Did Rubio and Cruz change their minds about J6?
Commenter “Niketas Choniates” asks:
If Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, just to name three from the top of my head, have repudiated their earlier remarks on what J6 was and what legal consequences should happen to those who participated, I haven’t yet seen it.
Like I said above, plenty of Republicans piled on to the J6 narrative. I’m not counting the never-Trump ones, of course.
Cruz:
“The January 6 terrorist attack on the Capitol was a dark moment in our nation’s history, and I fully support the ongoing law enforcement investigations into anyone involved. Everyone who attacked the Capitol must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and brought to justice. I also support the Senate committees of jurisdiction who are exercising their proper oversight roles to provide an in-depth and complete account of the attack. With multiple investigations already underway, I do not support the politically motivated January 6 Commission led by Sen. Schumer and Speaker Pelosi.”Rubio:
“The events that we saw this week should sicken every single one of us. The mob violence like the kind you see in third world countries happened, not just in America, but in your Capitol building. I don’t care what hat they wear or what banner they’re carrying, riots should be rejected by everyone every single time.”
Here’s what Rubio said about it approximately a year later, on 2/9/2022, calling it a “violent riot” but explicitly disagreeing with the idea that it was any sort of insurrection. And he called the J6 committee a “complete partisan scam,” among other things.
In 1/22, a year after the attack, Cruz took back his earlier statements:
The Texas Republican attempted to clarify his intent on FOX News program “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” calling his own words “sloppy” and “frankly dumb.” Cruz insisted he was referring only to the rioters who attacked police during the breach of the historic building.
“For a decade, I have referred to people who violently assault police officers as terrorists. I’ve done so over and over and over again,” Cruz said Thursday. …
Cruz said he understood why people were angry at his use of the word “terrorist” but insisted that he would never use the same word that “Democrats and the corporate media have so politicized” to describe the “patriots” that were at the Capitol that day to protest the results of the presidential election.
At the time of the breach, Cruz argued, he was asking for Congress to investigate potential voter fraud in accordance with the law.
“It would be ridiculous for me to be saying that the people standing up and protesting to follow the law were somehow terrorists,” he said. “I was talking about people who commit violence against cops.”
Democrats and the media, Cruz said, “are trying to paint everyone as a terrorist, and it’s a lie.”
In August of 2021, Cruz also criticized the prosecution of many of the J6 participants:
Republican Senator Ted Cruz is under fire for arguing that some participants in the Capitol riot should be spared prosecution.
Mr Cruz told HuffPost that people who “assaulted a police officer” should spend “a long, long time in jail”, but balked at criminal charges for participants who entered the Capitol but did not harm anyone.
“If, on the other hand, the Biden administration is targeting and persecuting people for exercising political speech that is nonviolent and simply expressing their peaceful support for a political party different from that in power, that is not the purpose of our criminal justice system,” he said. …
In June, Mr Cruz and Senator Tommy Tuberville sent a letter to US Attorney General Merrick Garland complaining that Capitol rioters are facing harsher treatment than people who protested during the George Floyd demonstrations in 2020.
“DOJ’s apparent unwillingness to punish these individuals who allegedly committed crimes during the spring and summer 2020 protests stands in stark contrast to the harsher treatment of the individuals charged in connection with the January 6, 2021 breach of the US Capitol,” the duo wrote.
As for Graham, as far as I can tell he’s never taken back what he’d said.
Repeating what I said on the other thread:
To me it looks like both Cruz and Rubio are not really “taking back” anything, and are applying their words retrospectively for the people at the Capitol on J6 who were in their judgement genuinely violent. I have no idea what either of them think the proportion of peaceful to violent protest was or if their views on that have changed.
Note Cruz’s words “I was talking about people who commit violence against cops”, implying he thinks some people were doing that. In what you call Rubio’s “pushback” he says it was “It was a riot. It was a dangerous riot. It was a violent one. It should have never happened and it should never happen again.” He was also saying that it just didn’t rise to “insurrection”, contra Mitch McConnell, another Republican who piled on at the time: “It was a violent insurrection with the purpose of trying to prevent a peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election.”
Both have consistently been against the politicized investigation of J6, but both also appear to be consistently of the opinion that there really was a violent riot at the Capitol that day.
And of course the reality is there is a huge middle ground between “everyone there was trying to overthrow the government” and “nobody there did anything wrong”, with everyone drawing the “truth”/”lie” distinction in a different place. I think it would be hard to show that there was no violence from the protesters whatever, but I do think the “insurrection” narrative is an exaggeration.
