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      'I ended up horrified': Black organizers had barely celebrated victory when mob attacked Capitol

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      [embedded content]
      Wednesday was supposed to be a day of jubilation for organizers in Georgia.
      Early that morning, news organizations projected that the Rev Raphael Warnock, a Democrat would win an upset victory over Senator Kelly Loeffler, making him the first Black senator ever elected from the state. Jon Ossoff was on the verge of defeating David Perdue in a second runoff. It was a dual result that would give Democrats control of the US Senate, and the first Democratic win for Georgia in decades.
      After years of meticulously registering and organizing the state’s growing population of minority voters, Black voters turned out in droves and were responsible for powering Democrats to victory. It was a payoff years in the making.
      But as the day wore on, those same organizers watched with horror as a pro-Trump mob took over the US Capitol in Washington, bypassing law enforcement officers and forcing lawmakers to evacuate. By the time the Associated Press formally declared Ossoff the winner in his race by mid-afternoon, it was no longer the biggest story of the day.
      Felicia Davis, an organizer who is the convener of the Clayton county Black Women’s Roundtable, said her feelings shifted from when she woke up in the morning.
      “I woke up feeling joy, I then went into a state of anxiety, and then finally I ended up horrified,” she said.
      Deborah Scott, the executive director of Georgia Stand-Up, one of the groups that helped mobilize voters, said she and other organizers left their office on Wednesday morning on a high note, but the mood shifted just hours later. “It definitely was overshadowed,” she said. “You look at the paper today, and the election is almost an afterthought. I think that’s what they want, they want chaos.”
      Watching the images on television, Scott said she couldn’t help but think of how much more aggressive police were towards Black Lives Matter protesters.
      “Most Black people saw that and watched in horror and said it would be such a different thing if it was us,” Scott said. “It kind of took away from the feeling of ecstasy, like the people won, they chose who they wanted.”
      Warnock’s Twitter feed underscored the whiplash of the day, the New York Times noted. At 1.55pm he sent out a tweet celebrating the historic nature of his win. His next tweet, less than two hours later, quoted Martin Luther King Jr and condemned the violence in Washington.

      Senator-Elect Reverend Raphael Warnock
      (@ReverendWarnock)
      Georgia, we made history. I am forever grateful. pic.twitter.com/hQfCYKEo3q

      January 6, 2021

      Senator-Elect Reverend Raphael Warnock
      (@ReverendWarnock)
      In this moment of unrest, violence and anger, we must remember the words of Dr. King, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” Let each of us try to be a light to see our country out of this dark moment.

      January 6, 2021

      It had been a victory in Georgia that was made possible by months of methodical canvassing on display even in the final days of the race. In a final push early on Monday morning, canvassers with Georgia Stand-Up worked in pairs in a quiet suburban neighborhood, quickly placing leaflets on doors with information telling people how they could vote. Their goal was to knock on just over 6,000 doors in the final day, bringing their statewide total to 100,000.
      On Wednesday evening, after the violence at the Capitol unfolded Stacey Abrams, the former Democratic candidate credited with leading efforts to mobilize minority voters, tweeted a reminder of that work, and the historic achievement in Georgia.

      Stacey Abrams
      (@staceyabrams)
      While today’s terrible display of terror and meanness shakes us, let’s remember: @ossoff, Jewish son of an immigrant & @ReverendWarnock, first Black Senator from Georgia, will join a Catholic POTUS & the first woman, Black + Indian VP in our nation’s capital. God bless America.

      January 7, 2021

      The attack on the Capitol also took place as Republican lawmakers, led by Donald Trump, pushed forward with their effort to undermine confidence in the results of the 2020 race. Even though courts across the country have universally rejected Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud, Republicans in Congress objected on Wednesday to the counting of electoral votes from swing states Joe Biden won in November.
      Though the challenges were ultimately unsuccessful, they were still a form of voter suppression, said Helen Butler, executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, a civil rights group that also helped register voters.
      “They’re trying to put doubt in our process and they’re trying to make sure that certain people don’t vote, it’s not counted,” she said. “Kind of putting water on fire, kind of dampening spirits. But we’re resilient and we’re not going to let that stop us. Because we intend to protect the right to vote.”
      Scott said her group had already received calls from people in other southern states – North Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi – seeking to learn and replicate strategies in Georgia in their states.
      “By the end of [the day] it was like ‘OK, we know more work has to be done now,” she said. “It’s gonna make us stronger. I see this, particularly the Georgia win, as a tipping point for the rest of the south.” More

