Former President Barack Obama said Monday during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper that it is cause for concern that the Republican Party “cowed” to former President Donald Trump’s claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election by passing restrictive voting laws.
Obama said, “I think we have to worry when one of our major political parties is willing to embrace a way of thinking about our democracy that would be unrecognizable and unacceptable even five years ago or a decade ago. When you look at some of the laws that are being passed at the state legislative level where legislators are basically saying we are going to take away the certification of election process from civil servants, secretary of states, people who are just counting ballots, partisan legislatures who may or may not decide a states electoral votes should go to one person or another. And when that’s all done against the backdrop of large numbers of Republicans having been convinced wrongly that there was something fishy about the last election, we’ve got a problem.”
He continued, “I thought that there were enough guardrails institutionally that even after Trump was elected that you would have the so-called Republican establishment who would say okay, you know, it’s a problem if the White House isn’t — doesn’t seem to be concerned about Russian meddling, or it’s a problem if we have a president who is saying neo-Nazis are marching in Charlottesville, there are good people on both sides.”
Obama added, “The degree to which we did not see that Republican establishment say hold on, time out, that’s not acceptable. That’s not who we are but rather be cowed into accepting and then finally culminating on January 6 where what originally was ‘Oh, don’t worry, this isn’t going in where. We’re just letting Trump and others vent.’, Then suddenly you now have large portions of an elected Congress going along with the falsehood.”
He concluded, “I didn’t expect that there would be so few people who say well, well I don’t mind losing my office because this is too important. America is too important.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.