This week, three Republican state Senators in Georgia lost roles as chairpersons of powerful state legislative committees after their public support for efforts to overturn the election. Georgia’s Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan, a Republican, demoted state Sens. Brandon Beach, Matt Brass, and Burt Jones, all three of whom backed the lies about the recently concluded presidential election. As The Atlanta-Journal Constitution reports, all three state legislators “aggressively promoted President Donald Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud, and pushed efforts to overturn the outcome that ran afoul of Duncan, who has called out the phony narrative.”
Beach lost his role as Transportation Committee chairman, while Duncan removed Jones from his post as chairman of the Insurance and Labor Committee. Both of the legislators have been removed from these committees entirely, while Brass was moved from his now previous role as chairman of a committee handling the redrawing of district lines to a post at the helm of a banking committee. Among other plaintiffs, Beach signed onto what the Journal-Constitution described as a “vast federal lawsuit alleging election misdoings in Georgia and several other states,” which named Duncan among the defendants.
Election deniers in the Georgia state Senate have been stripped of their chairmanships: Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan demoted three Republican senators who backed attempts to overturn the presidential vote over baseless allegations of irregularities. https://t.co/JALO0CRXGe
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 14, 2021
Trump and his allies have repeatedly targeted Georgia, where Biden won, in the aftermath of the presidential election. Trump has personally complained about Duncan and Governor Brian Kemp, a fellow Republican, insisting that these leaders have essentially capitulated to an imaginary election-rigging scheme that the soon-to-be ex-president alleged swung the election to Biden. Although he’s made a show of calling for no violence in the aftermath of a deadly riot at the Capitol last week that unfolded under the pretense of his lies about the election, Trump has failed to publicly conclusively acknowledge the fact that Biden’s win was legitimate. He’s still pushing these lies.
In response to his role in inciting the recent Capitol violence, the Democrat-led House impeached Trump for a second time on Wednesday, formally charging him with inciting an insurrection. Ten House Republicans voted in favor of impeachment. Rather than overtly defending the president’s actions, many House Republicans who voted against impeachment complained that the effort would be divisive for the country, failing to meaningfully acknowledge the fact that genuine unity would be difficult — to say the least — without basic accountability.
