The party of law and order

[Admin]

Her point is captured in the headline: “The GOP Has a Choice: Fight Anti-Trump Coup Effort or Surrender Government to Democrats.” What is most notable is that Hemingway isn’t counseling Republicans to gather evidence and identify witnesses to defend the president during the impeachment inquiry. Instead, she points to what has been labeled the “Brooks Brothers Riot” during the recount of the 2000 election in Florida. As Joe Conason wrote at the time, that was the moment Republicans abandoned the rule of law. That lawless incident was the “bourgeois riot” of Nov. 22, incited on the airwaves by Rush Limbaugh and a Cuban-American radio station, and then praised on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal the next day by Paul Gigot (who also regularly appears on the very civilized and genteel PBS Newshour). According to Mr. Gigot, the white riot that stopped the manual counting of votes in Miami-Dade was sparked by a command to “shut it down” from Representative John Sweeney of upstate New York.

In other words, an elected Republican Congressman-who took an oath to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States-unashamedly incited a mob. What Mr. Gigot omitted from his eyewitness account of that event showed up in the pages of The New York Times, which reported that “several people were trampled, punched or kicked” during a fracas outside the office of the county supervisor of elections that continued until sheriff’s deputies restored order. Republican thugs also assaulted the Democratic county chairman because they mistakenly believed that he had absconded with a single ballot.

That is what Hemingway is recommending when she urges the GOP to fight. But she’s not merely talking about fighting against the impeachment process. What we are facing now is not partisan warfare…It represents a fatal threat to our system of government, and if this coup succeeds — whether through impeachment proceedings, or through an election that (if the last three years are any indication) the other side is clearly willing to steal by hook or by crook — the nation will cease to be a constitutional, democratic republic. Hemingway just set the stage for Republicans to claim that the 2020 election was stolen if Trump loses, all without providing a shred of evidence. Her remedy is to abandon the rule of law and engage mobs in an effort to intimidate their opponents. To the extent that the Federalist is representative of “establishment Republicans,” it is impossible to capture the danger of what is being proposed.

Conservative columnist urges the GOP to abandon the rule of law – Alternet.org