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Some Democrats believe that responsibility for the assault on the Capitol last week lies not just with president Trump, but with other Republican members of Congress. The Washington Post reports this morning:
New Jersey Rep. Mikie Sherrill said in a Facebook Live broadcast that she saw Republicans “who had groups coming through the Capitol that I saw on 5 January for reconnaissance for the next day.” She said some of her GOP colleagues “abetted” Trump and “incited this violent crowd.”
“I’m going to see that they’re held accountable and, if necessary, ensure that they don’t serve in Congress,” she said.
She and other Democrats sent a letter Wednesday asking congressional security officials to investigate what they called “suspicious behavior and access given to visitors” the day before the attack. The letter said that Democratic lawmakers and staffers “witnessed an extremely high number of outside groups” visiting the Capitol, which was unusual because the building has restricted public access since March, when pandemic protocols were enacted. Since then, tourists can enter the Capitol only when brought in by a member of Congress
Among the visitors, according to the Democrats’ letter, were some who “appeared to be associated with the rally.” Sherrill and the other Democrats asked that any logbooks, videos and facial recognition software be examined to identify visitors and determine if they could be matched with those who stormed the Capitol.
Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz said in an interview that “I do know that, yes, there were members that gave tours to individuals who participated in the riot.” She said an investigation is needed, adding, “What I don’t know is whether they were aware of what their plans were for the next day.”
In the past 10 months, US law enforcement agencies have used teargas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and beatings at a much higher percentage at Black Lives Matter demonstrations than at pro-Trump or other rightwing protests.
Law enforcement officers were also more likely to use force against leftwing demonstrators, whether the protests remained peaceful or not.
The statistics, based on law enforcement responses to more than 13,000 protests across the United States since April 2020, show a clear disparity in how agencies have responded to the historic wave of Black Lives Matter protests against police violence, compared with demonstrations organized by Trump supporters.
Barack Obama highlighted an earlier version of these statistics on 8 January, arguing that they provided a “useful frame of reference” for understanding Americans’ outrage over the failure of Capitol police to stop a mob of thousands of white Trump supporters from invading and looting the Capitol on 6 January, a response that prompted renewed scrutiny of the level of violence and aggression American police forces use against Black versus white Americans.
The new statistics come from the US Crisis Monitor, a database created this spring by researchers at Princeton and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (ACLED), a nonprofit that has previously monitored civil unrest in the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America.
The researchers found that the vast majority of the thousands of protests across the United States in the past year have been peaceful, and that most protests by both the left and the right were not met with any violent response by law enforcement.
Police used teargas, rubber bullets, beatings with batons, and other force against demonstrators at 511 leftwing protests and 33 rightwing protests since April, according to updated data made public this week.
I kind of went limp. And all I remember at that point was kind of leaning back, looking at my boys. I said, ‘Daddy love you, no matter what.’ I thought it was going to be the last — I thought it was going to be the last thing I say to them. Thank God it wasn’t.
Those are words of Jacob Blake, who was shot seven times by Kenosha police officer Rusten Sheskey, who faces no action over the incident. Blake has been interviewed for ABC’s Good Morning America, which will air today.
Yesterday, Blake’s uncle wrote for us about justice in the US.
Ten Republicans may have voted to impeach Donald Trump yesterday, but there’s definitely some House representatives with a very different idea of what should happen next. Last night newly-elected QAnon-adjacent Marjorie Taylor Greene announced plans to impeach Joe Biden. She told Newsmax’s Greg Kelly in an interview that:
I would like to announce on behalf of the American people, we have to make sure our leaders are held accountable, we cannot have a President of the United States who is willing to abuse the power of the office of the presidency and be easily bought off by foreign governments, foreign Chinese energy companies, Ukrainian energy companies, so on 21 January, I will be filing articles of impeachment on Joe Biden.
She has posted about her plans to impeach the president-elect on social media.
Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee)
On January 21st, I’m filing Articles of Impeachment on President-elect @JoeBiden.
1. Trump makes history that no president wants — the first to be impeached twice. He also is the president who has had the most members of his own party vote for impeachment.
2. The cracks of Republican party are out in the open, growing larger in real time. There are no signs the president’s base is abandoning him, but the split among congressional Republicans about the future of the party is accelerating.
3. President-elect Biden’s agenda gets complicated. Even before Wednesday’s vote Biden’s allies openly worried about what starting the impeachment train moving would mean for the incoming president’s ability to secure Senate confirmation for his cabinet nominees and press for top priorities like coronavirus relief. Now that reality is setting in and the trial will commence likely shortly after Biden takes office.
4. The US Capitol has been forever changed by 6 January. The images of magnetometers stationed around the House chamber, National Guard troops napping on marble floors coddling their weapons, and remnants of broken windows make it apparent that things have dramatically changed in the building. The symbol for democracy used to be a frequent tourist attraction pre-pandemic for school groups learning about the country’s founders and history. Now, it has a new image of what can happen when political rhetoric ignites supporters to turn on their opponents.
The National Guard has started to move into Washington en masse in an attempt to prevent violence in the run up to the inauguration of Joe Biden next week.
As Congress acted to impeach Donald Trump on Wednesday and the president urged his supporters to shun violence, the National Guard started to deploy 20,000 troops in the US capital.
At Trump’s inauguration in 2016, the figure was about 8,000.
