CNN tried it.
On Saturday, the 24-hour global news network aired a segment entitled “5 Freshman Congresswomen Who Changed History This Week.” In it, CNN’s Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash spoke with Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia. Collectively the women go by the name the “badasses.”
“I think badasses kind of came organically from the group since we all had either served in the military or in the CIA,” Houlahan told Bash, who began interviewing the friends prior to Nancy Pelosi’s decision to open up an impeachment inquiry into the Trump administration.
At the time the women, who represent traditionally red districts, were against a Trump impeachment. However, after Trump’s phone call to Ukranian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, “The Badasses” say they had to act. The freshman Democrats penned an op-ed in The Washington Post, CNN coined them history makers and Twitter — well Twitter wasn’t buying any of it.
Because contrary to what CNN believes, anybody whose been paying attention to politics since the start of the Trump presidency knows that calls for impeachment started well before these freshman lawmakers were elected into Congress. Maxine Waters, just days after the inauguration, said the “illegitimate President” undermined our democracy and presented a danger to the country. Therefore, he needed to be impeached.
After the 2018 midterms ushered in the most racially diverse group of representatives, four Congresswomen of color, who jointly go by “The Squad,” loudly joined the impeachment chorus. And yet with all the Black and Brown women who have been vocal about impeachment since the start, CNN chose not to sit down with any of them for their story. In fact, the only mention of them was a not-so-subtle shade about the way they conduct themselves in the halls of Congress.
“None of us is ever going to get in a Twitter war with anyone else,” Slotkin told CNN. “If we have a concern with someone, we’re going to go right up and talk to them about it and we’re not going to add unhelpful rhetoric to an already bad tone coming out of Washington.”
Well, Twitter thought the entire CNN piece presented a bad tone, and they certainly weren’t here for what many deemed a “whitewashing” of history. They made that pretty clear.
And even though respected journalist Dan Rather didn’t specifically say he was responding to the CNN story, his words, which came in the aftermath of the segment, pretty much sums up what many people know to be true. “Some of the earliest and strongest calls for impeachment came from women and men of color,” the former CBS Evening News anchor tweeted out on Sunday. “When the history of this period is written their voices of moral clarity must not be diminished.”
Enough said.