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      We should have been ready for it, yet the spectacle at the Capitol came as a shock | Emma Brockes

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      “Are you watching this?” I was crossing the road, five minutes late to pick up the kids, and after reading the text, paused to scroll. Whoa. Instantly, I texted someone else. “Is your TV on?” “No.” “Turn it on.” After pick-up, we ran to a doctor’s appointment, where the receptionist had the TV on behind the desk. “This is insane,” he murmured, as someone in the waiting room read a news report aloud to his teenage daughter. When we got home, a few neighbours had come out of their apartments to mill, masked, in the hallway. “The numbers of people who support this look low, but it doesn’t have to be a majority,” said one, darkly.
      The absorption into daily life of disastrous events is one the world has grown used to over the last 12 months, which isn’t to say each new disaster isn’t shocking. This is particularly true in America, where no matter how many times one is reminded that millions of Americans hold opinions that seem, to millions of others, actively insane, their public expression never gets less astounding. When the Trump-supporting mob stormed the Capitol on Wednesday, the most flabbergasting thing was less that it was happening, than that after four years of dire predictions, our imaginations had still failed to prepare us.
      This was, partly, a selectivity of memory. “It can’t happen here” is a phrase that, even as it was used in conjunction with darker warnings about Trump, betrayed a bedrock faith in American democracy that overlooks its savage foundations. The white supremacist project, still going strong as an overt tenet of even liberal government policy well into the 20th century – black Americans were largely cut out of the New Deal – should at least have raised as a possibility a white mob storming the government at the behest of a racist president. The fact that they looked, in their costumes and homemade gas masks, so utterly ridiculous wasn’t even out of keeping with precedent: that end of the extra-political spectrum has always gone in for fancy dress and flaming theatrics.
      From a processing point of view, what was stranger, on Wednesday, was that an event with the force of a foregone conclusion still broke a fundamental rule of superstition: that by anticipating the worst, we invite the universe to pleasantly surprise us. The word “coup” has been used in relation to Trump plenty of times since November. Prior to the president’s incitement of the mob, however, it was, even in sincere contexts, used if not as hyperbole, then at least with the expectation that by naming it we lessened the likelihood it would happen. You could take Trump seriously as a threat to national security, believe wholly in his efforts to corrupt the election and still not get fully behind the notion he would encourage a power grab – not just because he is lazy, chaotic and a fool, but because, as an extremely broad principle, nothing ever tends to unfold as predicted.
      The day still had to be lived through. As with 9/11 and the beginning of the pandemic, the unreality of Wednesday’s events butted up against quotidian matters to make them seem even more bizarre. It is a function of human resilience that no matter what happens, you still, as Sylvia Plath put it in The Bell Jar, have to “eat three meals a day and have a job and live in the world”. Many of us ditched the job part of that observation and spent the afternoon trying to dispatch our chores while flipping incredulously between news channels; nonetheless life went on. People from other countries texted. I tried to explain what was going on to my children and didn’t get much further than, “You know how Donald Trump’s a terrible person?”
      Once again, the goalposts shifted. With each breach of moral standards, Trump has widened the range of public behaviour that can still be absorbed. His supporters smashed windows and graffitied doors and trashed congressional offices, but they were not an armed militia, which, I caught myself thinking, before turning to analyse the thought in amazement, was something to be grateful for. It could have been worse, as those streaming out of the Capitol building shouted to reporters it would be the next time.
      In the hallway outside my apartment, my neighbours and I went over how crazy it was, how we couldn’t believe it, what it all meant and where it would go. “It’s Germany 1933,” said one. And whether or not this was true, we all nodded in agreement, then went back inside our homes to make dinner.
      Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist More

