Written by: Heather Cox Richardson
January 6, 2021 (Wednesday)
Today the Confederate flag flew in the United States
Capitol.
This morning, results from the Georgia senatorial runoff
elections showed that Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff had beaten their
Republican opponents—both incumbents—by more than the threshold that would
require a recount. The Senate is now split 50-50 between Republicans and
Democrats, so the position of majority leader goes to a Democrat. Mitch
McConnell, who has bent the government to his will since he took over the
position of majority leader in 2007, will be replaced.
With the Democrats in control of both Congress and the
Executive Branch, it is reasonable to expect we will see voting rights
legislation, which will doom the current-day Republican Party, depending as it
has on voter suppression to stay in power.
Trump Republicans and McConnell Republicans had just begun
to blame each other for the debacle when Congress began to count the certified
electoral votes from the states to establish that Democrat Joe Biden won the
2020 presidential election. The election was not close—Biden won the popular
vote by more than 7 million votes and the Electoral College by 306 to 232—but
Trump contends that he won the election in a landslide and “fraud” made Biden
the winner.
Trump has never had a case. His campaign filed and either
lost or had dismissed 62 out of 63 lawsuits because it could produce no
evidence for any of its wild accusations. Nonetheless, radical lawmakers
courted Trump’s base by echoing Trump’s charges, then tried to argue that the
fact voters no longer trusted the vote was reason to contest the certified
votes.
More than 100 members of the House announced they would
object to counting the votes of certain states. About 13 senators, led by Josh
Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX), agreed to join them. The move would slow
down the count as each chamber would have to debate and take a separate vote on
whether to accept the state votes, but the objectors never had anywhere near
the votes they needed to make their objections stick.
So Trump turned to pressuring Vice President Mike Pence, who
would preside over the counting, to throw out the Biden votes. On Monday, Trump
tweeted that “the Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen
electors.” This would throw the blame for the loss onto Pence, but the vice
president has no constitutional power to do any such thing, and this morning he
made that clear in a statement. Trump then tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the
courage to do what should have been done.”
It seemed clear that the voting would be heated, but it was
also clear that most of the lawmakers opposing the count were posturing to
court Trump’s base for future elections. Congress would count Biden’s win.
But Trump had urged his supporters for weeks to descend on
Washington, D.C., to stop what he insisted was the stealing of the election.
They did so and, this morning, began to congregate near the Capitol, where the
counting would take place. As he passed them on the east side of the Capitol,
Hawley raised a power fist.
In the middle of the day, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani spoke
to the crowd, telling them: “Let’s have trial by combat.” Trump followed, lying
that he had won the election and saying “we are going to have to fight much
harder.” He warned that Pence had better “come through for us, and if he
doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country.” He warned that Chinese-driven
socialists are taking over the country. And he told them to march on Congress
to “save our democracy.”
As rioters took Trump at his word, Congress was counting the
votes alphabetically by state. When they got to Arizona, Senator Ted Cruz
(R-TX) stood up to echo the rhetoric radicals had been using to discredit the
certified votes, saying that public distrust in the election—created out of
thin air by Republicans—justified an investigation.
Within an hour, a violent mob stormed the Capitol and Cruz,
along with the rest of the lawmakers, was rushed to safety (four quick-thinking
staffers brought along the electoral ballots, in their ceremonial boxes). As
the rioters broke in, police shot and killed one of them: Ashli Babbitt, an Air
Force veteran from San Diego, QAnon believer, and staunch Trump supporter. The
insurrectionists broke into the Senate chamber, where one was photographed on
the dais of the Senate, shirtless and wearing a bull costume that revealed a
white supremacist tattoo on his abdomen. They roamed the Capitol looking for
Pence and other lawmakers they considered enemies. Not finding them, they ransacked
offices. One rioter photographed himself sitting at House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi’s desk with his feet on it.
They carried with them the Confederate flag.
Capitol police provided little obstruction, apparently eager
to avoid confrontations that could be used as propaganda on social media. The
intruders seemed a little surprised at their success, taking selfies and
wandering around like tourists. One stole a lectern.
