American Democracy Is Under Assault, But Kyrsten Sinema Missed The Vote For ‘A Personal Family Matter’?

Our prima donna senator emerged from hiding in her chicken bunker since last Friday, speaking to reporters Tuesday in Tucson — after touring migrant facilities with the anti-immigrant Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, earlier in the day — Sinema had a short response when asked why she missed the vote on the January 6 Commission.

Sinema on why she skipped vote on Jan. 6 commission: ‘I had a personal family matter’.

“I had a personal family matter,” Sinema said, without elaborating further.

I’m sorry? American democracy is under assault, and “a personal family matter” takes precedence? And you think it is sufficient to just throw this catch phrase out there without explanation or elaboration?

Our prima donna senator has learned nothing from being humiliated by the vote last Friday, when her unfounded belief in her own mystical powers of persuasion with her Republican colleagues was put to the test, and failed miserably. There were not ten Republican “patriotic senators” to vote for the January 6 Commission.

On Tuesday, Sinema once again doubled down on her support for the filibuster, saying she would not budge on the issue.

In Tucson, Sinema reiterated her position that the filibuster is a tool that “protects the democracy of our nation” and is meant to create comity and encourage senators from both parties to work together.

“To those who say that we must make a choice between the filibuster and ‘X,’ I say, this is a false choice,” she said.

“The reality is that when you have a system that is not working effectively — and I would think that most would agree that the Senate is not a particularly well-oiled machine, right? The way to fix that is to fix your behavior, not to eliminate the rules or change the rules, but to change the behavior,” Sinema added.

To put it bluntly, this is quite simply the stupidest thing anyone has ever said, given the peril of the moment this nation finds itself in.

Sinema should listen to her seat mate, Sen. Mark Kelly. “Kelly said his vote to establish the commission reflected his desire for an investigation, which he said could help prevent future attacks on the government.” Sen. Mark Kelly touts infrastructure work, says it’s ‘critical’ to investigate origins of Jan. 6 Capitol riot:

“I was there in the chamber on Jan. 6,” Kelly said. “It’s something I never expected to see, to have an insurrection at our nation’s capital. I think our democracy was put at risk on that day. … I think it’s critical that we do an investigation. It would have been nice to do this in a bipartisan way.”

Kelly would not speak to Sinema’s absence.

I’m sorry? You need to call her out, senator. Sinema is failing this state and the nation with her indefensible position on the Senate filibuster rule.

Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August (no that isn’t how it works but simply sharing the information). https://t.co/kaXSXKnpF0

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) June 1, 2021

The pardoned former Trump adviser Steve Bannon recently joked on his podcast about an August 15 inauguration restoring Trump to the White House.

Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post explained last week, The really scary reason Republicans don’t want to face the truth about Jan. 6:

But there is an even darker reason to explain why they appear less concerned about paying a price for failing to reckon with what happened on Jan. 6, which was also an assault on the integrity of this country’s democratic processes.

The more dangerous truth is that a not-insignificant portion of the GOP’s Trumpian base actually appears to believe that the violent mob was justified in its effort to disrupt Congress as it conducted its pro forma tally of the electoral votes that made Joe Biden the 46th president.

These are the people who have bought into Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and who share at least some of the unhinged theories that fuel the QAnon movement.

A new poll released by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute and the Interfaith Youth Core shows that these dangerous and conspiratorial beliefs are not confined to the country’s dank backwaters.

Fully 20 percent of more than 5,500 adults questioned in all 50 states — and 28 percent of Republicans among them — said they agreed with the statement that “there is a storm coming soon that will sweep away the elites in power and restore the rightful leaders.”

Even more worrisome were the 15 percent overall — and, again, 28 percent of Republicans — who were of the opinion that because “things have gotten so off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

What Republicans made clear with their vote on Friday is that they would rather allow this thinking to fester within their base, and hope that it works to their electoral advantage, than to stand up to it.

[Republicans] standing in the way of a reckoning with the poisonous forces that are growing within the ranks of their own party, they are doing a disservice to the country — one for which democracy itself will ultimately pay a price.

As Paul Blumenthal writes, The Insurrection Isn’t Over (excerpt):

The stolen election lie that inspired the Jan. 6 insurrection now inspires voter suppression legislation that could be used by partisan forces to prevent Democrats from winning in 2022 or 2024. Republicans aren’t just trying to fix elections to benefit them in the future. In states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and New Hampshire, they’re still trying to change the 2020 election results.

This is not just a top-down phenomenon driven by the ex-president from his redoubt in Mar-a-Lago. The stolen election myth is driving the majority of the party’s grassroots as well.

The Republican Party’s orientation around the tale of a stolen election comes as it finds itself in an increasingly precarious political position in national elections. Republicans have lost the presidential popular vote in four straight elections and in seven out of the last eight. The party no longer operates as a national majority.

But the stolen election myth provides a narrative for why the Republican Party can no longer win the popular vote. It also justifies the party’s anti-majoritarian turn. It is the reason for Trump’s continued power over the party. And it could lead to further violence as the former president or other figures continue to insist that their supporters cannot trust the nation’s democratic processes and must take dramatic action to overcome them.

