Kansas, Missouri reps insist we didn’t all watch as Donald Trump led an insurrection | Opinion

Tracey Mann isn’t telling the truth. Neither are Mark Alford and Eric Burlison.

The three men — from Kansas and Missouri, respectively — are all Republicans, all members of the U.S. House of Representatives. And all three this week signed onto an effort by Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz (by far the smarmiest member of Congress) to keep Donald Trump on the presidential ballot this November.

That’s bad enough in and of itself. But it’s the how that really sticks in the craw.

The how is a lie.

Here is what is going on: Gaetz — along with 60 Republican co-sponsoring, including our three area congressmen — has introduced a resolution flat-out denying that Trump is an insurrectionist.

“Resolved,” the proposed resolution states: “That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that former President Donald J. Trump did not engage in insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or give aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

Nope. Sorry. Not true.

What’s going on here is obvious. On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing the notorious case in which Colorado officials — having decided that Trump did engage in insurrection in the days and weeks culminating in the disgraceful Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — decided he is constitutionally ineligible to be president.

The proposed resolution is a rather public but informal friend-of-the-court brief, a way of putting their thumbs on the judicial scale while justices weigh the facts and their options.

“It’s not the job of the states, and especially not the job of some bureaucrats in Colorado, to make this assessment and interfere with the rights of voters to cast their vote for the candidate of their choice,” Gaetz said at a Tuesday news conference.

You know what? Fair. There are a lot of smart, non-insurrectionist folks who think preemptively preventing Trump from appearing on the ballot is a bad, antidemocratic idea — that the problem of Trumpism is a political problem that can be solved only by soundly defeating Trump on Election Day.

I don’t agree with those points. Trump and his supporters have proven they’ll never accept a defeat, that they’re willing to lie about elections they lose and that they’ll commit violence in pursuit of their goals. Getting Trump off the ballot won’t solve the problems wrought by the forces he has unleashed in American life, but it would solve the immediate problem of Trump possibly being the next president.

Still, those folks have a reasonable argument. What isn’t a good argument: That Trump didn’t actually engage in insurrection.

We all saw it. We saw Trump’s lies about election fraud after the 2020 election.

We saw Trump call for his supporters to gather in Washington, D.C., on the day that Congress was to certify that election for President Joe Biden. We saw Trump tell those supporters that if they didn’t “fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” We saw him send those folks to the Capitol. We saw the chaos and violence they committed.

And we saw Trump’s decision to remain publicly silent for hours while those supporters rampaged.

You’ve heard this story a million times by now. Maybe you’re getting tired of it. But we must insist on repeating these facts over and over because it’s the most important fact about Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy in 2024: He tried to break American democracy. Given another chance, he might well finish the job.

Elected Republicans who have stayed by Trump’s side know this. They can’t claim to love America and its Constitution — can’t claim to be faithful to their oaths of office, really — if they acknowledge those plain truths.

So they resort to utter distortion. Donald Trump didn’t really do the thing you saw him do. It’s their “sense” that he didn’t actually aid and abet insurrection. Which is actually senseless.

The Supreme Court probably will decide that Trump should remain on the ballot. So be it. Just don’t let anybody — not even your congressman — tell you Trump isn’t an insurrectionist. It’s just not true.

Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle Opinion correspondent. He lives in Lawrence with his wife and son. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.