After the invasion of Iraq, Americans did not forget that we should not have attacked Iraq. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and posed no threat to the United States or our national security. 

Mistakes were made, and we were misled by our national leaders.

 When NAFTA was signed, creating an expansive trade agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico, then-presidential candidate Ross Perot warned us that the “giant sucking sound” would be American jobs going to Mexico. 

He was correct, and our government failed us in protecting entire American industries. We are still recovering from that national political miscalculation.

 More recently, when President Donald Trump told us that he won the 2020 presidential election and was cheated of his victory, many of us wanted to believe that no American president would lie about an event so crucial to our national integrity, and so wanted to believe Trump.

 But Trump, Fox News and Trump’s congressional supporters, including newly-elected House Speaker Mike Johnson, lied to us, as we now know. 

Trump’s claims were soundly rejected by 62 courts and the Supreme Court. Fox’s claims of election denial by Dominion Voting Systems resulted in a nearly $800 million settlement in favor of Dominion. Disclosed before the settlement were Fox emails acknowledging that Fox knew it was making false claims, but told its viewers what they wanted to hear.

 By 2023, eight of Trump’s election lawyers, who argued election fraud, had been disciplined or lost their licenses to practice law over their unethical conduct of advancing false claims about the 2020 election.

 Even more recently, three of Trump’s election attorneys in an election fraud suit against Trump in Georgia have pleaded guilty to advancing claims they knew to be false in supporting Trump’s election denial claims — Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro. 

Ellis, in her public statement, said her words and actions “undermined the American public’s confidence in the presidential election.”

As egregious as Trump’s lies to remain in office after losing the 2020 election, and as offensive as Trump’s attorneys working in the full knowledge that their actions were in defense of lies, stands the effort of 147 elected Republicans, including eight U.S. senators and 139 House members, to refuse to count the electoral votes on Jan. 6 for President Joe Biden. That pledge was initiated by none other than Speaker Mike Johnson.

 The speaker said, “This is a very weighty decision. All of us have prayed for God’s discernment. I know I’ve prayed for each of you individually.”

Johnson then did his best to overturn the free and fair election of 2020, upending our constitution and ending the peaceful transition of power that has been a hallmark of a free American election.

 We cannot know what Johnson knew then, but we do know that Fox News and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, knew that Trump’s claims were lies, even while they were advancing those claims. Murdoch said that Trump’s claims were “pretty much a crime.” 

We also now know that Trump’s election attorneys knew their client was advancing lies by their own confessions and admissions before the courts they have appeared in while pleading to retain their licenses to practice law.

But we can surmise that any experienced politician would have known that, if there could be no evidence presented to the courts to overturn a stolen election, they would have to concede to their opponent and not reject the people’s vote. 

In that regard, the 2020 election offered no new rationale to reject the winner of 81 million votes. Yet Johnson did exactly that, on literally the eve of Jan. 6, he gathered those 147 signatures, those votes against democracy, fact-free and prayerful.

 Johnson has never reflected on his support for overturning the 2020 election, even after the confession of Fox News and Trump’s attorneys and Trump’s own ongoing legal issues related to his lies about the 2020 election.

 We have not forgotten.

Jim Crawford is a retired educator and political enthusiast living here in the Tri-State.