As the White House, the FBI, the Justice Department, and the
Department of Homeland Security all remained silent, President-Elect Joe Biden
spoke to cameras urging calm and calling on Trump to tell his supporters to go
home. But CNN White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins later reported that she
spoke to White House officials who were “genuinely freaked… out” that Trump was
“borderline enthusiastic” about the storming of the Capitol because “it meant
the certification was being derailed.”
At 4:17, Trump issued his own video, reiterating his false
claims that he had been cheated of victory. Only then did he conclude with: “Go
home, we love you, you’re very special.” Twitter immediately took the video
down. By nighttime Trump’s Twitter feed seemed to blame his enemies for the
violence the president had incited (although the rhythm of the words did not
sound to me like Trump’s own usual cadence): “These are the things and events
that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously
& viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly &
unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this
day forever!”
Twitter took down the tweet and banned the president for at
least twelve hours for inciting violence; Facebook and Instagram followed suit.
As the afternoon wore on, police found two pipe bombs near
the headquarters of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic
National Committee in Washington, D.C., as well as a truck full of weapons and
ammunition, and mobs gathered at statehouses across the country, including in
Kansas, Ohio, Minnesota, California, and Georgia.
By 5:00, acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller
issued a statement saying he had conferred with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff Mark Milley, Vice President Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA),
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and Representative Steny Hoyer
(D-MD) and had fully activated the D.C. National Guard.
He did not mention the president.
By late evening, Washington, D.C., police chief Robert J.
Contee III announced that at least 52 people had been arrested and 14 law
enforcement officers injured. A total of four people died, including one who
died of a heart attack and one who tased themself.
White House Counsel Pat Cipollone urged people to stay away
from Trump to limit their chances of being prosecuted for treason under the
Sedition Act. By midnight, four staffers had resigned, as well as Deputy
National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger, with other, higher level officials
also talking about leaving. Even Trump adviser Stephen Miller admitted it was a
bad day. Quickly, pro-Trump media began to insist that the attack was a
false-flag operation of “Antifa,” despite the selfies and videos posted by
known right-wing agitators, and the fact that Trump had invited, incited, and
praised them.
Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis laid the blame for
today’s attack squarely at the feet of Trump himself: “Today’s violent assault
on our Capitol, and effort to subjugate American democracy by mob rule, was
fomented by Mr. Trump. His use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our
election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by
pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in
cowardice.”
The attempted coup drew condemnation from all but the
radical Trump supporters in government. Former President George W. Bush issued
a statement “on insurrection at the Capitol,” saying “it is a sickening and
heartbreaking sight.” “I am appalled by the reckless behavior of some political
leaders since the election,” he said, and accused such leaders of enflaming the
rioters with lies and false hopes. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) was more direct:
“What happened here today was an insurrection incited by the President of the
United States.”
Across the country tonight are calls for Trump’s removal
through the 25th amendment, impeachment, or resignation. The Democrats on the
House Judiciary Committee have joined the chorus, writing to Pence urging him
to invoke the 25th. Angry at Trump’s sabotaging of the Georgia elections in
addition to the attack on our democracy, prominent Republicans are rumored to
be doing the same.
At 8:00, heavily armed guards escorted the lawmakers back to
the Capitol, thoroughly scrubbed by janitors, where the senators and
representatives resumed their counting of the certified votes. The events of
the afternoon had broken some of the Republicans away from their determination
to challenge the votes. Fourteen Republican senators had announced they would
object to counting the certified votes from Arizona; in the evening count the
number dropped to six: Cruz (R-TX), Hawley (R-MO), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS),
John Kennedy (R-LA), Roger Marshall (R-KS), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).
In the House, 121 Republicans, more than half the Republican
caucus, voted to throw out Biden’s electors from Arizona. As in the Senate,
they lost when 303 Representatives voted in favor.
Six senators and more than half of the House Republicans
backed an attempt to overthrow our government, in favor of a man caught on tape
just four days ago trying to strong-arm a state election official into
falsifying the election results.
Today the Confederate flag flew in the United States
Capitol.
---
EDIT AT 12:00 on January 7: The symbol on the abdomen of the
rioter on the Senate dais is a religious symbol that has been appropriated by
white supremacists, not the Ku Klux Klan specifically, as I wrote originally. I
apologize for the error.
