Rep. Dan Crenshaw, On Break From Punching Antifa Cars, Cries That Impeachment Will Cause Division

He says we need de-escalation now.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted 232-197 in favor of impeaching Donald Trump for a second time, with 10 Republicans joining all of the Democrats in voting for it. Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw was one of those voting against it — by proxy . Which is interesting since he was just saying very recently that voting by proxy, a thing Democrats wanted to allow because pandemic , was for cowards.

Back in April, Crenshaw explained this position on Facebook:

I will NEVER support proxy or remote voting.America is looking to its representatives to act like LEADERS with courage, not spineless sheep in hiding. We ask our grocers to work, our truckers to drive, and our nurses to risk their lives. Congress can show up to VOTE.

That sure is a thing that would make a lot of sense ... to someone who can't quite grasp the notion that going out a lot doesn't just risk your life but the lives of others.

Rep. Crenshaw, along with co-signers Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC), and Rep. John Curtis (R-UT), issued a statement explaining why they were voting against impeachment, though not why Crenshaw voted by proxy, like a "spineless sheep."

We can’t ignore the President’s behavior leading up to the violence in the Capitol last week. He bears enormous res… https: //t.co/oYlORQOn8R

— Dan Crenshaw (@Dan Crenshaw) 1610571122.0 

Graciously, they admitted that some of the things Trump said and attempted to get people to do on his behalf were bad .

President Trump publicly pressured Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress to accept the demonstrably unconstitutional idea that the Vice President has unilateral authority to ignore the sole slate of electors sent to Congress from each of the states of this Union and to declare who would be President of the United States. He did so leading up to, and during, a massively attended rally which he called for and encouraged.

Moreover, the event was deliberately scheduled to take place at the precise moment at which members of Congress were meeting to carry out our Constitutional duty to count those very electoral votes. This pressure campaign whipped many of those present into a frenzy that contributed, in part, to the assault on the Capitol resulting in the deaths of several American citizens, including at least one Capitol Hill Police Officer.

Therefore, we condemn the President for the words and actions which contributed to these events, and encourage every member of Congress to similarly condemn. While we do not venture to make legal judgement of the president's intent regarding Wednesday's demonstration, his actions were reckless. No President should ever, among other things, promote clearly unconstitutional theories that risk the stability of our nation and, in particular, do so to the detriment of the peaceful transition of power.

How gracious! But can you guess who is worse? Surprise! It is Democrats who aren't considering the messed up shit he pulled soberly enough.

Unfortunately, rather than conducting a sober review of the facts through hearings and establishing the legal standards under which we would review all that transpired, our Democrat colleagues are rushing impeachment articles through the House of Representatives. Meanwhile, some are beginning to target members of Congress with blanket threats of censure that are void of specific examples to justify a censure vote.

Taking these paths undermine due process as established in the Constitution and inflames an already starkly divided nation by politicizing what should be a serious and thoughtful bipartisan review.

Naturally.

Voting to impeach the President seven days before his departure from office serves little purpose given the Senate will not be able to hold a trial by that time and risks establishing this impeachment as politically motivated. Furthermore, the articles are flawed, charging crimes that are lacking the requisite element of intent. For these reasons and others, we will not be voting for these articles of impeachment despite our strong belief the President's actions were wrong.

Above all, we condemn last week's actions. But we also must denounce this rushed proposed reaction because we seek to stop the division inherent in our current politics. Now is not the time for political maneuvers that offer no remedy to the problems facing our Republic. A tree is known by its fruit, and this effort will bear nothing but further conflict and division.

We must tone down the rhetoric and calm the tensions, something that impeachment will not achieve.
Donald Trump is leaving the oval office next week no matter what. Let our legacy be that we rebuild our nation by moving forward together.

Wow, what a truly beautiful rendition of Kumbaya . Can't we all just get along? Give peace a chance? Get over all the conflict and division and allow the temperature to drop?

It's very interesting the way Crenshaw is coming to this opinion so suddenly after Trump lost the election and then attempted a coup so that he could stay in office. He clearly had no problems with conflict and division and escalating tensions last month when he released this completely batshit video in which he pretends he is some kind of superhero coming to save the world/Georgia from "radical leftists" ... like Jon Ossoff! And also two people who are nothing alike in any way except for being women of color — ridiculously edited versions of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Kamala Harris!

The culmination of this video is a scene in which he literally jumps out of a plane, lands on a car with two guys we are to assume are antifa activists and then ... punches through their windshield. Because of how he is so tough and bad ass.

Crenshaw has had absolutely no qualms about escalating tensions and sowing division and all of that nonsense. There is no question that he does not give a shit about them now. What he and the others clutching their pearls are doing is counting on Democrats taking the bait and then leaving them alone so that they can continue scaring the pants off of their constituents and coddling their longstanding party belief that they can overthrow the government any time they like. That's your "tree of liberty watered with the blood of tyrants," and your "Second Amendment solution."

 
 Giphy 

This is a gambit that very likely would have worked 10 or more years ago. Now, it's not such a safe bet.

The irony here is that for Republicans like Crenshaw, walking this line isn't going to save them with Trump voters. The only way they're going to keep the Trump voters is by being as unapologetically, unequivocally pro-Trump, pro-armed-militants-storming-the-Capitol as it possible to be. They will accept nothing less. A vote saying "Don't impeach but also what Trump did was wrong and bad" is, to them, the exact same thing as voting to impeach. They hate establishment Republicans almost as much as they hate Democrats, sometimes more.

Given what we've all been through in the last couple of weeks — never mind the last four years — if Republicans actually want "unity," if they want to "de-escalate," they're the ones who need to do the work here. They're the ones who need to be making the grand gestures and the sacrifices and doing all the bipartisanship. Efforts by Democrats to appease Republicans have, historically, not actually resulted in any diminishing of tensions (and usually end up being used against them, by Republicans, later on), so it's going to have to be up to the Right to calm their people down.

[ Dan Crenshaw ]

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