Senator Lindsey Graham warned on Sunday that if Republicans take control of the House of Representatives in next year’s midterm elections, Vice President Kamala Harris could face impeachment for her tweet supporting a bailout fund for Black protesters. Matter lives during the summer.
Speaking in an interview on “Fox News Sunday”, the day after the US Senate acquitted President Trump, the South Carolina Republican said the former president’s impeachment trial, brought on because of the violent rebellions on Capitol Hill in January 6, “opened Pandora’s Box”
“If you use this model, I don’t know how Kamala Harris will not be impeached if Republicans take over the House, because it really helped the protesters …,” Graham said of the former California senator from Oakland. “So, we opened Pandora’s box here and I’m sad for the country.”
Like many pro-Trump Republicans, Graham appeared to be equating the deadly siege of the U.S. Capitol last month with last summer’s protests for racial injustice, two very different events rooted in opposite movements.
On June 1, Harris tweeted a link to a fundraiser for the Minnesota Freedom Fund and asked his followers to help pay bail for protesters in the city after outrage over the death of George Floyd by the police. The video captured the incident in which Floyd, who was black, gasped, handcuffed to the floor, while an officer pressed a knee to his neck on May 25.
The Black Lives Matter movement demands an end to the systemic racism that often disproportionately takes the lives of blacks. Small fragments of last year’s national protests included violence, but the movement was largely peaceful – although scenes of looting and fires have caught the attention of the media and the public. A recent Princeton University study said that 93% of the 7,760 demonstrations linked to the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 were peaceful.
Capitol riots by Trump supporters aimed to overturn a free election by attacking an American institution and took the lives of five people, including a police officer. Trump supporters appeared at his request to “fight like hell” after he claimed more than once that he had fraudulently lost the election, spawning numerous conspiracy theories.
Some Republicans have drawn a false equivalence between the two events. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia focused on violence in last summer’s civil rights protests during the House’s impeachment procedures.
Graham talked about the possibility of Harris’ impeachment earlier, bringing the issue up earlier this month in an interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity. The senator’s office did not return requests for comment.
Shwanika Narayan is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @shwanika Instagram: @shwanika