Editor's Note: Steve Schmidt is one of the founding members of the Lincoln Project. He is a communications and public affairs strategist who has worked on several Republican campaigns, including John McCain's 2008 bid for the White House, and he is now a regular political contributor to MSNBC. On Saturday, Schmidt released a 5-tweet thread calling for justice in the wake of Wednesday's insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. MaxNewsToday has assembled this thread and reprinted it as one easy-to-read op-ed for our ongoing segment, Schmidt Storm. It has been edited for grammar and clarity.
The first act of the 1st Congress was the establishment of the following Oath for federal officials. “I, _______ do solemnly swear or affirm that I will support the Constitution of the United States.” We do not move on from sedition and anarchy. We face it in America, and we treat it like the cancer it is. We lawfully excise it. We repudiate it. We must be clear-eyed about the monumental catastrophe that has been brought to us all through the dishonesty, greed, corruption, sociopathy, psychopathy of a few thousand people who were able to yield the levers of Executive and Legislative power for a few short years. They created an autocratic movement in a short time and advanced a Confederacy of racial animus, illiberalism, conspiracy theories, junk science and anti-democratic theories that overran the Capitol of the United States and led to the desecration of our greatest secular temple, the People’s House. We stand at an hour of profound national humiliation and shame. We are in an hour of danger. None of this happened providentially. It was incited. It was instigated. It was premeditated. It was organized. It was stoked by the reckless lying, opportunism and cynicism of Josh Hawley, Kevin McCarthy, Ted Cruz and so many others. There must be a reckoning of justice. We cannot stand for this and we will not.