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Random Thoughts on Rioting and Impeachment
I continue to believe that there is no basis for assigning blame to President Trump for the reprehensible rioting at the Capitol last week. Last Friday, I thought that calls for impeachment were premature, irresponsible, and I went so far as to call them “deranged.” Nothing that I have seen or heard over the past week has changed my mind about this initial conclusion. Indeed, further information has strengthened my position. I do, however, remain willing to consider additional evidence.
I’m going to walk through some important issues, in summary fashion. I’d appreciate your feedback.
I. Propriety of Impeachment
I was surprised by the number of Right-leaning commentators who initially favored impeachment, and asserted that President Trump “incited” the rioting. The two that I respect most, who expressed this opinion, were Andy McCarthy and our own Jon Gabriel.
Here are a few contrary viewpoints that have come out over the past week:
1. Alan Dershowitz, no man of the Right, has a column strongly opposing impeachment (here), contending that the President did not incite violence and that the impeachment is an unconstitutional violation of the free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. Part of his argument is:
Whatever one may think of President Trump’s speech last Wednesday—I personally found it deeply upsetting—one thing is clear: It was fully protected by the First Amendment. Nothing the president said constituted unprotected “incitement,” as narrowly defined by the Supreme Court over nearly a century of decisions. His volatile words plainly fell on the side of political “advocacy,” which is protected speech.
2. Ben Stein’s column titled Goodbye, America is strongly critical of the charges against the President, calling them “The Biggest Lie of the Postwar Era.” Stein has such a way with words. He concludes:
As soon as Mr. Trump heard about the rioting at the Capitol, he urged his supporters to stop and go home.
Nevertheless, the news media and the leftists and the RINOs insisted that Mr. Trump had “incited” his followers to attack the Capitol. To punish him, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Amazon, and every other large internet platform took away Mr. Trump’s email and then shut down the platforms for Parler because it had contributors who had defended Mr. Trump and thus were party to his January 6 “incitement.”
There was no precedent for this shutdown of free speech. Nazis and Muslim terrorists still have use of the internet. Only the president who got more than 70 million votes is shut off.
What’s even worse is this: I have read every word of Mr. Trump’s January 6 speech to his supporters. There is not one single word of “incitement” to lawlessness. In fact, Mr. Trump, explicitly tells his fans to be “peaceful.”
And so, over a clear-cut lie, the powers in media and politics have ended free speech in America. And Joe Biden has not even been sworn in yet. These are terrifying times. Goodbye, America.
3. Victor Davis Hanson, who I’ve been following closely, finally has a column out that strongly opposes the impeachment (here). His prior commentary, at least that I’ve seen, was a bit unambiguous, and he seemed to be reserving judgment. This article calls the impeachment a “farce” and “one of the greatest travesties of modern politics.” He concludes:
So what, then, was this latest impeachment gambit really about? Of course, it was a Parthian shot to discredit supporters of Trump—and perhaps stop Trump from running for president again.
But it was also aimed preemptively at opponents of what will soon be the most left-wing Congress in history—one that in days will try to change the very institutions of American government in ways never tried before.
I’m inclined to agree with these three gentlemen.
II. Further News Reports Regarding Timing and Pre-Planning
The specific details and timeline of the rioting on January 6 remain unclear to me. It does appear that the rioting at the Capitol started before President Trump even concluded his speech.
It is difficult to find reporting of this (I had to resort to DuckDuckGo). This article at the Conservative Review claims that the rioting began 20 minutes before the end of President Trump’s speech. As I understand it, the rally was a fair distance away from the Capitol, but I don’t know precisely how long it would have taken to walk the distance. I cannot vouch, in any way, for the Conservative Review, as I know nothing about this website.
This claim is consistent with a timeline published by USA Today, which reports (if you dig through it):
- The President started speaking at about 11:50 am.
- The President spoke for more than an hour.
- Rioters began grappling with police on the Capitol steps at 1:10 pm.
- Capitol police ordered the evacuation of nearby buildings (not the Capitol) at 1:26 pm.
- A Congresswoman tweeted that she was being evacuated after a pipe bomb report at 1:46 pm.
