Oh, to be a blissfully ignorant Republican Senator, unaware–or unwilling to acknowledge–how much damage his Party has done to both individual rights and the Constitution in the United States. And so we give you Republican Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, the man who took a slate of fraudulent electors which was supposed to be given to Vice President Mike Pence on January 6th to give Pence the rationale for tossing out the certified set of electors from Wisconsin and thereby throw the peaceful transfer of power expected by our Constitution into chaos.
In Part I of our clip, Johnson tells a reporter from a local Wisconsin television station that he “had nothing to do with Janaury 6th,” when asked if he was called to testify before the House Select Committee investigating the Republican-led domestic terrorist attack on Congress. Johnson then goes on to detail how he and his staff were part of a scheme to get false electors to Mike Pence, only to have Pence’s staff to stop trying to get Pence involved. (He also notes that either he or someone in his office “destroy[ed]” the document, which could lead to a destruction of evidence investigation.) While Johnson claims he had nothing to do with it, apparently he has a lot of information about the contacts that were made to activate the plan, so yes, apparently he does have some role to play in the plot. (Johnson is not, apparently, very smart.)
The second part of our clip features Johnson assuring the reporter that unlike negating the right for patients to seek an abortion overturned in the Dobbs decision, the right to gay marriage “will never be overturned,” saying it’s “completely different” than the Dobbs decision. While the GOP is reeling for the unexpected massive backlash to overturning Roe–a decades-long effort for conservatives which has been exceptionally unpopular with voters–Johnson claims the fact that overturning the Obergefell decision legalizing gay marriage nationally was safe because it “would affect millions” of people–which could be said of overturning Roe, but Republicans apparently don’t consider pregnant people to be “people.”
Johnson also ignores the plea from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurring opinion in the Dobbs case in which he expressly beseeched conservatives to bring cases to the Supreme Court that would challenge rulings like Obergefell and Griswold, the 1965 ruling that provided the right to birth control, so that Thomas and the other alt-right justices on the Court could destroy more individual rights.