America’s close call
If you were watching the news on Jan. 6, 2021, you may have wondered if you were witnessing the end of America as you had known it. It would not have been an overreaction.
That was the day that a sitting president — who for months had been stoking rage among his followers by falsely claiming that the 2020 election had been stolen from him — urged a crowd to descend on the U.S. Capitol and stop Congress from accepting the results of the Electoral College that gave Democrat Joe Biden a decisive victory. And descend they did. The crowd turned into a rioting mob, stormed the Capitol, erected a scaffold, called for Vice President Mike Pence to be hanged, went in search of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Seven people died on the scene or in the following days, three of them police officers. It would be hours before then-president Donald Trump called it off.
This Thursday a congressional committee that has been investigating the insurrection will begin holding hearings and revealing its findings, in prime time. It’s vital that Americans see the evidence.
But in a parallel effort, Mr. Trump’s loyalists — Rep. Elise Stefanik prominent among them — plan their own “counterprogramming.” It’s a chillingly apt word for their attempt to deny, dissemble and distract from Mr. Trump’s attempt to subvert a fair and democratic election and stage a coup to keep himself in power by seemingly any means at his disposal — waging baseless court challenges, trying to cajole or intimidate state elections officials into changing vote counts, engaging in legally questionable maneuvers to undo the election, unleashing a mob on the Capitol.
In Ms. Stefanik’s alternative reality, this is just a “witch hunt” aimed at persecuting “patriotic Trump supporters,” and the real problem was the lapse in Capitol security. It’s like Bonnie and Clyde saying the issue isn’t that they rob banks, but that bank security is so weak.
We suspect Ms. Stefanik and company are well aware of the effect of this sideshow, beyond giving cover to Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators: to confuse the public and reduce this all to a political he-said-she-said spat.
It was far more than that. It was a direct threat to our republic.
And there is every reason to believe that if this goes unaddressed — if there are no consequences for those involved, from Mr. Trump on down — then it will happen again, and with fewer obstacles and mistakes. The questionable legal theories Mr. Trump’s allies suggested could be used to subvert the election remain untested and unaddressed by Congress to shore up any loopholes. And as the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU has documented, some Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed or introduced laws that will put more partisan officials in charge of elections, and make disruption of elections and intimidation of voters and election officials by poll watchers easier. The New York Times wrote of how one member of Mr. Trump’s legal team has been recruiting an “army of citizens” to “take back our elections.”
This is not normal political gamesmanship. If the Jan. 6 committee has done its job, Americans will see just how close they came to losing America, and what needs to be done to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.