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“U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday vowed to hold accountable anyone involved in last year's deadly Capitol attack by former President Donald Trump's supporters and said the Justice Department's work on the matter is far from done… The [Justice] department has charged more than 725 people with crimes arising from the riot ranging from disorderly conduct to assaulting police to conspiracy. Of those people, about 165 have pleaded guilty and at least 70 have been sentenced.” Reuters
“Sen. Joe Manchin sounded a skeptical note Tuesday about the prospects of easing the Senate’s filibuster rules, raising doubts about whether he will provide crucial support to the Democrats’ renewed push for voting legislation they say is needed to protect democracy… Manchin’s skepticism comes just one day after Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced the Senate will vote soon on easing the filibuster rules.” AP News
Here’s our recent coverage of the Jan. 6 commission. The Flip Side
The right argues that the events of January 6 are being exaggerated and used as an excuse to push longstanding Democratic policy priorities.
“Democrats and their mainstream media allies express dismay, if not alarm, over a poll that shows 58 percent of Republicans don’t believe Joe Biden was elected legitimately. However, Byron York points out that in the Fall of 2017, the same pollster found that 67 percent of Democrats said Trump was not legitimately elected…
“It wasn’t just rank-and-file Democrats who wouldn’t accept the result of the 2016 presidential election. A number of Democratic congressmen objected to the tally of Electoral College votes. One of them was my congressman, Jamie Raskin, an influential member of the Dem caucus who led the second Trump impeachment…
“To his credit, then-vice president Biden wasn’t having it. But neither was then-vice president Pence in 2021. 2017 wasn’t the first time modern-day Democrats tried to obstruct the certification of a Republican presidential victory. In 2005, Sen. Barbara Boxer and Rep. Stephanie Tubbs objected to George Bush’s electoral votes in Ohio, forcing their fellow lawmakers to leave their joint session and debate whether to reject the state’s electoral votes… Conflating objecting to certification — something Democrats have done in the past — with promoting an ‘insurrection’ is so absurd that it’s difficult to believe the Dems are sincere.”
Paul Mirengoff, Power Line Blog
“Words have to have meaning, and the continuous mislabeling of the U.S. Capitol breach as an ‘insurrection’ is an example of how a false narrative can gain currency and cause dangerous injustice… of the hundreds of ‘Capitol Breach Cases’ listed at the Justice Department’s prosecution page, not one defendant is charged with insurrection under 18 U.S.C. 2383… The events of Jan. 6 also fail to meet the dictionary definition of insurrection, which Merriam-Webster defines as ‘an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.’…
“The demonstrators who unlawfully entered the Capitol during the Electoral College count were unarmed and had no intention of overthrowing the U.S. constitutional system or engaging in a conspiracy ‘against the United States, or to defraud the United States.’ On the contrary, many of them believed — however erroneously — that the U.S. constitutional system was in jeopardy from voter fraud, and they desperately lashed out in a dangerous, reckless hysteria to protect that system…
“The media’s mischaracterization of these events created a moral panic that unfairly stigmatized Trump supporters across the nation… Those who violated the law inside the U.S. Capitol should be prosecuted and, if convicted, sentenced accordingly. But dramatizing a riot as an organized, racist, armed insurrection is false reporting and dangerous political gaslighting.”
Jeffrey Scott Shapiro, Wall Street Journal
“The latest pitch for the Democratic voting agenda is more cynical and detached from reality than ever. We are to believe that the only way to counteract the furies unleashed on Jan. 6 is by imposing same-day voter registration and no-excuse mail voting on the states, ending partisan gerrymandering and requiring the counting of ballots that arrive up to seven days after Election Day, among other provisions completely irrelevant to events that day or afterward. If you’re thinking that Democrats supported all this on Jan. 5 of last year and still supported it on Jan. 7, you’re correct…
“In reality, voting has never been easier, and voters have never had so many options for how to participate in elections — whether early in-person voting, traditional same-day voting or mail-in voting. There are partisan disputes about how to strike a balance between convenience and security, but there is no reason that these differences can’t be debated at the state level, with the balance struck differently depending on the policy preferences of elected officials in each state.”
Rich Lowry, New York Post
The left argues that the events leading up to and including January 6 are an ongoing threat, and action must be taken to prevent a recurrence.
The left argues that the events leading up to and including January 6 are an ongoing threat, and action must be taken to prevent a recurrence.
“[Republican lawmakers] didn’t expect that playing footsie with, or outright embracing, the president’s efforts to overturn an election could lead to physical violence; they were just trying to stay on the good side of a lame-duck president who still controlled the Republican base. ‘What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?’ a senior Republican official infamously told the Washington Post shortly after the election. The downside proved to be lockdowns in undisclosed locations, gas masks, bullets, hundreds of injuries, and a roving mob trying to locate and kidnap the vice president. The downside was an insurrection in their workplace, the seat of government…
“In the hours and days that followed, we got some rare honesty from Republicans… After the riot, a visibly furious McConnell insisted on the floor that this ‘failed insurrection’ from ‘thugs’ would not deter the Senate from its work… [Republican House Minority Leader Kevin] McCarthy said Trump ‘bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.’… South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who, like McCarthy, had egged on Trump’s efforts to fight the election results, gave an emphatic speech after the riot on the need to certify the election results… [One year later] Republicans are back on script, and I don’t see a plausible happy ending.”
Jim Newell, Slate
“The Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol was an attempt, through force and violence, to overturn the will of the majority expressed in a free and fair election. In a well-functioning democratic republic, its anniversary would engender a commitment across party lines to protecting and enhancing our system of self-rule. At the moment, we do not live in such a republic. One of our two major political parties refuses to face up to what happened. Worse, the Republican Party has been using Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election as a pretext to restrict access to the ballot box in many GOP-controlled states and to undermine honest ballot counts by allowing partisan bodies to seize control of the electoral process…
“[Congress should reform] the Electoral Count Act of 1887, whose weaknesses in defining how Congress and the vice president should act in counting electoral votes were exposed by Trump’s machinations… But there is little point in having a nice, orderly count of the electoral college votes if the elections that produce its members (and those in the House and Senate) are marred by efforts to make it more difficult for citizens to vote and by the systematic exclusion of some groups from casting ballots… At issue is whether we are the democratic republic we claim to be.”
E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post
“During the years leading up to the attack on the Capitol, [Trump] helped usher in a new era of militancy. The number of threats aimed at members of Congress rose from fewer than 4,000 in 2017 to 9,600 in 2021. The FBI says there are about 2,700 open investigations into violent extremism at home, up from 1,000 in the spring of 2020. The latest Washington Post-University of Maryland poll shows 34 percent of Americans say violent action against the government is sometimes justified, more than double what surveys showed in 2010…
“[At the same time] political violence has long been a feature of the American experience… More than 70 incidents of violence between lawmakers from 1830 to 1860, from duels to brawls on the House floor… In 1954, Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from the House gallery and wounded five congressmen. In 1971, in opposition to the Vietnam War, the Weather Underground detonated a bomb in the men’s bathroom underneath the Senate chamber, saying the goal was to ‘freak out the warmongers.’ In 1983, self-described communists exploded a bomb under a bench outside the Senate majority leader’s office… Pretending Jan. 6 was a singular event risks a dangerous complacency.”
James Hohmann, Washington Post
Wait, what?? Whales once walked along the coasts of North America.
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