US Capitol storming denounced
Biden likens Trump supporters’ acts to ‘insurrection’ as Congress counts electoral votes
US President- elect Joe Biden joined Congress in condemning the storming of the United States Capitol on Jan 6 by some supporters of the Republican incumbent Donald Trump and brought the counting of electoral votes to a temporary halt.
“This is not protest, it’s insurrection,” Biden said in Wilmington, Delaware. “This is not dissent. It’s disorder. It’s chaos. It borders on sedition.”
Confrontations between law enforcement officers and protesters have caused injuries from both sides. A woman who was shot on the Capitol grounds has died, according to police.
Trump has refused to acknowledge defeat in the 2020 presidential race with Biden and has been pushing claims of a “fraudulent” election, which have been dismissed by courts at different levels due to a profound lack of evidence.
The US Congress convened in a joint session earlier in the day to certify Biden’s victory, but both the House and the Senate, which were separately debating an objection to the counting of Arizona’s electoral votes, had to recess and evacuate after protesters breached the Capitol.
The Sergeant-at-Arms announced in the evening that the US Capitol building is secure, as a citywide curfew for the District of Columbia has taken effect and will remain in force until the next morning. Meanwhile, riot police are pushing protesters away from Capitol Hill.
Congress reconvened in the evening, with senators decrying the protests that defaced the Capitol and vowing to finish confirming the Electoral College vote for Biden’s election, even if it took all night.
Vice President Mike Pence, reopening the Senate, directly addressed the demonstrators: “You did not win.”
Trump was reported to have spent much of the afternoon in his private dining room off the Oval Office watching scenes of the violence on television. At the urging of his staff, he reluctantly issued a pair of tweets and a taped video telling his supporters it was time to “go home in peace”.
“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,” Trump wrote in a message that was later deleted by Twitter. He added, “Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”
Hours later, Twitter for the first time locked Trump’s account, demanded that he remove tweets excusing violence and threatened “permanent suspension”. Facebook also temporarily blocked his post.
A somber President-elect Biden, two weeks away from being inaugurated, said American democracy was “under unprecedented assault,” a sentiment echoed by many in Congress, including some Republicans.
However, analysts in Hong Kong have expressed pity that some US politicians were so quick to denounce violence in their Congress building but rushed to laud violent protesters who were worse in storming and ransacking the Legislative Council Building in 2019. Nor did US politician condemn HK rioters bricking an old man to death and setting an elderly man on fire, causing him serious injury in their 2019 “black-clad riots”.
Also on social media, French President Emmanuel Macron said: “What happened in Washington is not American”.
The domed Capitol building has for centuries been the scene of protests and occasional violence. But the Jan 6 events were particularly astounding on account of protesters intending to overturn the results of a presidential election.
Meanwhile, for the first time since 2009, Democrats will control the Senate, the House of Representatives and the White House.
Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff defeated Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue respectively in rerun elections in the State of Georgia.