The very notion of the "Stop the Steal" campaign was to overturn the results of a United States election on known-false pretenses. It was a call for a coup. The intent was an overthrow of elected government and the reappointment of Donald Trump as new leader regardless of the election's outcome, and was intended to either intimidate lawmakers into allowing that outcome or to remove whatever opposition needed to be removed to secure it.
It would remain a call for a coup even if the resulting crowd had not ransacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to find and execute anti-Trump politicians. You can be assured that every American who associated themselves with something called "Stop the Steal" intended rebellion. It is possible some were persuaded by hoaxes and propaganda: "Stop the Steal" is that hoax and propaganda. It was intended, from the outset, as a fraud.
Stop the Steal organizer Ali Alexander, a key figure in the now-attempted coup, was kind enough to list out his congressional allies and accomplices in a video released before the violence. I suggest we listen to him.
"I was the person who came up with the January sixth idea with Congressman Gosar, Congressman Mo Brooks, and then Congressman Andy Biggs. We four schemed up of putting max pressure on Congress while they were voting so that who we couldn’t lobby, we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body hearing our loud roar from outside."
That is, of course, quite the gloss on what would soon turn out to be an attempt to exert “max pressure” on Congress by killing the movement’s opponents, and ignores the most pertinent issue: that the entire campaign was based on propaganda, lies, and hoaxes.
Indeed, all three figures named by Alexander promoted, for weeks, known hoaxes to claim that Donald Trump had won the election only to have it stolen from him by imaginary fraud, and all were traitors to their oath and nation long before the Capitol was attacked. Their hoax now has a body count—and one that will likely rise because of their conspiracy.
But they have co-conspirators as well. Dozens.
Rep. Mary Miller was the Republican who extemporaneously quoted Hitler in egging on the soon-to-be-violent crowd.
We can go on, and we should. The metric that should be used for expulsion should be a simple one.
• If a member of Congress advocated for overturning a U.S. election based on fraudulent claims, that member should be expelled.
• If a member of Congress promoted known-false conspiracy theories designed to discredit the U.S. election that were used to justify the violent insurrection against Congress, that member must be removed.
That really is not a hard measure of who should be a lawmaker and who should not. It requires no ideological litmus test. There is no "conservative" or "liberal" label that needs to be applied. Fomenting insurrection by using your office to promote hoaxes discrediting U.S. democracy itself is not an edge case. It does not matter if these members chose to spread sedition-justifying hoaxes because they were incompetent paint-huffing dullards or with explicit intent to deceive; either is sufficient reason to expel them from government service. Any government service.
This will not be easy, because the Republican House and Senate are full of co-conspirators to this attempt to overturn democracy in favor of one-party rule. They have been willing saboteurs who have allied themselves with Trump's criminal acts, who have blocked probes into those acts, who have abided as Trump misled the American people using a torrent of lies and who took up those lies and fascist causes themselves. But it needs to be done. This nation cannot survive if governed by seditionists and traitors. Democracy is already dead if the public can, without consequence, be manipulated into believing whatever hoax their leaders find it most advantageous to push.