Georgia Senate Democratic Caucus leadership wants the chamber to formally condemn last week’s riot at the U.S. Capitol that left at least five people dead.
Senate Democratic Leader Gloria Butler and other members of the caucus’ leadership team filed the legislation Monday that would condemn the “disgraceful actions of right wing violence and sedition” the week after a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol after he falsely claimed the November election had been stolen from them.
The resolution is unlikely to go far in the Republican-controlled chamber.
In recent weeks, committees in the House and Senate aired Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. And before last week’s Capitol attack, some Georgia senators wrote to Vice President Mike Pence, asking him to delay congressional certification of the presidential election “to allow for further investigation of fraud, irregularities, and misconduct in Georgia’s election.”
On Tuesday state Sen. Lester Jackson, a Savannah Democrat and a co-sponsor on the resolution, asked the chamber to pause for a moment of silence to remember a U.S. Capitol police officer who was among those who died as a result of the Jan. 6 riot.
And state Sen. Jen Jordan, an Atlanta Democrat and a co-sponsor of Senate Resolution 5, accused some of her Republican Senate colleagues of “aiding and abetting the spread of disinformation.”
“This body must reckon with its role in the attempts to subvert this election,” Jordan said. “I often see people say ‘that’s not who we are.’ The problem is, it is. It was. But it doesn’t have to be.”
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