Rachel Maddow on Monday mocked the ignorance on display by Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) in the form of a text he sent then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Jan. 17, 2021 telling him to urge President Donald Trump to invoke “Marshall Law.”
The misspelling of “martial law,” the MSNBC host joked, occurred as if Norman “thinks there’s a Marshalls law and maybe also a Ross Dress for Less law, [and] possibly a TJ Maxx law that can be invoked as well.”
“What he means is martial law,” Maddow continued. “‘Martial’ as in suspend the Constitution and put the military in charge to rule by force.”
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Norman’s text was one of a batch that Meadows handed over to the House Jan. 6 committee and which were published Monday by Talking Points Memo. The messages about overturning the 2020 election, which Meadows exchanged with nearly three dozen Republican members of Congress, are “rife with links to far-right websites, questionable legal theories, violent rhetoric, and advocacy for authoritarian power grabs,” TPM noted.
Norman’s full text, sent three days before Joe Biden took office, mentioned voting machine company Dominion, which ended up filing a $1.6 billion lawsuit against Fox News for airing discredited conspiracy theories.
“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 !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!” Norman wrote.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Norman wasn’t the only Republican in Congress who botched a reference to martial law while communicating with Meadows; Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene also misspelled it.
“In our private chat with only Members, several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call for Marshall law,” she texted Trump’s chief of staff the same day as Norman, CNN reported in April. In February, Greene drew widespread mockery for confusing a type of soup with the Nazis’ secret police force, having said “gazpacho” instead of “Gestapo.”
