Congressman Hice should resign

 Because of the boundary lines of Georgia’s vast 10th Congressional District that have made it a Republican bastion, and because the state and national Democratic parties have not made serious attempts to contest the seat, GOP Rep. Jody Hice remains safely entrenched in office and seemingly can continue to hold his title for as long as he so wishes. Whether or not he should, or should even be allowed to, are entirely different questions.

In light of Congressman Hice’s continued echoing of unfounded conspiracy theories, his participation in the perpetuation of the grand myth of rampant voter fraud upon the public and his collaboration in an effort aimed at thwarting the will of the majority of American voters (one of the most blatantly anti-democratic actions by a group of elected officials in this nation’s history), the answer is a resounding “no.”

Hice and others in Congress who chose service to a demagogue over service to their country and its core principles and institutions must summon the necessary self-awareness and moral clarity to resign. If not, the argument certainly can be made that they should be expelled by their colleagues. At a bare minimum, they should be formally censured. And if none of that happens, if they are not held accountable, voters of all political persuasions in their respective congressional districts must choose a different path forward at the ballot box next year.

To this point, there is no evidence that Hice and the majority of those who helped light the flames for the radical, right-wing insurrectionist riot at the U.S. Capitol have done or intend to do any soul-searching over how their dangerous rhetoric fueled the events that transpired in Washington, D.C. — where a maniacal mob stormed a temple to our democracy, murdered a cop, assaulted and injured many others, and came dangerously close to the vice president, House speaker and other members of Congress.

In an opinion piece put out over the weekend titled “Unity at the Crossroads,” Hice takes no responsibility for his shared furtherance of false conspiracy theories that inspired the Trump-incited insurrection. What he does instead is air typical Trumpian grievances. It’s always something else’s fault — the left, the media, the courts, immigrants, you name it. There is no willingness to look inward.

Hice begins with this paragraph:

“America stands at a pivotal crossroads. Many of us have felt the political tensions rising for months. We began 2020 with a baseless, divisive and ultimately unsuccessful impeachment. Before things had even begun to settle, America was hit by the Coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing vast overreach by state and local governments implementing burdensome lockdowns and nonsensical mandates. Then came the Georgie Floyd riots and the extremist ‘Defund the Police’ movement. We ended the year with a hotly contested presidential election that tens of millions of Americans – including myself – believe was riddled with fraud and irregularities.”

Right off the bat, Hice does several things.

•He unintentionally reminds us that congressional Republicans last year, including him, lacked the conviction to hold Donald Trump accountable for a flagrant abuse of power and betrayal of a key U.S. ally and instead demonized those who dared to shine a light on it. He ignores that Trump had already established a clear pattern of this kind of behavior — from his obstruction of and interference with the FBI’s Russia investigation and the Mueller probe, to his obstruction of Congress in the impeachment investigation, to his improper, unethical and quite likely illegal pressuring of Georgia’s secretary of state and other state election officials to overturn the vote count in his favor.

•He then scoffs at the public safety actions taken by governments in response to COVID-19 but cannot bring himself to acknowledge the 400,000 (likely more) Americans, including many in his own district, who have died in the past year — or that many of those deaths occurred as the result of the fecklessness of a president he has kowtowed to, who wasted precious time dismissing the virus as a Democratic hoax and placed the blame for his own administration’s incompetence and lack of preparedness on others.

•He then raises the subject of “the George Floyd riots,” a racially-tinged and mesmerizingly tone-deaf way of describing the legitimate protests by people from all walks of life over the historical systemic mistreatment of Black people and other people of color by law enforcement across the country. This is foreshadowing of what comes later in the piece when he makes a false equivalency between the Jan. 6 insurrection by seditionists and the Black Lives Matter protests. He ignores that the vast majority of those protests, including ones right here in Barrow County, were peaceful, civil and inherently American. He neglects to mention that the overwhelming majority of the real problems, destruction of property and clashes with police in cities across the country came at night, when the peaceful protestors had long since dispersed and those left were not there in the spirit of social justice or advancing desperately-needed conversations. Hice continues with the ludicrous assertion that “the media” and “elected Democrats” were in support of the criminal behavior. He has plenty to say about Black Lives Matter protests, but cannot bring himself to explicitly mention the right-wing violence and domestic terrorism in America over the last quarter-century and how that was what was expressly at work on Jan. 6. His statement that, “I feel no differently about the events of Jan. 6 than I do about the unrest during the summer” belongs in the hall of fame of all-time passive “condemnations.”