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      in Elections

      'It was just a free-for-all': my day photographing the Capitol attack

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      On the morning that the US Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters, I knew it was going to be a pretty big day. Agence France-Presse (AFP) had photographers all over the city and my job was to be inside the Capitol, photographing the joint session where the vote counting would occur. But I had no idea what was coming our way.I have been working in Washington for almost 14 years and this is definitely the craziest day I have ever worked. Never in a million years could you imagine that the US Capitol would be overrun with protesters. It’s completely unprecedented territory.I had started the day photographing the session for 20 minutes and when it was adjourned, I went back to my laptop in another room. Suddenly, an announcement warned us of a “security situation” inside the building, urging us to shelter in place.Being a photographer, the last place you want to be is stuck inside a room when everything’s going on outside. So a group of us went down towards the commotion on the second floor, right outside the door to the Senate chamber. It’s a very inner part of the Capitol – normally a very secured area – so it’s highly unusual to see one protester, let alone the 12–15 that were there.That’s when I got my first big shot. Some of the protesters had face paint and body paint on, and were wearing costumes. One had a Viking hat on; a bunch were carrying Trump flags. Another had a Confederate flag. They were clearly Trump supporters there to disrupt things. They were shouting at police, who were trying their best to defuse the situation. About 12 officers were forming a line trying to prevent them from going any further into the building. For the most part they were trying to engage with them, saying, “How can we resolve this peacefully? How can we get you out of the building?”I thought, this is an area of the Capitol that never has protesters. This is going to be a big story of the day. Little did I know this was just the tip of the iceberg.Usually in a situation like this, the police act very quickly. They will tackle individuals to the ground, cuff them and take them out but that’s not what was happening. All these people had broken in somehow, and it wasn’t clear whether they had weapons, or what their intentions were.I heard commotion elsewhere and turned towards the Rotunda, underneath the dome. Hundreds of protesters were streaming in. That’s when I realized this was a much bigger deal than I could have ever imagined.People put Maga hats on the statues and had them hold their Trump flags, it was almost like a circus atmosphere.I was scared of the police clearing everyone out and getting stuck with them so I went down the tunnel towards the Senate and saw thick smoke in the air. People were retreating. People were running out coughing and there was a general craziness.That’s when we saw people going into the offices of Nancy Pelosi. Normally this is a very secure part of the building; she’s the speaker of the House, second in line from the presidency – nobody can just wander in. But there was no staff, no police. It was just a free-for-all.The protesters were sitting at desks, taking selfies and rummaging through the office. It was just a bizarre scene. I kept moving through the office and saw a guy with his feet up on the desk, looking through the mail and making himself at home. The staff had left in such a hurry that the computers were still on, with emails still up on the screens. I chatted with the guy with his feet up at the desk. I think everyone was just astonished. This is one of the most secure buildings in Washington and here it is with protesters who seemed to have complete control over the second floor of the US Capitol. It was just mind-boggling.You’re always worried people won’t want to be photographed, and you don’t want anyone to become violent towards you. But they either didn’t notice or didn’t care I was there. No one tried to hide their face, no one tried to discourage me from taking photos.Soon the crowd started to get larger and more volatile, so we went through another narrow hallway, turned a corner and came across a police Swat team who had their rifles like you see in the movies – sweeping the area, going room to room and immediately they say, “Hands up! Who are you?” It was definitely startling. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever had a gun pointed at me. They let us through and told us to find shelter. Three of us barricaded ourselves in an office on the third floor where I could charge and check my phone. My wife knew I was at the Capitol and was very worried. At some point she texted saying shots had been fired inside the building, but that’s the only news I got about that. When you’re photographing, you’re on autopilot and don’t have time to think about what’s actually happening.I don’t know how what happened was made possible. During political conventions, inaugurations, even the State of the Union, they set up huge metal fencing around the building. During the Black Lives Matter protests, they set that up around the White House for maybe as much as a month. But that just wasn’t there that morning. During an event like this, it’s human nature to run away from it. But for better or for worse, we have to run towards it. No photographs are going to come from inside a locked office.By 8pm, we got word that the Senate and the House would reconvene to count the electoral votes.Sure, the windows were still broken, the floors were still slippery from the teargas, and there were broken things all over the place – doors, windows and desks in disarray. But Congress was going back to its business. Even then, just five hours after they cleared the building, things were returning to normal. I think that’s what members of Congress wanted to show: that the work of the government will continue.– As told to Poppy Noor More

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      in US Politics

      From Charlottesville to the Capitol: how rightwing impunity fueled the pro-Trump mob

