Jandos Rothstein
In the days following the insurrection at the Capitol, the consequences were relatively swift. Hundreds of rioters were rounded up by law enforcement, and within a week the president was impeached for a second time. But a deeper form of accountability was also taking hold, in the form of social and professional censure.
The Trump Organization has lost contracts and vendors. Key inciters like Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) may lose their legal and educational credentials. House Republicans who voted to object to the election results have also been shunned. Corporate donations to those held responsible have all but stopped. Those with ties to sedition are being ushered out of polite society.
Conservatives have derided these responses as “cancel culture.” In the midst of an impeachment, Republicans—instead of reckoning with the danger within their ranks—are shouting that they are being censored. QAnon-friendly freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) sported a face mask with the word “CENSORED” across it while speaking against impeachment on the House floor on Wednesday, broadcast on several national TV channels.
But the backlash is at least in part the consequence of an unreliable system of legal accountability for the powerful and well-connected. The public has little belief that Trump will actually be jailed or even removed from office for inciting a riot, let alone his allies in Congress. His legal team has been allowed to lie in court with impunity. In an environment with unequal justice, the only reliable and possibly long-lasting consequences come from social sanction.
“The condemnation of the people responsible for last week’s violent insurrection must be swift, uniform, and pervasive in all corridors of our civic life,” New York Congressman Mondaire Jones told the Prospect in an interview. “It’s why people who have honorary degrees need to see those rescinded. It’s why lawyers need to have their law licenses revoked after the criminality we saw last week and the criminality we’ve seen over the last four years.”
These forms of accountability are coming primarily from elites—corporate executives, alumni of elite universities, professional golf associations. But they’re acting because of their own reputations among the public, and the desire to disassociate themselves from those undermining the government. The push is from below, even if it looks like it’s coming from above. And in the absence of a functioning legal system to hold powerful people responsible, it’s just about the only accountability available.
FOR EXAMPLE, JONES and Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) wrote a letter to the New York State Bar calling for the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to be disbarred. Giuliani called for “trial by combat” at the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Capitol Riot, and has been at the forefront of attempts to undermine a fair election. Within days, the association announced a historic inquiry into Giuliani’s membership.
“I’ve had concerns for some time as it was reported about him going from court to court and state to state bringing cases and challenging the election results without any proof,” said Scott Karson, president of the New York State Bar Association (NYSBA).
Karson explained that the NYSBA’s committee on discipline will interrogate the claims against Giuliani. Should the committee expel him, that would not actually disbar him in New York state, as the bar association has voluntary membership. The NYSBA can only make recommendations to disbar him, which are then taken up by state court. At other state bar associations, expulsion from the association is equivalent to disbarment.
The same day as the NYSBA’s announcement, state Sen. Brad Hoylman, chair of the state Senate’s Judiciary Committee, made a formal request to begin the process of stripping Giuliani of his law license.
Should any lawyer be charged and convicted of a crime, he or she would be immediately disbarred. But without criminal charges as of yet, professional and social censure has filled the gap.
A petition calling for the disbarment of Cruz and Hawley, authored by seven third-year Yale Law students, surpassed 11,000 signatures in less than a week. Notables include former Wisconsin senator and president of the American Constitution Society Russ Feingold, activist and lawyer Ady Barkan, activist Valarie Kaur, University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck, federal judge H. Lee Sarokin, and Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush.
One of the petition’s authors, Jenny Choi, said that the response has mostly been from active lawyers, not law students.
“We thought that it would be egregious for there not to be a statement, a clear statement from the legal profession, that this sort of behavior is not acceptable,” she said. “This is not a political issue as I think some people were trying to spin it. I think we would have done exactly the same thing had Democratic senators done the same thing.”
The floodgates of social consequence have opened wide.
Rep. Jones, a graduate of Harvard Law School, said he also supports disbarring Sens. Cruz and Hawley for their role in last week’s insurrection, adding that they “need to be doing lengthy sentences in federal prison.” Jones has also co-sponsored Missouri Rep. Cori Bush’s legislation to investigate and expel members of Congress for inciting the insurrection.
“I want people to understand that there is a colorable argument that all 140 House Republicans who objected to the certification of the presidential election helped to incite last week’s violence and that those people need to be expelled,” Jones said.
Though there hasn’t been institutional condemnation from Cruz and Hawley’s undergraduate and graduate alma maters, censure from their peers has been loud. More than 400 members of Sen. Ted Cruz’s 1992 Princeton class have signed a petition condemning him.
