A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things.
The House Jan. 6 Select Committee last night voted unanimously to hold former White House adviser Steve Bannon in contempt after he ditched his hearing last week and refused to hand over documents listed in the panel’s subpoena.
Do TFG next!
Send in the Marshalls.
America’s most obvious alcoholic quivering atop a mountain of self righteousness.
Truth is, people that are self righteous are compelling to the weak. It’s the MO of every preacher, grifter, and politician.
Stunned to be a part of this ridiculous monkey race.
Excuse me while I whip this out -
Well, they already dressed him.
See, this is how it’s done.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Ad infinitum…
Another guy whose time is coming.
The Morning Memo is packed full of nuggets today.
Bannon likes attention more than anything else in this world. It’s hard to say if going to prison will really upset him. Sure, it will be inconvenient for him to give up all of the creature comforts he’s used to, but he gets to play political martyr in front of all of his nutjob fans.
Will he grow tired of languishing in a prison cell, eating lousy food and having no freedom, or will all this extra attention make it worth it to him? Only time will tell.
He won’t got to jail. He has Seinfeld money.
Now would be a good time for Dems to show they can wield power effectively.
Hard disagree. If jailed, Bannon would be dead within a week. He’ll do anything (most notably, giving up TFG) to stay out.
OT?
Freaking traitor, after all that Trump has done for him. What would have been of his career if Trump hadn’t hired him for the NJ Generals?
That won’t save him in D.C.
Realistically, however, he’s looking at like 30-360 days in prison. Max penalty is 1 year.
Let’s find out kids!
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/19/jan-6-commission-steve-bannon-criminal-contempt-516233
Contempt is one of the House’s only tools to punish witnesses who refuse to cooperate, but it’s riddled with legal loopholes and ambiguities that could allow Donald Trump’s allies to bury the Jan. 6 select committee in Byzantine court challenges — without ever producing new evidence about the former president’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.
“The committee has a tough row to hoe,” said former House counsel Stan Brand, who helped orchestrate the referral of the then-EPA chief to the Justice Department for criminal contempt of Congress in 1982. “You have no clear, easy path to compliance.”
“There’s not really any way to get this resolved in litigation on the timeline the committee is operating on,” said Lisa Kern Griffin, a Duke University criminal law expert.
“Since at least the Reagan Administration, there has not been a successful prosecution under the criminal contempt statute,” said Thomas Spulak, another former House counsel.
A prison is a big busy place when a person first walks in. Then it shrink wraps when the bars ratchet shut. A number of Bannon’s 01-06 followers have found incarceration to be more than they signed up for back in their days of running free. It will be a wonderful place for Bannon.
Excerpts from King’s speech, as quoted by Heather Cox Richardson’s ‘Letter from an American’ overnight:
Cheney was not the only one admonishing the Republicans to put aside partisanship and stand up for the country. The Senate will vote tomorrow on whether to take up the Freedom to Vote Act, with Republicans threatening to filibuster that procedural vote. Senator Angus King (I-ME) established himself today as a key advocate of the measure, and as the Senate’s conscience.
He reminded his colleagues that in a world of absolute monarchs, the U.S. was founded on the radical idea “that the people… are the ultimate source of power and can govern themselves through their elected representatives.” That idea “was tested at Gettysburg, Antietam, Shiloh, and the Wilderness. It was defended at Anzio, Iwo Jima, and Normandy, and was reaffirmed in 1965.”
But democracy is fragile, and it most often fails “from erosion from within.”
The senator warned that most failed democracies start with legitimate elections, but that leaders then manipulate the system to stay in power, just as they have done recently in Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, and Hungary. In the U.S., if the new laws suppressing the vote and permitting partisans to choose their own electors over the wishes of the voters are allowed to stand, “we will be left with a downward spiral toward a hollow shell of democracy, where only raw power prevails and its peaceful transfer becomes a distant memory.”
King noted the profoundly dangerous breakdown of trust in the electoral system and called out the Republicans’ “overtly partisan attempt” to use the loss of trust as a justification to skew elections in the future. He demolished the idea that our elections are corrupted by “voter fraud,” and suggested the new election laws going into effect in Republican-dominated states are “stone-cold partisan voter suppression.”
King urged his colleagues to change course, “to pull our country back from the brink, and to begin the work of restoring our democracy as we did in the Revolution, as we did in the Civil War, and as we did in the Civil Rights struggles: first, by simply telling the truth and then by enacting a set of basic protections of the sacred right to vote.” If they will not, he said, we will lose “our identity as a people,…the miracle of self-government, and…the idea of America.”
“We are the heirs and trustees…of a tradition that goes back to Lincoln, Madison, and, yes, our friend John McCain,” Senator King reminded his colleagues. “All of them were partisans… but all shared an overriding commitment to the idea that animates the American experiment, the idea that our government is of, by, and for the people…. Now is the moment that we’re called upon to reach beyond our region, our state, our party, ourselves to save and reinvigorate the sputtering flame of the American idea.”
“Indeed,” he said, “destiny has placed us here at one of history’s fateful moments. Our response to it will be our most important legacy…. I believe we all know our responsibility, and whether we like it or not, history will record whether we, each of us, meets that responsibility.”
And the Republicans in the House will circle the wagons around Bannon and extol his virtues? Sing songs of praise & demand he go free?
To endorse Bannon’s defiance … is endorsement of the disregard of the rule of law.
