AMERICA IS SEEING THAT WE HAVE ONLY ONE FUNCTIONING POLITICAL PARTY

  ….This was the rioters reaction to the teargas used by both opposing parties at the Insurrection.

The following show why our nation is concerned about a having continued democracy

(The follow is a composite of the inputs for an article in the Washington Post that was written by over 13 national opinion reporters regarding the hours of the January 6^th Insurrection of the U.S. Capitol..)

Former President Trump watched from the White House, the attack playing out on television and he resisted acting, neither to coordinate a federal response nor to instruct his supporters to disperse. He all but abdicated his responsibilities as "commander in chief."  He was a president reduced to being a mere bystander. The tweets Trump sent during the first two hours of rioting were muddled at best. He disavowed violence, but encouraged his supporters to press on with their fight at the Capitol. And throughout he still lies, he has again repeated the lie that the election was stolen.

Donald Trump had just returned to the White House from his rally at the Ellipse on Jan. 6 when he retired to his private dining room just off the Oval Office.  He flipped on the massive flat-screen television and took in the show. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, thousands of his supporters were wearing his red caps, waving his blue flags and chanting his name.

Live television news coverage showed the horror accelerating minute by minute after 1:10 p.m..  That was when Trump had called on his followers to march on the U.S. Capitol. The pro-Trump rioters toppled security barricades. They bludgeoned police. They scaled granite walls. And then they smashed windows and doors to breach the hallowed building that has stood for more than two centuries as the seat of American democracy.

The Capitol was under siege, and the president, glued to the television, did absolutely nothing.

For 187 minutes, Trump resisted entreaties to intervene from advisers, allies and his elder daughter, as well as lawmakers under attack.  As the violence at the Capitol intensified, even after Vice President Mike Pence, his family and hundreds of Congress members and their staffers hid to protect themselves.  Even after the first two people died and scores of others were assaulted, Trump declined for more than three hours to tell the renegades rioting in his name to stand down and go home.

During the 187 minutes that Trump stood by, harrowing scenes of violence played out in and around the Capitol.

• Twenty-five minutes into Trump’s silence, a news photographer was dragged down a flight of stairs and thrown over a wall.

• Fifty-two minutes in, a police officer was kicked in the chest and surrounded by a mob.

• Within the first hour, two rioters died as a result of cardiac events.

• Sixty-four minutes in, a rioter paraded a Confederate battle flag through the Capitol.

• Seventy-three minutes in, another police officer was sprayed in the face with chemicals.

• Seventy-eight minutes in, yet another police officer was assaulted with a flagpole.

• Eighty-three minutes in, rioters broke into and began looting the House speaker’s office.

• Ninety-three minutes in, another news photographer was surrounded, pushed down and he was robbed of his camera.

• Ninety-four minutes in, a rioter was shot and killed.

• One hundred two minutes in, rioters stormed the Senate chamber, stealing papers and posing for photographs around the dais.

• One hundred sixteen minutes in, a fourth police officer was crushed in a doorway and beaten with his own baton.

Trump’s “Make America Great Again” army was on the march, just as he had commanded to happen at the rally.

The president had directed his followers to head to the Capitol in a forceful show of “pride and boldness” to pressure lawmakers to try to overturn the results of an election he falsely claimed had been rigged. And there they were, literally fighting to keep Trump in power.

 

(There are much more detail available as to what happened during the event.  But here’s how it went with the former president himself after the insurrection.)

“Trump was enamored with how ‘all these people are coming to fight for me,’ ” said a senior Republican close to him. “I don’t think he appreciated what was really going on.”

An investigation by The Washington Post provides the richest understanding to date of Trump’s mindset and the cost of his inaction as democracy came under attack. It also reveals new aspects of an extensive pressure campaign by the president and those around him to get Pence to block certification of the election results.  This includes a last-ditch appeal on the night of Jan. 6, after the riot was over, by attorney John Eastman, who urged Pence to reject electors as Congress reconvened.

As expected, in a statement, Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich disputed The Post’s findings as “fake news” and falsely cast people who entered the Capitol that day as “agitators not associated with President Trump.”

The Post’s investigation also found that signs of escalating danger were in full view hours before the Capitol attack, including clashes that morning among hundreds of pro-Trump demonstrators and police at the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial.

Unfortunately, the mounting red flags did not trigger stepped-up security responses that morning, underscoring how unprepared law enforcement authorities were for the violence that transpired.