Good that Rubio and Cruz moderated their views in some way in at least somewhat for at least some of the people in J6.
I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what happened. But mention the phrase “violent riot” and the visions that pop into my head are more along the lines of the George Floyd riots or the Rodney King riots or the riots in L.A. when ICE came to town last June.
Likewise I can’t pretend to know who did or did not do what on J6, but my money says Pelosi was involved somehow in the response. She’s not the sort to put herself in a position where she could be held accountable for anything, but there are plenty of people in DC who she could make life very difficult for if they do not do what she tells them to.
@Sgt. Joe Friday:the riots in L.A. when ICE came to town last June.
Interesting you say this. Lots of people in LA say there wasn’t anything that rose to the level of “riots”. Somebody put together words and images to make it seem as there was one, and maybe there was, but was there really one and how do we know?
I’ve also seen some pretty bad stuff in Oakland that never made more than local news.
Work occasionally takes me into downtown Seattle and nothing I see there corresponds to anything I hear on blogs about what downtown Seattle is like these days; most of my colleagues go into the downtown office every day and they see nothing worth talking about. The places to avoid are the same places they ever were; are they really worse, who goes there to check who isn’t buying drugs? And plenty of people were telling me in the CHAZ days that the reports about Capitol Hill were enormously exaggerated. Were they lying? They were there, I wasn’t, how would I know? I know that I don’t see everything that happens in downtown Seattle but bloggers and blog commenters in other states telling me it’s Mad Max sure in hell don’t see it for themselves. (I do think it’s somewhat worse than it was ten years ago and definitely there’s a movement toward Bellevue and other cities in the area where things are better.)
We have much the same problem with January 6. Things happened. In principle, we can determine what those things were. But the argument is really about what to call it.
Rubio and Cruz have been consistently saying that something bad happened there for which some people should have been punished, but they’ve also been saying it wasn’t as bad as others say it was and I’m sure they agree that some people have been punished all out of proportion to anything they did. Who knows how much they saw themselves, since the Senators were all evacuated.
What about violence which was instigated (police firing pepperballs without warning into a peaceful crowd)? How many of the acts of violence were done by undercover police/military or Antifa/rent-a thugs? What about the kid glove treatment of Ray Epps?
The problem is that the violence was egged on by hundreds of undercover FBI agents and that the capital police incited violence by attacking protestors.
The only people who died that day were Trump supporters, one of whom was clearly murdered and another appears to have been murdered by police.
Interesting you say this. Lots of people in LA say there wasn’t anything that rose to the level of “riots”. Somebody put together words and images to make it seem as there was one, and maybe there was, but was there really one and how do we know?
The videos make it clear that there were immigration riots in LA. It was no doubt only in certain parts of town. The fact all of LA wasn’t engulfed in riots doesn’t mean they didn’t happen.
Just as an example, there is clear video of where the rioters were dropping rocks and bricks on CHP trapping them on the 101 below an overpass.
https://abc7.com/post/lasd-releases-new-photos-suspects-accused-throwing-large-rocks-chp-officers-duringanti-ice-protests-los-angeles/18273901/
That’s clearly a riot.
There’s a spectrum of ways to characterize J6. I can understand Cruz and Rubio shading their words words one way before Trump and another way after Trump.
I don’t admire them for it, but I’m not going to bother about it either.
@Don:The videos make it clear that there were immigration riots in LA
The videos that someone selected to publish and you happened to see shows that there were some people doing some rioting at that time, and the same can be said for J6. But was the “rioting” around the ICE raids unusual for that area, or the kind of thing you see after a ball game?
LA Rams fans LOOT and RIOT after team’s Super Bowl victory: Fan is shot and troublemakers destroy their own city
That’s where we get into “what are people calling it”. For J6 there’s tons of “riot” video. There’s also video of people walking quietly within the velvet ropes. Which is representative of what “really” happened? I can’t say of my personal knowledge, I wasn’t there, and even if I had been I might have seen the wrong things.
I can’t tell you of my own knowledge how much or less worse the 2022 Superbowl “rioting” in LA was compared to the ICE “rioting”. All I can tell is how much people online are talking about it and what they are calling it. This is an ongoing problem in trying to figure out what of what we see in the news and online is even “real” in the sense of matching how important it is and what kind of thing it is.
Wait until you see the riots tonight in Minneapolis after the shooting there today.
Just one more shovelful of the crap we’ve been fed since (and before) 9/11. Gets tiresome after a while, eh? Boring almost. Maybe that’s the intent. Buy tar, rope, and ammo; hot times a’comin.
