Directly calling out his Republican colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) scorched Vladimir Putin’s “cheerleaders” in Congress and urged Americans to stand on the “right side of history.”
Raskin, a member of the House committee investigating the 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, lashed “the very distinguished gentlelady from Georgia” for her comments last month on a radio program in which she blamed Ukraine for being invaded by Russia because it “just kept poking the bear.”
“We have members of Congress who are cheerleaders for Vladimir Putin, and are voices of nothing but defeatism, fatalism and pessimism for democracy in Europe,” Raskin said, “and so they try to distract us with a lot of phony rhetoric about other issues.” He then referenced Greene’s claim that NATO was supporting neo-Nazis in Ukraine, the Kremlin’s own justification for its invasion.
“My friends, we have to decide which side we’re on,” he continued.
Raskin said Americans during World War II did not watch Nazis march down the street in Europe and say there were “very fine people on both sides,” a reference to former President Donald Trump’s comments about the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2019.
“They did not start cheerleading for Mussolini and Hitler and Franco,” he added. “And yet we have people here who go out and speak on the side of Vladimir Putin.”
Raskin and Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) issued a resolution Friday calling for May 4 to be recognized as a “National Day of Reason” in America.
The resolution is a “call to celebrate reason, empirical inquiry, knowledge, facts, and science as the guideposts for democratic progress,” the lawmakers said in a statement.
“Right now, authoritarian despots from Moscow to Mar-a-Lago are promoting conspiracy theories, bigotry and propaganda to undermine the habits of critical thinking and logical reasoning that are central to our democracy,” said Raskin. “We need to combat the flood of disinformation and lies in order to restore truth and reason to their rightful place in our democracy.”
