Today there was sworn testimony in a lawsuit brought on behalf of Georgia voters contesting Marjorie Taylor Greene’s right to be on the ballot, as someone who took an oath to defend the Constitution and who then advocated loudly for extra-constitutional remedies to an election she claimed was stolen. The case was brought under section three of the Fourteenth Amendment, which reads:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
The hearing was live streamed to anybody interested in hearing it in real time. I heard about an hour of Marjorie and then the closing arguments of both lawyers. Here are some new things I learned from Marjorie Taylor Greene’s testimony today.
She seems to have a fairly spotty memory for someone her age. She didn’t recall making any of the strong statements she made about the need to stop the peaceful transfer of power. When her own words were played on video she said they were taken out of context, but didn’t elaborate except to call CNN a lying outfit. She swore she had no recollection about people she talked to before or after January 6th because she was very busy running her new Congressional office. Her recollection is particularly poor when it comes to specific contacts of her’s who were arrested for the violent assault on the Capitol.
She says she really has little control over what appears on her Facebook page, or on her Twitter feed. She said she has many staffers and does not directly authorize the videos, even ones that have been on her facebook page for a year-and-a-half, prove good for fundraising (Biden stole Trump’s presidency and the radical left thinks we’re idiots) and are never taken down.
Marjorie believes that socialist liberals are out to portray her as stupid, her followers as not smart people. But she insists her supporters are smart enough to know that when she encourages them to show up in numbers on January 6th to flood the Capitol because it’s a 1776 moment, or that Pelosi and others might need to be executed, and we need you all there to help us right this evil injustice of a stolen election, that she is only referring to a peaceful lawful march to the Capitol to keep the pressure on fainthearted Republicans to legally overturn a stolen election. In other words, free speech. Plus, after the riot was stopped she immediately urged everyone to be peaceful and to obey the law.
I may have missed it, but when she spoke of a planned peaceful march to the Capitol, I thought the lawyer questioning her should have asked her if she was aware that the organizers of the January 6th Stop the Steal protest rally had not sought a permit for any kind of march that day. Why involve all those extra police and spend all that extra money when you can all just march down there as a bunch of individual free citizens and go into the people’s house which you already own and don’t need an invitation to, or permission to enter, even when its closed for a joint session of Congress?
And besides words like “fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore”, or her “we can’t allow the peaceful transfer of power Joe Biden wants” are obviously metaphors meaning be peaceful, don’t insult the police, don’t hit them, gouge their eyes out or spray mace at them, if they tell you the building’s closed obey their lawful orders, and all like that.
And, of course, when she said that Nancy Pelosi had committed treason and that treason was punishable by death, she was a private citizen, in 2019, come on, she was just a regular person trying to get elected to Congress. In other words, she hadn’t taken the oath of office yet, the oath to defend the Constitution, so like are you going to go all the way back to when I was in high school looking for things I said that you can use to crucify me? (her lawyer interjected that bit about going all the way back to high school for compromising comments she made a year or two before the riot) [1].
And what we learned most of all is that she, like Boof Kavanaugh and her party’s raging leader, is the victim of a dark money-funded nefarious witch-hunt campaign, by cannibal pedophiles, no doubt, to bring shame to the people who voted her into office as their duly elected representative. (in the very election that was rigged against Trump!)
In summary, she is merely the victim of enraged, insane partisans trying to stop democracy by taking her off the ballot on some weird and farfetched old legal theory about not helping and encouraging, aiding and comforting, people who want to violently overturn a corrupt and evil election and stop them from “peacefully” putting a monster in the White House.
Her lawyer’s closing focused on the need to look only at the peaceful, lawful rally at the Ellipse that preceded the riot, something that was 100% protected by the Constitution, to wit, the First Amendment rights to free expression and to peacefully assemble, and that it’s not fair to punish someone merely for supposedly aiding and abetting a riot she later tweeted, once it was underway, should be done lawfully and peacefully. In fact, he took pains to read “or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” right out of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Once the briefs are filed next week and the judge has a chance to weigh all the evidence and arguments, this could be a very interesting and helpful case going forward. Brad Raffensberger will then have to weigh the administrative law judge’s decision against his own political future and the number of death threats he recieves before likely leaving Marjorie on the ballot. I found it fascinating to watch how outwardly calmly Marjorie conducted herself during most of the part I saw, Like others before her she preferred to come off as a pinhead with the memory of a housefly rather than truthfully answer almost any question under oath. Her composure was particularly surprising after some of the overheated rants she made on right-wing media in the days leading up to her forced sworn testimony in a baseless case launched, no doubt, by moneyed Jewish space laser wielders and four black elected women she denounced by name in recent “out of context” rants.
[1] from the commies at Business Insider:
“She’s a traitor to our country, she’s guilty of treason,” Greene said of Pelosi in a 2019 Facebook video, according to CNN. “She took an oath to protect American citizens and uphold our laws. And she gives aid and comfort to our enemies who illegally invade our land. That’s what treason is. And by our law representatives and senators can be kicked out and no longer serve in our government. And it’s, uh, it’s a crime punishable by death is what treason is. Nancy Pelosi is guilty of treason.”
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