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 a member of Congress in modern American history. A sitting lawmaker communicated to the White House that he wanted to see the then-president deploy U.S. troops because he didn’t like voters’ choice in an election.
By way of an explanation, Norman said in 2022 that his message “came from a source of frustration.”
Of course, when regular people get frustrated, they might slam a door or become curt with those around them. If a member of Congress, overcome by frustration, privately reaches out to the White House to encourage a sitting president to suspend constitutional order and deploy the military onto American streets, then maybe a career in public service isn’t quite right for him.
Three years after his actions, Norman apparently thinks this is all a big joke. He regrets his poor spelling, not his offense against his own country’s constitutional system of government.
There is no shame. There is no accountability. The South Carolinian apparently believes the political world should simply accept his misconduct and move on — and by and large, that’s precisely what happened.
If there's a defense for this, I can't think of it.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.