Yesterday, an outgoing, one-term President continued to feed the anxieties, fears, and anger of his most committed followers and directed them to take their grievances to the Capitol building, where our elected representatives were following their constitutional duty to certify the election of a new President-Elect.
In response, the crowd of mostly white Americans marched from their rallying point towards the Capitol carrying flags celebrating their “dear leader” and the lost cause of defeated traitors, where one can only imagine they expected to be stopped by a strong show of force from the Capitol police, the District police, and the National Guard.
Instead, some of the police opened the gates. While some drew their weapons to protect the House chamber once the Capitol had been breached, other police officers chose to pose for selfies or chose to help older members of the mob with the building’s difficult steps.
Did Trump’s mob expect to breach what should have been one of the most secure locations in the United States? How could they have? The Capitol police is made up of more than 2,300 officers and civilians and has an annual budget of roughly $460 million, which is more than the entire city of Atlanta. Additionally, the media had reported earlier in the week that the Mayor of Washington D.C. called in almost 350 members of the National Guard to provide crowd support. And then of course, you had the District police, and while they’re not responsible for protecting the Capitol, they are responsible for maintaining order in the city.
As they marched toward the Capitol, members of the mob should have rightly expected to run into some resistance.
But they didn’t. So they kept walking, scaled walls, broke windows, wandered the halls, and took selfies on the floor of the Senate. Civilians and police officers were injured in the chaos, and at least four people died, including one by gunfire [UPDATE 1/8/21: With the death of Capitol Police officer, Brian Sicknick, the death toll of Wednesday’s insurrection has risen to five].
Had the Capitol’s security forces done their job, this would have been just another example of an assembly of citizens standing outside of the institutions of their democratically-elected government seeking redress for their grievances (grievances based on a mass delusion, but grievances nonetheless).
Instead, we had a mob damaging and looting the People’s House, and acting to influence the policy of our government by intimidation.
Everyone involved should be held accountable for their actions. The President should be removed from office immediately for inciting an insurrection against the authority of the United States and giving comfort thereto. The Sergeants at Arms of the United States House and Senate and the Chief of the Capitol Police should be fired for incompetence. The DoD officials who “denied a request by [the D.C. Mayor]” for the National Guard to restore order in the Capitol ought to be charged with causing or attempting to cause “disloyalty, mutiny or refusal of duty by any member of the military of the United States.”
But as I said at the beginning, let’s not overdo it. All government officials who had a hand in this insurrection ought to be held accountable. All identifiable members of the mob ought to be held accountable.
But this is not the end of the Republic. Insurrections have happened before. They will happen again.