- Rioters breached the police lines on the west side of the Capitol at 2:11 pm.
- C-SPAN reported that rioters crossed Statuary Hall at 2:33 pm.
- At 2:38 pm, the President tweeted: “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”
- At 2:44 pm, “[s]hots are reported fired in the House chamber.” I have heard nothing more about shots inside the chamber. This may be the shooting of rioter Ashli Babbitt, which occurred just outside the House chamber.
- At 3:13 pm, the President sent a second tweet: “I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you.”
- The DC National Guard was mobilized at 3:51 pm.
- At 4:17 pm, the President tweeted a video which, among other things, told people to “go home now” and that “[w]e have to have peace.”
It’s hard to figure out precisely what happened. That’s a very tight timeline.
There are reports (for example, USA Today here), that the FBI issued a “dire warning” on the day before the riot about “violent extremists” planning an “armed uprising in Washington” that was “described as a ‘war’ to coincide with Congress’ certification” of the electoral vote. If true, such pre-planning would further undermine any claim that the President incited the rioting.
III. False-Flag and Antifa
There was a fair amount of speculation that the rioting was instigated, or even entirely conducted, by Antifa or other Leftist agitators. I have seen little evidence of this, though it remains plausible that some such “false-flag” operations occurred.
It is very difficult to reach a conclusion on this issue. Most of the rioters, in the videos that I have seen, looked and sounded like Trump supporters. This appears to be true of poor Ashli Babbitt, the rioting Air Force vet who was shot and killed.
I don’t think that the “false-flag” claims are entirely unsupported. Here is a Fox article about a left-wing activist who has reportedly been charged in federal court, after allegedly having participated in the rioting and made various statements urging others to participate.
IV. Poor Ashli Babbitt
I don’t want to litigate this issue in detail. The death of Ms. Babbitt is a tragedy, but I do not think that it was a crime. It looks like justifiable homicide, to me. This is a preliminary conclusion, as additional details may emerge.
The videos that I’ve seen show a very violent confrontation at the doors of the Speaker’s Lobby, which I understand to be the final doorway that could be defended before the very entry to the House Chamber itself. Ms. Babbitt was reportedly unarmed, but it also plainly wearing a large backpack. The scene was pandemonium, with rioters hammering on and breaking the glass doors and the flanking windows. Ms. Babbitt pushed to the front of the crowd, and tried to climb up through the broken sidelight window on the right. She was shot, reportedly by a Capitol policeman.
I disagree strongly with those who have called this a “murder.” It remains early, and I expect that an investigation is underway. I do think that such lack of support for the police, in difficult circumstances, is a major cause for both the Capitol rioting and the widespread rioting that we saw last year.
V. Republican and Conservative Support for Impeachment
This is difficult to gauge. My impression is that the overwhelming majority of Republicans and Conservatives find no basis for impeachment and no cause for allegations of incitement against President Trump, and find this to be another misleading Leftist narrative being pushed for cynical political purposes. Here are my data points.
First, the vote in the House on impeachment. The Republican vote was 197 nays, 10 ayes. Four were absent, of whom three (at least) have publicly stated their opposition.
Second, the Ricochet “poll” that I posted yesterday (here). Through the first 112 votes, 86% oppose and 12% support.
Third, the public opinion polling on Trump’s job approval. I am even more skeptical of polling than before, and the RCP average of polls shows a precipitous drop, from 44.2% approval on January 5, to 39.7% today. But there are a small number of polls, and I worry about “push polling.”
I generally find Rasmussen to be the best poll. I think that it’s a robocall poll, which perhaps makes it less likely to engage in “push-polling,” and I think that it reports a 3-day moving average. Per Rasmussen (here), there’s been essentially no change in Trump’s job approval. It was 47% on January 5, and is 48% today (January 15), ranging from a low of 46% to a high of 49% in the interim.
This has been a very troubling nine days for me. Thanks for providing a forum for me to share my thoughts. I look forward to your comment.
Wokeistan delenda est.
Published in Politics
That is false. There was the point of pressuring lawmakers that were going to vote on objected electors. It is not unusual to have a protest on the day of a key vote.
