Tom Cotton: we need to crack down on violent protestors, except for the MAGA ones who tried to overthrow the government
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Paging Frank Wilhoit. Frank Wilhoit to the courtesy phone:
Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican who is a contender to be former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate, on Sunday described left-wing protesters as “street militias” who had not been prosecuted enough. He also said that prosecutors were unfairly charging “every grandma and MAGA hat who was within a country mile of the Capitol” on Jan. 6, 2021.
As Mr. Cotton was interviewed on CNN, Senator Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican who is also a vice-presidential contender, made similar arguments on ABC News. With less inflammatory phrasing than Cotton used, he distinguished violent Jan. 6 rioters who should be imprisoned from people who “came into the Capitol because the doors were open,” while also calling Democrats weak on crime.
Elsewhere in the vice-presidential fash-off, J.D. Vance explains to Ross Douthat that Trump successfully performing an autogolpe would have been fine because we know he would have left office in 2024:
Even under a circumstance where the alternative-electors thing works, and he’s president again, he would have served four years and retired and enjoyed his life and played golf. The idea that this sets off a sequence where Donald Trump becomes the dictator of America is completely preposterous. He was using the constitutional procedures. Now, your argument is that he was using them ineffectively, or maybe even illegitimately, but he was trying to take a constitutional process to its natural conclusion.
“Take a constitutional process to its natural conclusions” is a well of a way of saying “threatening the vice president to try to coerce him to accept a phony set of electors to allow the losing candidate to remain in power.” But the 22nd Amendment, he would totally respect, and if he “interprets” it as not applying specifically to him you can bet that Peter Thiel’s fake-Appalachian messenger boy will be right there to explain why this is just an ordinary example of constitutional discourse by noted respecter of legal formalities Donald Trump.