Read the whole piece, but jumping to the conclusion:

The Insurrection Isn’t Over

Large numbers of Republicans have also internalized a lesson from Trump’s insurrection: that violence is necessary to “make America great again.”

One poll conducted in January by the conservative American Enterprise Institute found that 39% of Republicans agreed that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves, even if it requires violent actions,” and 56% believe that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”

Another poll conducted in March by the Public Religion Research Institute found that 28% of Republicans agreed with the statement, “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

The turn to violence to maintain power amid a failure to secure majority political support among a subset of Republican voters is increasingly given voice in elite spaces.

One such piece in The American Mind, a publication run by the pro-Trump Claremont Institute, asserts that “Conservatism Is No Longer Enough.” Something less constrained by rules, laws and systems is needed to restore traditional American values from the internal “non-American” threat, Glenn Ellmers, the author, wrote. The internal threat of “non-Americans” is not limited to immigrants.

“I’m really referring to the many native-born people—some of whose families have been here since the Mayflower—who may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer (if they ever were) Americans,” Ellmers said. “They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.”

He calls for “overturning the existing post-American order” through a “counter-revolution.” He then exhorts readers to “get strong” in preparation for the coming conflict. “One of my favorite weightlifting coaches likes to say, ‘Strong people are harder to kill, and more useful generally,’” Ellmers said.

The American Mind also recently re-published a letter from right-wing French military officials calling for a military coup in that country.

“It is a cautionary tale for what could happen in America if our own ruling class continues to attack and betray our foundations,” the introduction to the letter said.

In a further endorsement of the French military coup idea, Douglas Macgregor, Trump’s failed pick to become ambassador to Germany and a retired Army colonel, stated in a piece for the pro-Trump publication American Greatness, “We will face the same predicament.”

Michael Anton, the former Trump national security official, extrapolated on his fascistic “Flight 93 Election” thesis following the insurrection. In that 2016 article, Anton compared conservatives voting for Trump in 2016 to the passengers on United Flight 93 who stormed the cockpit and crashed the plane hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists on 9/11. Why?

“[T]he ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle,” he wrote at the time.

In his more recent piece, “The Continuing Crisis,” Anton despairs at Trump’s failures to win and challenge the election rules and then also to raise his supporters’ hopes that the results would be overturned. Now, the goal of Biden and Democrats, he claims, is “subjugation.”

“The ruling class has backed Middle America into a corner,” he wrote while comparing the current situation to the Civil War.

This entire genre of insurrectionary political writing feeds the right’s increasing appetite for justifications toward anti-majoritarian actions.

Will the coming elections be undermined by the new laws that make it harder to vote and easier for Republican officials to override election rules in jurisdictions run by Democrats? Will proponents of the stolen election myth win races to run state elections and refuse to certify elections won by Democrats?

As it looks now, the insurrection didn’t end on Jan. 6. It was just beginning.

Frida Ghitis adds at CNN, The Republican Party is building a political bomb:

Today’s Republican Party is building a political bomb — and the ingredients for the explosive concoction are being mixed before our eyes. When it all blows up — and it will, unless the party changes course soon — the result will be not just rhetorical extremism but could well include real violence.

If you thought the events of Jan. 6 were shocking, what comes next could be far worse.

* * *

So, let’s take a step back and look at how this bomb construction is going. Countless Republican leaders either spread or refuse to deny the Big Lie, the claim that the election was stolen. Tens of millions of Republicans erroneously believe Trump won. Almost one-quarter of Republicans believe it may become necessary to use violence to “save the country.” Then they are told by Republican outrage peddlers that the US Constitution protects their right to own firearms for the purpose of rising up against the government. And then — the match to start lighting the fuse — they are told that Democrats are similar to Nazis.

If that’s not the recipe for disaster — not just for Republicans but for the entire country — tell me what it is.

As Republicans pave the way for another insurrection, this one potentially much better attended than the Jan. 6 disaster, the leaders of the party, the “grownups,” have abandoned their responsibility to the country, focusing instead on winning the next election. America may blow up, but at least they’ll try to eke out a majority in Congress — even if it means blocking an investigation of the Jan. 6 assault on the US Capitol by enraged Trump supporters.

[S]ome may view these maneuvers about the Jan. 6 commission, the reluctance to declare the legitimacy of the election and the implications of the increasingly extreme rhetoric as just a sign of a more polarized political system. This thinking fails to grasp the seriousness of what is building. And unless GOP leaders wake up to the danger, the US may soon face something far more dangerous than over-the-top rhetoric and a disputed election.

The MAGA/QAnon personality cult of Donald Trump is crypto-fascist, anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian authoritarian mob that is is engaged in an ongoing seditious insurrection against the U.S. government to complete the coup d’etat that just barely failed on January 6.

But Kyrsten Sinema took a powder on the January 6 Commission vote because she “had a personal family matter“?

Wake the fuck up!