US Congressman and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise joined Newell Tuesday morning to discuss impeachment, the inauguration, the January 6th attack on the Capitol and more.
“Obviously volatile times in Washington DC right now,” Newell began. “You wrote this op-ed for the Wall Street Journal… tell us how you sum up everything that’s gone on over the last week.”
“Tensions have been high for a few months now, and this has been a divided nation for some time,” Scalise said. “What you saw at the Capitol was an insurrection. Once you’re attacking cops and breaking windows, you aren’t protesting, you’re breaking the law. Those people need to be held accountable. There’s still a lot of tension here… you see National Guard troops everywhere. The whole District of Columbia is on high alert. I think it’s important that the inauguration tomorrow be carried out smoothly, and I think it will be. But we’re a divided nation and we need to be focused on toning down the rhetoric on all sides. That’s not helping.”
“There’s a move afoot by both Democrats and Republicans to assign blame,” Newell said. “But there’s a marked difference as to how we are looking at the events of January 6th. I’ve said all along that looking at this in a vacuum is very shortsighted, and those people aren’t being honest with themselves. How much blame should be laid on the process that was taking place in Congress that day, and whether or not the election could be overturned? I called this a flawed tactic - I wouldn’t even call it a strategy - by many Republicans.”
“These challenges have been done for years and years but are not successful,” Scalise said. “But at the end of the day, what you’re saying is correct, this has been building up a long time. January 6th was not an isolated incident. Millions of people are disgusted by what happened that day, but equally angry about what we saw last summer, when you had violence in so many cities, burning down cities, killing cops, killing civilians - and there was no outcry on the left. The double standard has been on display. But some people only called out what happened two weeks ago, and encouraged what happened over the summer. You can’t have it both ways. You’ve got to be against violence at all times. There were some people condoning violence over the summer who now want to have this righteous indignation and asking how we got here. How do you think we got here, when you were encouraging it on one side of the aisle? You can’t encourage it on either side, and that’s what I was trying to say with my Wall Street Journal op-ed.”
“I’m just curious as to why Republicans didn’t call out the President and others around him when he was saying they could overthrow the election,” Newell continued. “I know historically we’ve had challenges to the certification by both parties - but that’s not what was being said here. So much so that they put the Vice President in a box and had people believing that he had the sole authority to throw out this election - why didn’t more people come forward to say that’s not going to happen?”
“I never said it was going to happen - as a matter of fact, I agree that the Vice President didn’t have that role,” Scalise answered. “The Constitution lays out the Vice President’s role, he is essentially a bursar who counts the certificates handed to him. There’s a law going back to the 1800’s that gives Congress a different role, and maybe it’s time to revisit that law that puts Congress in a position to say, did this state follow their election laws? Pennsylvania is the most egregious example. Every Republican president this century has been challenged by Democrats under that law, and nobody called it insurrection. Let’s be consistent. But again, the Vice President never had a role to play other than the one he did.”
Hear the entire interview in the audio player below.
