Alyse Kaminski | staff columnist
1/21/2021
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi signing the articles, of Trump’s second impeachment.
In 2020, I was so sick of hearing people say that everything that went wrong would just disappear in 2021. I heard countless times, “2021 will not be as crazy!” And while I am hopeful that 2021 will be a better year, I have the sense to admit that 2020 wasn’t some fluke. The insanity that was 2020 was the combination of many faults in our country.
On Jan. 6, when domestic terrorists stormed the Capitol in a strange effort to reverse the results of the election, I can’t say I was really surprised. And it definitely did not come as a surprise to me when President Trump — former president once this article comes out — was impeached for inciting that riot.
The despicable actions the insurrectionists committed on that day will go down in history. It is my sincere hope that they all are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. And I really hope that all of the speakers at the rally which led up to the breaching of our Capitol are as well. Especially Donald Trump.
The day of the impeachment debate in the House, I, for some reason unbeknownst to me, watched the entirety of the spectacle. And it was exactly that — a spectacle. I fully believe it was the Republicans, who are sworn to protect our Constitution and our government, who made it that way. Sure, call me biased because I am a Democrat, but for hours I sat through conservatives making logically unsound arguments for reasons I cannot fathom.
I think my favorite — actually, my least favorite — argument came from freshman Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia. Her argument was much like the rest of her Republican colleagues, but what stood out to me was her mask, which read “CENSORED.” It seems ironic that a woman freely speaking into a microphone for her whole country to see would believe she is censored. Obviously, this is a nod to the banning of President Trump from almost all social media platforms, but it came off so whiny.
An argument I heard throughout the afternoon was that no one who participated in the riots over the summer against police brutality was being punished the way Trump is. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz made remarks about buildings being burned over the summer. Unfortunately for Gaetz, this argument makes no sense and has absolutely nothing to do with what happened at the Capitol. Trump did not incite those protests.
But if Gaetz and others like him want to play that game, let’s go. What did Trump think was going to happen this summer when he tweeted, “When the looting starts the shooting starts?” He knew that would not make any of the protests stop. He knew he was fear mongering. He knew he was making a racist nod toward a saying in the 1960s.
To draw a comparison between the domestic terrorists at the Capitol and those protesting so Black people stop being killed by the police is racist. Those who stormed the Capitol were not protesting for anything productive. Black Lives Matter protests are angry at a system that puts Black Americans in danger every single day. They are not the same.
Aside from the bogus whining about private companies “censoring” Trump and ridiculous claims about Black Lives Matter, the Republican arguments failed in many other ways, including acknowledging how awful what happened was and that someone should be held responsible. It is almost as if they were at a debate to acknowledge that what happened was awful. It was almost as if they were debating this because they have the power to hold one of the perpetrators, the president, accountable.
But they were too afraid. They’re scared of Trump, and they used a false fear of further dividing the nation through impeachment to hide behind their actual fear. In other words, they remain spineless.