We can take his word for what his motive was. The verb “overturn” is not correct. It is would be better to say that Trump was calling on Congress to correct electoral irregularities according to the Electoral Counting Act of 1877.
Do you have an opinion regarding whether or not the election in the battleground states was normal?
Andy McCarthy distinguished between law and politics, as we all must. Legally, impeachment is limited. Politically, it can be applied by whatever focus and extent politicians can get away with.
Defenders of Trump and future presidents need to convince people that pursuing impeachment is political suicide.
They do have that right, but Congress can still impeach him for protected speech, if it determines it to meet the definition of “high crime and misdemeanor.” The first amendment doesn’t protect you from impeachment, or getting fired from any other job, really.
In other words, Impeaching President Trump is about nothing more than arbitrarily exercising power for political purposes.
Don’t worry there is an inferred promise (ie: “a return to normalcy”) that we can all have our first amendment rights back after the orange-man-bad is gone.
I suppose literally he can’t be protected from the act of impeachment, which is within the realm of the House. But I’m quite sure that the impeachment itself could be viewed (declared?) unconstitutional. If the impeachment article is not reviewable anywhere (something that I don’t know–yet), that’s a moot point. But it should arguably have been considered by those voting.
No, it’s not arbitrary at all. It’s about Congress sending a message that it is intolerable for a president to bully it (and the VP) into unlawfully keeping him in office. Biden was lawfully elected and Trumps refusal to accept they has now gotten people killed. So, not arbitrary at all. No sitting president has done this to the country.
People lose court battles all the time and accept the results even when they think the results were wrong. It’s what adults do in a society with the rule of law. I’m not sure people appreciate how much depends on that acceptance. This gross event has been a good reminder.
In a vacuum, maybe. In front of tens of thousands of angry protestors, who are keyed up to DO SOMETHING, no. That is incitement.
The vast majority of whom did nothing. From my perspective, your argument cuts the other way.
That’s your subjective (i.e. arbitrary) interpretation of events; Mine is that Biden and Kamala Harris should be immediately impeached for cheerleading, minimizing, justifying, and in Harris case bankrolling racist domestic terrorists for months-all of which is far worse for preserving the rule of law than grandstanding about a highly flawed election. You know, since there is no objective standard like criminality involved.
I have a question a bit afield from the topic as presented but I think fair for discussion since we have encountered the issue of possible or suggested unlawful interference in the last two Presidential elections. Four years ago there was initiated an unrelenting effort to nullify the elections results or, after he was inaugurated, to remove President Trump based on allegations that he or members of his campaign colluded with Russians to affect the 2016 Presidential election. Even though a thorough and unrestrained investigation of these allegations was conducted nothing came of it beyond the negative effects on the conduct of everyday Administration activities. In 2020 we again have numerous allegations of election fraud and other illegalities, some of a constitutional nature, that most Trump voters think affected the result, placing Joe Biden as POTUS instead of Donald Trump.
Now to my question with a couple of premises. I think we have shown that the election of the POTUS is a weak spot in our national security. What if we did have massive interference in our election by elements of a foreign power so that the “elected” President is not really the choice our system says should have prevailed? What if our counter-intelligence determined that this happened? Remember the so-called intelligence consensus released by the Obama Administration in January 2017 that was used to start the Special Counsel investigation. How does a sitting POTUS defend the national security of the United States in this circumstance?
And, by the way, this was the one possible thing I was waiting for that never surfaced and so I thought it left Pence with no options to do what the Trump supporters favored. But what if it had been there, what do we do? It makes me think we really have a need to insure fair, accurate, and secure ways to elect our national executive leadership.
There’s more conjecture than facts in this Young Americans interview of journalists at the Capitol when the riot happened. But it’s informative. They confirm bits of Michael Yon’s report that the instigators at the front were organized, prepared, and attempting to manipulate the crowd.
As I said on the 6th, it’s important to remember the nature of crowds and mobs.
During the Portland riots, a video was released online of a Portland police meeting. The officer in charge explained how people in a crowd can bend to peer pressure and instinct in the emotions and chaos of the moment to do things they would never do without that intense, immediate, unrelenting pressure. He cited examples of individuals they arrested who responded as if awoken from a daze, unable to explain why they did what they did.
