If Republican Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina is known to national audiences at all, it’s probably because of a striking spelling error: Three years ago, he urged the Trump White House to impose martial law on the United States, but the GOP congressman’s message referred to “Marshall Law.”
With the benefit of hindsight, does the right-wing lawmaker have any regrets? As The Daily Beast noted, Norman would change one thing.
Just over three years later, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Norman if he would have liked to have done things differently. The answer, apparently, was not really. “You were urging the White House to use the U.S. military to prevent the peaceful transfer of power,” Collins said. “Do you regret sending that message?” Norman, who was one of nearly 150 Republicans in Congress who voted to reject the 2020 presidential election results, wasn’t apologetic.
“The only thing I regret: I misspelled ‘martial law,’” he said.
In case anyone needs a refresher, it was on Jan. 17, 2021 — 11 days after the attack on the Capitol, and three days before Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration — when Norman reached out to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in apparent desperation.
“Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of no return in saving our Republic !!” the congressman texted. “Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!”
When the messages came to light, Tom Nichols explained in The Atlantic, “This is a member of the U.S. Congress insisting, in a jumble of exclamation points and capital letters, that a sitting president call out the men and women of the United States military to nullify an election and prevent, by force of arms, the constitutional transfer of power. This is sedition, and it is madness.”
This was, by some measures, one of the most radical acts taken by…
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