All of this above raises questions about whether Hice should continue to represent the 10th District, but none of it inherently warrants his expulsion. What renders him unfit to serve in Congress any longer is his abandonment of his oath to the Constitution by continuing to lend credence to the baseless notion that the election was stolen from Trump, a scam knowingly pushed by Trump on his own supporters. Note that Hice is only concerned with the statewide election results in Georgia and other states that have led to a new, Democratic president — not the ones in his own district that afforded him another two years in office. He didn’t stand up to object to being re-sworn in this month over “concerns” and “belief” that his re-election was “riddled with fraud and irregularities.” Nothing but crickets there.

Hice has joined the prevailing approach by Trump loyalists in Congress, which is to hide behind the fact that “tens of millions of Americans” believe the election wasn’t legitimate and not reckon with what and who fueled that sad and embarrassing level of fact-free, mass delusion. How did Hice come to believe this hysteria? It couldn’t have been from state election officials and other elected leaders in Georgia — Republicans, by the way — who have flatly and repeatedly said and affirmed that Joe Biden was the fair and legitimate winner in Georgia and that there was no widespread fraud. So why does he believe all of this crap that has been peddled by the far right and Trumpland? Does he even believe it?

Does he honestly believe, as he again insinuates in his piece, that “antifa” infiltrated the crowd Trump supporters and were behind the violence at the Capitol? Has he just ignored or been incapable of understanding the videos of the siege and hearing and reading the insurrectionists’ own words from court proceedings and social media — that they felt compelled by Donald Trump to do what they did? Or is he just intentionally gas-lighting people out of cynical political motivation? These are questions that every one of his constituents should be asking him.

The only remorse that Hice seems to feel in his opinion piece for giving oxygen to dangerous conspiracy theories that activated whack jobs is that his and others’ Jan. 6 efforts to challenge Georgia’s presidential election results went nowhere. He and others didn’t get the chance to further waste everyone’s time with a deluge of reckless falsehoods because appointed Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler — a night after losing her election bid — looked at the chaos and five deaths wrought by the insurrection that day, the literal blood spilled on the floor of the Capitol building hours earlier, and correctly calculated that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to continue elevating such insanity.

Hice does not even attempt to apologize for his since-deleted “1776 moment” tweet on Jan. 6, which his office flimsily excused. Instead, he bemoans “the radical platform of Socialism and Marxism that has seeped into our politics.”

He finishes with this: “No matter how ferocious the debates become, we must remain peaceful and abide by the rule of law – and we must use every legal means to stop the rising tide of Socialism and Marxism. That is how we win. That is how we preserve our Republic.”

In fact, how we preserve the republic, how we uphold our traditions and democratic norms, is by recognizing that well over 100 representatives in the House and a handful in the Senate sought to completely discard the voices of the majority of Americans in subservience to a wannabe autocrat — and by understanding fully how perilously close we remain to true fascism in America. That stain cannot be left unattended to. The only possible chance at achieving the “unity” Hice and other Republicans in Congress half-heartedly speak of (You can’t call for “unity” and simultaneously not acknowledge the winner of the election without equivocation) is to hold people accountable for their actions — not to simply “move on” with no consequences.

It is extremely unlikely that the House and Senate both would reach the two-thirds consensus necessary to constitutionally expel from office the members of Congress who have come under fire. With that reality in mind, this moment calls for Hice to find it within his conscience to resign, and there should be a special election held to replace him.

Either way it goes, this district, this state and this country deserve far better than what we have been getting. The people of the 10th District should demand it.

—

Scott Thompson is editor of The Barrow News-Journal. He can be reached at sthompson@barrownewsjournal.com.