Author: Common Dreams

Senator Bernie Sanders accused Senate Republicans on March 4 of showing “contempt” for working class Americans after Senator Ron Johnson delayed a vote on President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill by forcing Senate floor staff to read all 628 pages of it out loud. Reading the entire bill could take as long as 10 hours. While claiming that he felt bad for making Senate clerks read the entire bill, Johnson (R-WI) attempted to justify his action by saying that “so often we rush these massive bills that are hundreds, if not thousands, of pages long.” “Nobody has...

The NAACP, Rep. Bennie Thompson, and a leading civil rights law firm on February 16 sued former President Donald Trump, his attorney Rudy Giuliani, and right-wing groups for allegedly conspiring to incite last month’s deadly attack on the United States Capitol. The suit — filed by the civil rights group and the law firm of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia — accuses Trump, Giuliani, the Proud Boys, and Oath Keepers of directly violating the Enforcement Act of 1871 by attempting to prevent Congress from performing its official duties on...

There really is no debating that Trump incited a deadly insurrection riot, no more so than we might debate that the earth is round. And the pending vote to convict or acquit will make clear exactly what the GOP has become. If it was not clear before, the Senate impeachment trial has laid bare and unmasked Republican Party leaders as a group of political cowards who talk tough yet support lawlessness, anti-constitutional mayhem, and anarchy. The barren naked truth, revealed starkly by this trial, is that the Republican Party has no interest in “law and order” or the Constitution....

The U.S. Capitol building was assaulted and occupied on January 6 by an angry and violent insurrectionary mob incited by Donald Trump and his closest family members and cronies. Was it a “coup?” Republican House member Adam Kinzinger said so. Many have called it that. Republican Senator Mitt Romney called it an “insurrection.” Many have used this term as well. We can argue about which terms best apply and how, and also about the moral and legal implications of applying such terms. What is beyond argument is a fact: there was a violent takeover of Congress – the representative...

The far-right siege on the U.S. Capitol has been called “unbelievable,” “shocking,” and “beyond imagination.” And let’s not forget the attacks on statehouses around the nation and all the symbols hate deployed – guillotine, hangman’s noose, confederate and Nazi iconography, though they received far less coverage. I admit I felt shocked, glued to the coverage, waiting for some sort of intervention. It never materialized, five people died, dozens were injured, hundreds feared for their lives for hours under lockdown, and millions across the country were terrorized. Senator Chuck Schumer said January 6, 2021 is a new “day that will...

Pundits desperately searching for a historical analogy for the storming of the U.S. Capitol have seized on August 1814, when the British army burned the Capitol in retaliation for the U.S. assault on the Canadian capital a year earlier. But there’s a more apt comparison. Fifty years later, in July 1864, with the Civil War still raging, a Confederate army came within shooting distance of capturing Washington. Confederate Gen. Jubal Early could see the shining dome of the Capitol “feebly manned,” he later wrote, a mere six miles away. Though troop fatigue, summer heat, and the late arrival of...