GOP Senator Ron Johnson just made a complete fool of himself
The bill to give statehood to Washington DC faces long odds in the Senate, as Republicans are desperate to paint the entire move as a power grab and because they don’t really care for its overwhelmingly Democratic population of voters, despite the fact that they had no qualms with adding five new states over a century ago, as it increased their odds of having (and keeping) 10 new Republican senators. They’ve used some fairly stupid arguments so far to try and argue their case for why a city with a population bigger than Wyoming or Vermont doesn’t deserve statehood – like the false claim that the city doesn’t have any car dealerships – but then Ron Johnson decided to go there and say the quiet part out loud.
He decided to press D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser – interrupting her response to another question – on the protests of police brutality from last summer, asking if the city had assessed a value to the property damage that occurred, and what methods of geolocation they used to track down the offenders after they left the city. His mistake was bringing up asking specifically whether they used geolocation the same way officials did with January 6 – as Johnson’s already been caught making idiotic remarks to defend the insurrectionists from that day.
“I’m glad to hear that you’re opposed to riotous behavior, whether it happened on 16th Street, or here at the Capitol,” said Bowser. From there, the wind was clearly taken out of his sails, as he exposed his own ignorance about how DC processes arrestees which is different due to its lack of statehood. The time has come to make DC a state and to push racist numbskulls like Johnson out of office, and we have that chance in 2022.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making