First, he needs to answer for what he did at Trump’s January 6 insurrection
By
Will Collette
Price
served 8 years in the State House and accomplished nothing. Seriously, nothing
– and go look it up if you want
to prove me wrong.
What
Price did manage to do was embarrass himself, his district and the state of
Rhode Island with his radical, Q-Anon style rantings about guns, conspiracies
and just about every other far-right meme and cliché. And he was an active
participant in the January 6 insurrection.
District
39 encompasses Richmond, Hopkinton and Exeter. It tends to be slightly more
conservative than the rest of Rhode Island. Price thinks this is why he should
run, telling WPRI “I think it [District 39]
should be represented by someone that’s conservative.”
Further, he told WPRI “after watching my opponent [incumbent
Megan Cotter] that ultimately won with a close margin, watching her, and what
she’s doing while she’s up there and who she’s aligned with up there.”
What Megan is “doing up there” in the State House is working hard for the 39th District with a special emphasis on protecting the
land and people of her district.
In
her announcement for re-election, Megan highlighted
funding for a van for Wood River Health, increasing access to affordable health
care, bringing legislative grants in for non-profits in her district, and
creating a Forest Management Commission,
which she chairs.
That commission is addressing problems like the sharp uptick in
wildfires in South County and clear-cutting woods for commercial-sized solar
installations, rather than using more appropriate locations.
According to the official state Legislative Tracker, Megan worked on 130 bills and
resolutions this year.
Justin Price’s crowning achievement in his 8 years was to create a
special legislative commission to study “chem-trails.” That’s a right-wing
conspiracy theory that some nefarious villains are putting mind-altering
chemicals into jet contrails. I could find no record of this commission
actually meeting or issuing any findings.
Nonetheless, Price told WPRI his priorities would be to focus on “representing
my district” and “Focus on bringing the issues from my district up to
the State House.” Except he did none of that in his prior eight years in
office.
Use the Legislative Tracker to
look up Price’s “achievements.” The last legislation he worked on as a minor (5th) co-sponsor
was a resolution congratulating
Charlestown’s former state rep. Blake “Flip” Filippi on his “service.”
Incidentally, state Republicans gave Price the second-highest vote total in the April 2 Presidential preference primary sending him to the Republican National Convention as a delegate for Trump.
Unanswered questions about his role in Jan. 6 insurrection
Price
admitted he was there along with what he claimed were “the other 1 million people” though
the official estimate is less than 15,000 on the Capitol grounds of whom 2,000
actually stormed the building.
Price claimed he did not enter the Capitol,
though he has not disclosed his actual location. However, just being on the Capitol
grounds that day means that Price admits to breaching police security lines set back a block
or more from the actual Capitol grounds. That is a federal crime.
Price has not – at least not yet – drawn enough
attention from the FBI to join the more than 1,200 who
have been charged, though there’s still time. Around 900 of Price’s fellow
insurrectionists have either been convicted or pleaded guilty. Only two were
judged “not guilty.”
There is no actual Antifa organization and no
uniforms, logos or other identifying marks – unlike the Oathkeepers, Proud Boys
and other insurrectionists we all saw with our own eyes storming the capital,
using chemical sprays, clubs, rocks and even American flags to beat Capitol and
DC Police. The MAGA myths about who stormed the Capitol have been thoroughly debunked.
Then there’s a problem of simple logic: why would
people that Price identified as Antifa want to storm the Capitol to block the
election of Joe Biden?
More
importantly, Price needs to reconcile his repeated oaths to “defend the
Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic” with what he did on
January 6. He took that oath as a United States Marine and again as a Rhode
Island State legislator.
The
US Constitution, 14th Amendment, Section 3 states in whole:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
It
was clearly a violation of his oaths for Price to have crossed police lines to
join in the storming of the Capitol.
I
hope RI Secretary of State Greg Amore will bar Price from running when by his
own admission, he committed acts on January 6 that exactly fit the kind of
person the 14th Amendment is intended to disbar.
Further,
if we are to believe his claim that he saw Antifa mounting the attack, WTF did
he do about it? Are we to believe that he simply watched “Antifa” beating the
police and then smashing into the Capitol and did nothing?
Why
didn't he help the DC and Capitol Police as his oath to “protect and defend” required? Well, either he lied when he claimed he
saw Antifa attack the Capitol, or he was simply afraid of getting hurt.
Either
way, there's nothing to be proud of. Unless your name is Justin Price and your
political legacy amounts to nothing, and you want to be consistent. Mission
accomplished.