Senator Hirono just shamed a Republican’s lone vote to allow more hate crimes

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Scott speaks with Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI) about her new book “Heart of Fire: An immigrant daughter’s story” which chronicles her humble beginnings that led to her five-decade career in public service. Her fight to protect the vulnerable recently culminated in getting the typically obstructed Senate to pass her bill making it illegal to commit hate crimes against persons of Asian-American and Pacific Island (AAPI) descent, like herself.

Surprisingly, Senator Hirono revealed that some of her Republican colleagues believed that her hate crimes legislation could have gone further in criminalizing racial violence, but she saved her clearest disdain for the junior senator from Missouri. But it’s not unusual for the now-outspoken Sen. Hirono to express her true feelings after years of adapting to the fight against the Republican party’s war against democracy, which Sen. Hawley has come to emblemize through his encouragement of the January 6th MAGA insurrection.

“Trump had been setting the stage for challenging the election results,” she explained about the conspiracy theory that led to an armed mob ripping into the Senate moments after she fled to safety. “And he had said very clearly that if he doesn’t win it’s because there’s fraud and the elections and the, he just set the stage before the elections. And then during the elections, he kept up with what I call everyone calls a ‘big lie’ that this election was going to be stolen from him. And of course, when the results came that he became even more vocal, he and his supporters have mounted so many losses. Dozens of losses. Most of which I think they were either kicked out of court or they withdrew.”

“Who can’t remember Rudy Giuliani going before the judge and not be able to articulate why they were even in court?”

“So [Trump] proceeded with a ‘big lie,’ [which] convinced a lot of people in our country that they shouldn’t have been stolen,” Sen. Hirono told us. “And the aftermath of all that is that there are still a lot of state legislators who support Trump, who are very Republican. Well, it doesn’t even matter because they’ve gerrymandered themselves probably, and they are proceeding to suppress people’s votes, basically stealing people’s votes from over 200 laws that are being considered to make it much, much harder to vote. A case in point is of course what the Georgia legislature did.

“And so it continues, the ‘big lie,'” lamented the junior senator from Hawai’i about the GOP’s wave of voter suppression laws. “The continuing efforts to steal people’s votes by making it much, much harder to vote. And that is why we Democrats, and others, need to fight back.”

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