US Representative Katie Porter was a guest on Bill Maher's show. Porter, a well-known defender of truth, was still nearly struck dumbfounded by Piers Morgan's attempts to compare an armed insurrectionist mob storming the nation's capitol to members of a state legislature demanding their right to be heard. When Porter recovers from her split-second bafflement, she backs Morgan down beautifully.
Porter is one of three brilliant congresspeople in California who are running for a soon-to-be-vacated Senate seat, and she is selling a recent book. I understand why she is on this kind of show with such a troll, and I am glad she holds her ground.
After Maher bemoaned them using a bullhorn inside the well of the legislature, Morgan chimed in with this:
MORGAN: And interrupted the proceedings which, of course, when that happened on January the 6th in a much larger and more violent way, all the people currently cheering on the two Tennessee legislators were the ones who would have been condemning and castigating what happened —
Which Porter rightfully jumped on:PORTER: You're not actually comparing.
MORGAN: No, no, I'm not.
MAHER: That's a crazy —
PORTER: You actually did just compare.
MORGAN: No, no. Here is what I'm comparing. When you have a mob of protesters and they're going into a legislative chamber, whether it's at the Capitol or whether it's in Tennessee, the principle is the same. And if you don't have the same principle response to both of those things, regardless of scale, the principle —
PORTER: Listen, the principle is different. They were Tennessee legislature — legislators who went into the chamber and admittedly broke the rules of decorum partly because they were being silenced when they wanted to talk following the rules of decorum about gun violence prevention.
What happened on January 6th was a bunch of crazy (bleep) with guns. You can't police people.
MORGAN: Yes.
PORTER: That is not the same.
