A big shout out to Rep Tom Emmer (R-MN) for at least initially pushing to do the right thing, according to journalists Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin:
McCarthy’s reaction was similar. Burns and Martin wrote that in a phone call on January 10, McCarthy said he planned to call Trump and recommend that he resign. “What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that and nobody should defend it,” he told a conference call of the Republican leadership. He also said he wished that social media companies would ban certain Republican lawmakers because they were stoking paranoia about the 2020 election. Other leaders, including Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA) and Representative Tom Emmer (R-MN), talked of moving Trump out of the party. [Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American]
Rep Tom Emmer (R-MN)
The problem with the toxic team politics of the Republican Party is that running around and going it on your own appears to be only viable for the far-far-right extremists who are waiting for the Party to continue its mad skid to the right, and not for the folks like Emmer, who, while obviously an extremists to us Minnesotans – who can forget his gubernatorial run of 2010, in which he seemed to think waiters made far too much money – might now be classified as a middle of the roader in today’s MNGOP.
And tomorrow, as too moderate. (I have a friend who was ejected from the MNGOP for being “too moderate” back in the day. These days that friend is a lefty.) The ties that bind in the Republican Party suppress free thought and public debate, and that is much to the detriment of the Party and Country, something Party leaders must take to heart.
So congrats to Rep Emmer for at least making a little bit of noise about doing the right thing.
