Democratic Sen. Bob Casey (PA) said on Monday night that Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (TX) and Josh Hawley (MO) should at the very least be censured for their efforts to undermine democracy that culminated in a deadly riot on the U.S. Capitol last month.
“I think at a minimum — at a minimum — there should be censure,” Casey told CNN’s Don Lemon in an interview Monday night.
Dem Sen. Bob Casey says "at a minimum" GOP Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz "should be censured."
Hawley and Cruz are facing an ethics complaint filed by Dems to investigate how their objections to the Electoral College votes on January 6 may have contributed to the Capitol riot. pic.twitter.com/w9VCqBTlcT
— CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) February 9, 2021
Casey asserted that the Senate’s recent history has seen instances of censure “for offenses or infractions that were a lot less severe than I think both senators engaged in.”
“At a bare minimum there should be a censure of both of those senators,” he said.
The comments come as the two senators who orchestrated an effort to undermine President Joe Biden’s electoral victory on Jan. 6, are now expected to serve as jurors tasked with determining whether or not to convict former President Donald Trump in a Senate impeachment trial beginning on Tuesday. A vote to convict, though, would likely lend credence to criticism against the senators as co-conspirators in Trump’s antidemocratic charade.
Last month, a group of Senate Democrats requested an ethics probe into the two lawmakers’ role in an objection effort to Biden’s Electoral College votes in Pennsylvania and Arizona that Democratic lawmakers said “lent legitimacy” to the violent mob of pro-Trump supporters that laid siege on the Capitol.
Hawley and Cruz have both shrugged responsibility for their role in perpetuating election falsehoods in the months following Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential race.
“To coin a phrase, I think it’s time to move on,” Cruz told Fox News’ Sean Hannity during an interview less than a month after the incident.
“It’s time to move on and focus on helping people get back to work, helping people beat this global pandemic, bringing America back to where we should be, not these partisan games the Democrats are playing,” he said.
Hawley also sought to distract from his own role in the Capitol siege’s provocation calling the probe a “flagrant attempt to exact partisan revenge.”