Remember what Hawley did:https://t.co/jIAUFdNimD

— Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) January 6, 2021

Tony Messenger writes:

Former U.S. Sen. John C. Danforth saw a mob of rioters take over the Senate chamber where he had spent much of his professional life. The dean of the Missouri Republican Party was a member of the Senate between 1976 and 1995.

“That place,” he said of the Senate, “is very familiar to me. To see it under attack was awful. It was unimaginable.”

Like the rest of the world, Danforth was shocked as rioters — some waving Confederate flags, all of them supporters of President Donald Trump who believed his lies that the election had been stolen from him — laid siege to the U.S. Capitol, stopping Congress in its tracks as it performed the generally pro forma process of recording the state-by-state Electoral College votes.

The process was anything but normal this year, however, because Sen. Josh Hawley, the junior senator from Missouri, followed by other senators and dozens of House members, decided to object to approval of the votes in a move that fed baseless conspiracy theories that the election was rigged. Before the insurrection against the Capitol, after Hawley, a Republican, had become the first senator to announce plans to seek to overturn the election of President-elect Joe Biden, Danforth criticized his protégé, a fellow Yale Law School graduate.

He called Hawley’s plan “radical” and dangerous.

Now, after the attack on the American election and the siege by rioters that left four people dead, Danforth has even stronger words.

“Supporting Josh and trying so hard to get him elected to the Senate was the worst mistake I ever made in my life,” Danforth said in a phone interview Thursday afternoon. “Yesterday was the physical culmination of the long attempt (by Hawley and others) to foment a lack of public confidence in our democratic system. It is very dangerous to America to continue pushing this idea that government doesn’t work and that voting was fraudulent.” [Continue reading…]