We know how mobs lose control and, simultaneously, how rabble rousers gain control. Evidence suggests that a small group of prepared rabble rousers manipulated a larger crowd to push forward.
Yet even so, the vast majority who pushed inside or to the steps did not proceed to Congressional offices or elsewhere far from entry. The video of the woman being shot is remarkable in part because so few rioters are seen between the door and the stairs trying to force their way in.
Even the sheep are criminally liable (though not for “insurrection”). But those who caused the trouble might count no more than twenty or thirty.
IMPEACH THEM!!!!
It seems to be all the rage …. all the cool kids(ie: (D)’s and NT) are doing it.
And after everything that has transpired in the past 8 years you just watch as the (D) continues do everything in their power to make elections loose, not secure, and as open to fraud as possible.
Tighten up the internal controls on who, when, and where to cast a legal ballot and they will play the trusty race card …. you can set your clock by it.
This is why I think the states should drop the votes for POTUS electors from the general election and put it back with the legislature as it started. Large parts of the general population don’t know anyway and, after all, if we are to remain a sovereign federal republic, national defense if the foremost responsibility of the President. State legislators should be more attuned to who can be effective in that responsibility. I think this was really the only deviation the founders did to make us not a parliamentary system by putting this in the hands of the state legislatures instead of the federal Congress. The race card is wearing out.
No. It’s not.
A very proper and constitutionally protected form of “intimidation.”
Incitement to do the right thing.
Martin Luther King’s 1963 rally at the nearby Lincoln Memorial was also an incitement of this kind. It was better disciplined than this latest social justice protest, though.
Those who were not “incited.”
White supremacists in action.
You so correct and are saying what I want to say in a far more civil manner.
Totally correct.
Yes. Why can’t people see this and admit this. There is no place for swarming and then invading the capitol building. None whatsoever. Trump pushed a boulder down a mountainside. He is accountable for the damage it does when the boulder rolls over people and kills them.
This is dead on.
The Dems have made four mistakes in my mind.
First, they should have included Trump pressuring the Georgia Secretary of State to “find 11,870 votes.”
Second, they should have invited Republicans to join with them for the drafting of the specific articles of impeachment. Allegedly Representative Chip Roy said that he believed that Trump needed to be impeached, but on the different grounds I think that Trump failed in his oath to protect and defend the constitution, as soon by his negligence in preparing for and then reacting to the rioters.
Third, if I had been Nancy Pelosi I would have invited the “Brave 10” Republicans to speak for as long as they wished on the Democrat’s time.
Fourth, at one of the House Managers should be one of the “Brave 10” Republicans. I would suggest Adam Kinzinger.
I haven’t read all of the comments but I need to point something out that Larry Ahrn said the other day.
The Founders only intended that impeachment be used when there is widespread bipartisan public support. It’s clearly set up that way. There obviously isn’t here in this situation, and there wasn’t with Bill Clinton. Same thing with the prior impeachment.
You can’t use it as a vote of no confidence or whatever.
You can babble about the Ukraine call all you want but it’s not clear enough to sway the public that much. Plus the Biden family is guilty as hell, obviously.
With all due respect, as to the issue of Collusion, the Mueller Report found that there was “Collusion,” but not “Conspiracy.” I have copied the three page Introduction and the seven page Executive Summary on Volume I of the Mueller Report several times. In lieu of that, I refer you to my April 20, 2019 post on that issue. https://ricochet.com/615718/archives/the-mueller-report-in-four-summaries/
As for Obstruction of Justice, Trump was guilty of ten counts of Obstruction of Justice. Again, I have copied the two page Introduction and the six page Executive Summary of Volume II of the Mueller Report several times. In lieu of that, I refer you to my April 20, 2019 post on that issue. https://ricochet.com/615718/archives/the-mueller-report-in-four-summaries/
For two months I wore t-shirts saying “Republicans for Biden” or “Republican Voters Against Trump” and gave out 120 of them to other Republicans. It looks like I will now need to get t-shirts made that say “Republican for Impeachment, Conviction, and Disqualification of Trump.”