- Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia said the Senate should consider removing its Republican colleagues, Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz.
- Manchin said the 14th Amendment should be applied after Cruz and Hawley advanced efforts to dispute electoral college votes last week.
- Trump supporters stormed the Capitol during a joint session to debate election results, leading to the deaths of five people.
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Senator Joe Manchin said the Senate should consider using the 14th Amendment to remove Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, two Republicans who opposed the Electoral College vote last week.
“This must be taken into account,” said Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, when asked whether the 14th Amendment should be triggered during an interview with PBS’s “Firing Line”.
On January 6, supporters of President Donald Trump violated the United States Capitol and clashed with law enforcement, interrupting the joint session of Congress as legislators debated challenges to electoral votes.
Critics have asked senators to step down and blame them for the five deaths that occurred as a result of the siege of the Capitol.
The House has since accused Trump on charges of inciting an insurrection. The Senate will soon pass a judgment and vote whether the president will be convicted.
Democratic MP Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez previously said that Cruz and Hawley’s support for electoral challenges, which stemmed from President Donald Trump’s baseless allegations of mass electoral fraud, helped to inspire the crowd that looted and destroyed the Capitol.
“Sen. Cruz, you must accept responsibility for how your cowardly and selfish actions contributed to the deaths of four people yesterday. And how you raised funds for this mutiny. You and Senator Hawley must step down. If you don’t, the Senate must move to his expulsion, “said Ocasio-Cortez.
Manchin also said earlier that senators were to blame for the violence.
“There is no way they are not complicit in this,” he said. “That they think they can go away and say, ‘Did I just exercise my right as a senator?’ Especially after we got back here and after they saw what happened. “
He added: “I don’t know how you can live with yourself now, knowing that people have lost their lives.”
The 14th Amendment says that no lawmaker in office “should engage in insurrection or rebellion against him, or give help or comfort to his enemies. But Congress can, by a two-thirds vote in each House, remove that deficiency “.
Many Republicans abandoned their plans to dispute the results of the elections after the violence, but Hawley and Cruz moved forward in an effort that would have been futile but earned them points with Trump’s base.
Earlier this week, Democratic advisers also told The Hill that some senators were also considering censoring Cruz and Hawley. Although censorship did not remove them from office, it could seriously undermine their political aspirations.