While Harvard Law School has taken no action on their alum Cruz, the college’s Institute of Politics did remove Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-NY), a 2006 graduate of Harvard College, from their advisory committee because she publicly lied about voter fraud and voted against certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
Ryan Enos, a Harvard government professor, believes that public pressure for the university to take a stand impacted Harvard’s decision to remove Stefanik. Enos also wrote a letter to Harvard’s president, Lawrence Bacow, asking the university to make clear that people who helped foment this insurrection are not welcome at Harvard. Bacow wrote back to Enos favorably, but did not commit to anything.
“Harvard in particular is an incredibly politicized place, if you will. It holds an outsized place in American culture because everybody points to it as an example of what they’ll hate and love for various reasons,” Enos said. “We need leadership right now … If Harvard takes a step, I think that other places will probably follow.”
Several honorary degrees have been quickly recovered. Middlebury College and Vermont College have revoked Rudy Giuliani’s degrees, and Lehigh University and Wagner College have revoked honorary degrees to Trump. The president still retains two honorary degrees from Liberty University.
Social media companies, after four years, have also made it more difficult to spread Trump’s message. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, Twitch, and (belatedly) YouTube have banned Trump from their platforms.
Judd Legum of the Substack newsletter Popular Information called 144 companies to ask if their support to Republican members of Congress would be affected by their objections to certifying the Electoral College vote. Marriott, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Commerce Bank said they would suspend PAC contributions, and the next day dozens of other companies followed suit. Popular Information also reported that Facebook, Lyft, and DoorDash would suspend contributions to the Republican Attorneys General Association, which helped put on the “Stop the Steal” rally. Dozens of other companies have said they will stop any political donations in light of the January 6 insurrection, or that the Capitol Riot will factor into future donations from their companies’ PACs.
(This is something of a clever dodge, as corporate PAC donations pale in comparison to donations to conservative dark-money super PACs from corporate executives, which show no sign of stopping.)
Deutsche Bank, which had previously been Trump’s main lender, has said it will refrain from any future business with the president. Signature Bank, another Trump lender, has also cut off the relationship. Stripe, an online payment processing company, has announced it will no longer process payments to the Trump campaign, and Shopify took away Trump’s online campaign store. Most “gutting” to Trump, The New York Times reported, was the PGA’s announcement that it was pulling the 2022 PGA Championship from the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
A reckoning within journalism about whose word to take as truth has also occurred.
THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME Trump and his lackeys have faced personal and social backlash. Trump’s hotels previously lost major corporate conferences after his racist and xenophobic remarks. But this is a different moment from when Sarah Huckabee Sanders was booed out of a Virginia restaurant and requires a bright line. The floodgates of social consequence have opened wide.
“This is an unprecedented moment in our nation that comes with great risk,” Enos said. “We all need to look around and say if our government can’t solve that problem, then we need to say we’re going to reject them and you will not be welcome.” Enos warned that without consequence, it will happen again.
While social repercussions may not be the most important response to the Capitol Riot, they are meaningful, if only because they strip away a form of legitimacy. “One thing people that study politics in other countries will tell you is that when there’s a battle for control at times like this, the time that they know they’re losing is when elites have turned against them,” Enos points out. Cruz and Hawley may mock institutions like Harvard and Yale, but at the same time, they revel in the power and prestige their credentials confer upon them. This also helps explain why people stormed the Capitol: They were following elites like Hawley and Cruz and Trump.
Activists involved in social accountability recognize the limitations of their efforts. “I think disbarment is an incredibly important thing to happen and should definitely happen, but it’s far from the most important thing or most urgent thing right now,” Choi said, adding that impeachment and criminal charges are more critical. “We are calling for disbarment because we think that the behavior that the senators engaged in was antithetical to the role that lawyers play in an imperfect democracy.”
A reckoning within journalism about whose word to take as truth has also occurred. The day after the Capitol Riot, Forbes released a statement condemning those who enabled Trump’s insurrection. “The easiest way to do that, from where I sit, is to create repercussions for those who don’t follow the civic norms,” wrote Randall Lane, Forbes’s chief content officer. “Let it be known to the business world: Hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists above, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie.”
Wednesday’s bipartisan impeachment of President Trump was swift, but lame-duck Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is poised to prevent similarly hasty action in the Senate. So in the meantime, organizations, universities, companies, and others are stepping into the void.
“We live in a world, we live in a country where, due to the Fox News propaganda machine and numerous cowards in the Republican Party,” Rep. Jones said, “people have been able to get away with great violence in terms of politics and dangerous rhetoric without consequence. The response in furthering accountability must be to alter the daily lives of these people so that they are deterred from ever putting us in harm’s way again and violating their sacred oath to the American people again.”