Little by little, Capitol Police officers and their reinforcements made progress in containing the violence and controlling the insurrectionists. Pence remained secure in his underground hideaway, accompanied by an associate who called Meadows late that afternoon to alert the White House Chief of Staff that the vice president planned to push through with certifying the election results as soon as the Capitol could be cleared and Congress could reconvene.

“I think that’s the right thing to do,” Meadows told the associate.

Pence did not spoke to Trump directly that day, and Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, was the only congressional leader to communicate with the president. “What would have been the point?” an adviser to then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said, adding, “Trump wasn’t going to be helpful.”

At 4:32 p.m., the Army received approval from Miller, the acting secretary of defense, to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol, more than two hours after the initial requests were made.

At 5:40 p.m., roughly 150 members of the D.C. National Guard arrived to begin support operations, and a citywide curfew went into effect at 6 p.m., though skirmishes between police and rioters continued in the vicinity of the Capitol.

Trump chimed in at 6:01 p.m. with a new tweet that, much like his Rose Garden video message, propagated his election fraud lie while telling the “great patriots” to “go home with love & in peace.”

At the time, Trump’s video and tweets enraged some Republican members of Congress, even loyal ones like Kevin McCarthy and Lindsay Graham. “That was a bad tweet,” Graham said of Trump’s message excusing what had happened that day.

At 6:14 p.m., police and National Guard troops established a security perimeter around the west side of the Capitol, and by 7 p.m., FBI and ATF agents completed their sweep of the Capitol, going room to room looking for rioters, weapons or other security threats. Bowdich led the FBI team on one end of the building while Donoghue, of the Justice Department, led the ATF agents at the other.

When they met in the middle, they had a quick conference call with Pence, Miller and congressional leaders. McConnell and McCarthy said nothing, and Pence was mostly quiet. The vice president offered only two words on the call: “Thank you.”

At last, the Capitol was locked down.  Carneysha Mendoza, a 19-year veteran of the Capitol Police, Mendoza led officers battling rioters in the Rotunda of the Capitol on Jan. 6.. He was of the Capitol Police and was finally at rest. Sitting on a bench in the Rotunda, she looked around and reflected on what had happened. Officers clumped their feet on the floor all around the room. They all looked defeated. Mendoza’s Fitbit recorded her as having been in a workout for nearly four straight hours.  (That was a testament to the extreme physical demands on her and other officers.)

Shortly before 8 p.m., Pence and senators returned to the Senate chamber to pick up where they had left off. Graham took Pence aside and said: “You’re doing the right thing. I’m proud of you.” The two men hugged.

Visibly emotional from the day’s trauma, Pence gaveled the Senate back into session at 8:06 PM.

When it was Graham’s turn to speak, the South Carolina Republican was animated as he wistfully described Trump as a friend, “who had drifted away”, if only for a moment.

Even as the Senate returned to order, the pressure on Pence did not let up. Eastman, the attorney advising Trump, emailed Jacob, (Pence’s counsel), around 9 p.m. to try to convince the vice president to move to not certify the election results.

In the past, Pence and his team had cited the Electoral Count Act, which laid out constitutional procedures for counting votes in presidential elections, as a reason he could not send electors back to states. But in the email to Jacob, Eastman argued that Pence had not precisely followed that law by allowing debate to extend past the allotted time, and could therefore disobey it by rejecting electors from Arizona.

Jacob told others he was amazed at the email and disregarded it. He did not respond to Eastman. Pence continued to oversee the counting of votes.

For Senator Lankford, the day’s trauma altered his journey. The Oklahoma Republican, who previously spent a decade as program director of a Baptist youth camp, was among the 12 senators who initially had opposed certifying electoral votes from some key states. But after his floor speech objecting to the Arizona count was interrupted by the Senate’s riot-induced evacuation, and after spending the afternoon in hiding from violent marauders, Lankford changed his mind.  He voted to certify the results.

In the end, just six senators objected to counting Arizona’s votes and only seven objected to counting Pennsylvania’s.  (There are 50 Senators total, so it was a small percentage.)

Of the 12 senators who initially had opposed certification, Lankford said, “six after the riot still stuck with they had said, ‘Let’s keep pushing.’ The other six of us, myself included, said: ‘I’m not going to win this debate. We only have 12 of us to begin with, and clearly, after what’s happened in the Capitol today, this is not going to get better. We’ve got to find ways to pull the country together.’”

It is too bad that so many of the Republicans that had initially blamed the president for what the rioters had done, have since changed their tunes and are now in support of the former president.  (As are most of what was the Republican Party.)

It is just more proof that as a democracy, today, there is only one political party that is seriously working to properly and honestly govern the nation as a democracy.

And that party is NOT the GOP.

Copyright G. Ater 2021