The problem is that J6 was a “shades of gray” sort of thing, and yet folks on both sides of the issue try to treat it as black and white. Actually, Rubio and, to a lesser extent, Cruz seem to be some of the few who acknowledge the shades of gray.
Contra Trump and his sycophants, there was a riot on J6. There was violence against law enforcement on J6. That was deeply, deeply wrong and remains a stain on the right and the GOP. Pretending that there was no riot or that the rioters were somehow justified is silly, wrong, and terrible politics.
Contra the sycophants on the left, it was abusive and wrong for the Biden administration to prosecute every individual who so much as set foot in the capital.
Contra the sycophants on the left, there are still legitimate questions about why there wasn’t adequate security at the capital and the extent of the FBI activities in the crowd.
Cruz comes off as a little more weaselly than Rubio, but it seems to me that they’re both (mostly) consistent and just dealing with a complicated, nuanced situation where no one else appears willing to see shades of gray.
Politics!
Contra Trump and his sycophants, there was a riot on J6. There was violence against law enforcement on J6.
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One police officer suffered a stroke some hours later. Several others committed suicide over the next several days, for whatever reasons they had. No, the J6 rioters were not responsible for that.
no it wasn’t shdes of gray, almost all the exculpatory evidence, about waterbuffalo guy, about the tear gas fired into the peaceful crowd, was left out of the story, there were two men, who were fraudulently accused of attacking an officer, no evidence was presented,
did the tear gas cause the stroke, what trauma did they face, that caused them to commit suicide, thats still dubious to me, then you have the provocateurs, name escapes me, which kinzinger and co, came to the defense of, even though he urged them to enter the capital, the day before,
January 6th, proved for many, that the rule of law went dorment, if not died under this combination, not only for the ones killed that day, but those that committed suicide, in the years after, because of the draconian charges,
for all of Tucker’s recent catastrophic choices recently, one cannot deny, that he really went the extra mile in pursuing this case, when most everyone else had given up the ghosr, same for julie kelly, who should have received multiple pulitzers for her research, and the johnnie come latelies, now attack her, for this or that perceived flaw
the fact that neither rubio nor cruz, my paisans, cannot reflect on their errors as other have done, is not a credit to them, others have thought things through
@ huxley > “I can understand Cruz and Rubio shading their words words one way before Trump and another way after Trump.”
Trump 2016 or Trump 2024?
Remember: Trump dissed both of them severely in the 2016 primary.
I don’t remember what Rubio did after the election, but Cruz swallowed his pride and buckled down to support the MAGA agenda in 2016-2020, and IIRC commended Trump when he earned it.
So, neither of them was really FOND of Trump in January 2021, but Cruz was still working on his side to present some of the arguments for pausing the election certification.
NOW, they are both sold on MAGA, which means working to push Trump’s agenda, and perforce their POV on things has changed, leading to different “shading” of their words in re Trump himself.
However, as I said on another thread, I think both of them (and many others) gave a knee-jerk response the day of and shortly after J6, based on the videos being broadcast, because the Senators did not personally see anything while in the building and then being evacuated.
I would have preferred a little more “Let’s wait and see all the evidence before drawing conclusions about anything.”
But that sounds “weaselly”, doesn’t it?
The seventy-two hour rule is good for bloggers & commenters, but high officials and news “stars” usually have to produce a response sooner than that.
Sometimes they get it wrong.
@AesopFan:I think both of them (and many others) gave a knee-jerk response the day of and shortly after J6… The seventy-two hour rule is good for bloggers & commenters, high officials and news “stars” usually have to produce a response sooner than that.
What I linked to from Cruz was from May 2021, which is about 3000 hours later, not less than 72. Still up on his website today, I just checked. (Don’t take my word for it, click the link and check it yourself, keep me honest.)
Checking neo’s posts on J6 I found lots of stuff questioning that narrative dating from well before Cruz’s statement of May 28, 2021. Either at that time Cruz knew less than neo was able to find out–or he knew more, which I think is a bit more likely. If by May his information was less complete, that was his choice, considering his position.
More than one person here besides myself has said it, a lot happened on J6 and some protesters were definitely violent that day, even if as the Left says about their own violence it was “mostly peaceful”. But we in the online world have a lot of people applying binary logic to a complex event.
@ Niketas – thanks for the corrections. I should have looked closer at the dates.
Gotta give up my night-owl commenting habit for the New Year!