but the damage had already been done, giving the appearance that the RNC supports the violent rioting which resulted in the deaths of five people.
And now Don Jr. has entered the fray, taking to Twitter to accuse McConnell of being a Democrat:
What Junior neglected to mention is that McConnell still has his job. Donald Trump doesn’t, and is under investigation in multiple states. He’s also likely to be referred to the Justice Department for his role in the Jan. 6 attack.
Don Jr. was in contact with the White House on the day of the Capitol insurrection. But if he has nothing to hide and did nothing wrong, why doesn’t he volunteer to testify in open session before the Jan. 6 committee? Probably because he knows that he’s guilty as hell and so is his old man.
It’s so much fun to watch as Republicans go after each other. If we’re lucky, they’ll rip their party into a million pieces. The country would be a hell of a lot better off if they did.
Once again, failed, one-term former President Donald Trump has set members of the GOP against one another, which could prove fatal to Republicans as they try to unify their party and win the 2022 midterm elections.
This time, Trump has Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) lashing out at Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) over remarks the ex-president made Saturday evening during a rally in Conroe, Texas.
Specifically, Trump hinted he might just issue presidential pardons to those who have been charged with taking part in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol:
“Another thing we’ll do — and so many people have been asking me about it — if I run and if I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. We will treat them fairly,” he said at a rally in Conroe, Texas. “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons. Because they are being treated so unfairly.”
That didn’t sit well with Graham, who pushed back at Trump on Sunday, according to Newsweek:
“I don’t want to send any signal that it was OK to defile the Capitol. There are other groups with causes that may want to go down to the violent path that these people get pardoned.”
Graham’s remarks set Greene off on a tangent which she posted on the Telegram social media app:
“Lindsey Graham has done nothing about J6 (Jan. 6).
“I guess Lindsey Graham doesn’t care about being presumed innocent until proven guilty. Americans are being treated worst than Islamic terrorists at Gitmo and Lindsey Graham doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about their due process rights. He doesn’t care that they haven’t seen their families and are denied seeing their attorneys most of the time. He doesn’t care that these pretrial J6 defendants are denied hair cuts, shaving, chapel, and the most basic of human rights. He doesn’t care that they are abused in the DC jail because they are white, male, and voted for the very President that he supposedly supports.”
The Georgia Republican then added this to her screed:
“While no one agrees with the violence and riot at the Capitol on J6, Lindsey Graham would rather see pretrial J6 defendants be abused and forgotten just like Nancy Pelosi wants them abused and forgotten. Instead of actually doing something about the great injustice happening to pretrial Americans awaiting their day in court, Lindsey Graham turns his head to their abuse, votes for Joe Biden’s nominees, votes for Joe Biden’s Infrastructure bill, and then pretends to be a friend to President Trump. Aren’t we all sick and tired of those kind of ‘friends.'”
Be sure and note the line “While no one agrees with the violence and riot at the Captiol on J6…” However, Greene does indeed agree with that took place, and has made that clear on multiple occasions. She is also suspected of having played a part in what transpired on that horrific day.
The good news is that if Republicans are sniping at each other, it weakens them. Leave it to Trump to set off a civil war inside the GOP.
Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) got caught in a controversy of his own making while discussing the issue of voting rights, telling reporters:
“The concern is misplaced because if you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”
As the AP reported, that set off a wave of criticism for obvious reasons:
The comment implied that Black voters are somehow not American and underscored the concerns of voting rights advocates that Republicans in state legislatures across the country are explicitly seeking to disenfranchise Black voters. The timing was also notable, coming the same day that McConnell engineered a filibuster to block voting legislation that Democrats and civil rights leaders say is vital to protecting democracy.
Mitch tried to walk back his remarks as the full fury of the online shitstorm hit him:
McConnell addressed the controversy at a news conference in Kentucky, calling the criticism an “outrageous mischaracterization of my record as a result of leaving one word out inadvertently the other day, which I just now have supplied to you, is deeply offensive.”
Now, however, Patriot Takes has unearthed a video of McConnell circa 2015 in which he proudly brags that Republicans do well with white voters:
“My party does really good with white people and I’m proud of that.”
Unearthed: Mitch McConnell, at a 2015 event: “My party does really good with white people and I’m proud of that.” pic.twitter.com/uiHf7Ir4np
During the same 2015 Aspen Institute forum where McConnell expressed pride in being popular with white Americans, he mused on why blacks don’t want to join the GOP, according to Mediaite:
He accused Black voters of being “locked down against Republicans,” and the only hope he expressed for making inroads was the existence of some Black Republicans.
But perhaps most strange was McConnell’s assertion that “it certainly hasn’t been helped by having the first African-American president be a Democrat. I mean, that didn’t do us much good on that front” — as if Barack Obama just fell to Earth and into the Oval Office in a stroke of misfortune for the GOP.
Republicans love to say they’re not bigoted, racist, or opposed to civil rights for minorities in the United States. But that’s just another lie they tell along with all the others.