Urgent Termination Of Josh Hawley & Ted Cruz’s Senate Committee Seats Requested

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Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) are continuing to face serious pushback after their role in inciting the deadly rioting at the U.S. Capitol building earlier this month. On January 6, a mob of Trump supporters violently stormed into the Capitol, where Congress was gathered while working through the process of formally certifying the electoral college outcome — a process that the Trump supporters were trying to stop. Hawley and Cruz were among the chief proponents of the unequivocal lie that the outcome of the 2020 presidential election was in any way dubious, and now, the well-established progressive advocacy group known as MoveOn is calling on Senate Democrats, who control the chamber, to keep Hawley and Cruz out of committee seats.

Rahna Epting, the executive director for MoveOn, commented as follows:

‘Elected officials like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and other senators who sought to use their power to promote the big lie to overturn the results of the 2020 election—and who incited a deadly insurrection—have no place in the U.S. Senate and most certainly should not be rewarded for their deadly attacks on democracy with seats leading important committees in the next Congress.’

Currently, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) — who only recently became Senate Majority Leader after the swearing in of two new Democratic Senators from Georgia — is engaged in negotiations with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) over a power-sharing set-up for the Senate. Currently, the chamber is 50-50, and Democrats have control because of Vice President Kamala Harris’s role as a tiebreaker. Epting addressed these ongoing negotiations in her statement, adding as follows:

‘Senate Majority Leader Schumer must work to ensure that any power-sharing agreement with Mitch McConnell keeps these insurrectionist senators from committee positions where they can use their influence to further undermine our democracy. Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and their allies in the Senate must be held accountable for their attacks on our democracy.’

Check out her statement below:

A block from serving on key committees is not the only potential consequence that has emerged for Hawley and Cruz’s actions. Some have even suggested expelling them from Congress, and even Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who is one of the most notably conservative Democrats in the Senate, recently expressed support for that idea.

Predictably, Hawley and Cruz have vehemently complained about the efforts to hold them accountable for their behavior — recently, Hawley insisted that an ethics complaint against him represented Democrats trying to “silence dissent.” In reality, suggesting that Hawley and Cruz merely “dissented” is ridiculous. At the time of their refusal to vote to certify some of Biden’s electoral votes, the security of the 2020 presidential election was not in any way an open question. The results in every single state underwent rigorous and comprehensive examination. In contrast, Cruz and Hawley pushed a politically expedient fantasy version of reality that gave a rhetorical cover to violent rioters.