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      As Susan Bro watched the footage of a mob of white Trump supporters breaking into the US Capitol and halting the official count of the 2020 election results, she was “mad as hell”, but she was not surprised.
      Bro’s daughter, Heather Heyer, was murdered in 2017 while protesting against neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia. Donald Trump had responded to Heyer’s death by saying there were “very fine people on both sides”.
      On Wednesday, Trump responded to open insurrection in the halls of Congress, which left at least four people dead, by repeating false claims about having the election stolen from him and telling the mob: “Go home. We love you. You’re very special.”
      “This path has always been predictable,” Bro said from her home in Virginia. “For people to now go, ‘I never knew this would happen,’ why not? How would you not see this happen?”
      “This is sort of an inevitable conclusion,” she added. “It’s been coming, at least openly, for months, but the trajectory was set years ago.”
      The playbook for the Maga invasion of the nation’s Capitol building on Wednesday has been developing for years in plain sight, at far-right rallies in cities like Charlottesville, Berkeley, and Portland, and then, in the past year, at state Capitols across the country, where heavily armed white protesters have forced their way into legislative chambers to accuse politicians of tyranny and treason.
      “No one should be surprised,” said Sarah Anthony, a Black state lawmaker who was on the legislative floor in Michigan’s Capitol on 30 April when hundreds of anti-lockdown protesters, including white militia members with guns, tried to force their way inside. “This has been escalating in every corner of our country for months.”
      From screaming matches in the lobby of the state house in Michigan to looting the office of speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi, the demonstrators have grown bolder and their aims more ambitious.
      But many elements of these incidents repeat each time: the chaotic mix of well-known extremists and unknown Trump supporters who showed up to participate; the strikingly soft and ineffectual response from the police; the expressions of shock from Republican lawmakers that any of their supporters would take action in response to the lies they had been repeating; and of course, the behavior of Trump himself, who first openly incites the violence, and then, when it spirals out of control, praises it instead of condemning it. More

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      Police officer dies after pro-Trump mob attack on US Capitol

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      A US Capitol police officer has died of injuries suffered during the attack led by a pro-Trump mob, the force said in a statement late on Thursday.The officer, Brian Sicknick, had been with the US Capitol Police (USCP) since July 2008, and most recently served in the department’s first responders unit.Sicknick became the fifth person to die in the attacks. Among the four others killed was a demonstrator shot by authorities. Three died in what police called “medical emergencies”.Wednesday’s breach of the building came as Congress was certifying the victory of President-elect Joe Biden.“Officer Sicknick was responding to the riots … and was injured while physically engaging with protesters,” police said in a statement.He died on Thursday after being taken to hospital following his collapse upon returning to his divisional office, it added.Metropolitan homicide officials, along with the USCP and its federal partners, will investigate the death of Sicknick, police said.Democratic leaders of the House appropriations committee said the “tragic loss” of a Capitol police officer “should remind all of us of the bravery of the law enforcement officers who protected us, our colleagues, congressional staff, the press corps and other essential workers during the hours-long takeover of the Capitol by pro-Trump protesters”.More than 24 hours after he incited a mob to attack the US Capitol, Donald Trump urged an end to the violence and acknowledged there would be a new administration on 20 January.With Reuters and Associated Press More

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      in Elections

      'Four years of propaganda': Trump social media bans come too late, experts say

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      In the 24 hours since the US Capitol in Washington was seized by a Trump-supporting mob disputing the results of the 2020 election, American social media companies have barred the president from their platforms for spreading falsehoods and inciting the crowd.Facebook, Snapchat and Twitch suspended Donald Trump indefinitely. Twitter locked his account temporarily. Multiple platforms removed his messages.Those actions, coming just days before the end of Trump’s presidency, are too little, too late, according to misinformation experts and civil rights experts who have long warned about the rise of misinformation and violent rightwing rhetoric on social media sites and Trump’s role in fueling it.“This was exactly what we expected,” said Brian Friedberg, a senior researcher at the Harvard Shorenstein Center’s Technology and Social Change Project who studies the rise of movements like QAnon. “It is very consistent with how the coalescing of different factions responsible for what happened yesterday have been operating online, and how platforms’ previous attempts to deal with them have fallen short.”Over the past decade, tech platforms have been reluctant to moderate Trump’s posts, even as he repeatedly violated hate speech regulations. Before winning the presidency, Trump used Twitter to amplify his racist campaign asserting, falsely, that Barack Obama was not born in the US. As president, he shared racist videos targeting Muslims on Twitter and posted on Facebook in favor of banning Muslims from entering the US, a clear violation of the platform’s policies against hate speech. He retweeted to his tens of millions of followers a video of one of his supporters shouting “white power!” in 2020 June. He appeared to encourage violence against Black Lives Matter protests in a message shared to multiple platforms that included the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”.Trump’s lies and rhetoric found an eager audience online – one that won’t disappear when his administration ends. Experts warn the platforms will continue to be used to organize and perpetuate violence. They point, for example, to Facebook and YouTube’s failure to curb the proliferation of dangerous conspiracy theory movements like QAnon, a baseless belief that a secret cabal is controlling the government and trafficking children and that Trump is heroically stopping it. Parts of the crowd that stormed the Capitol on Wednesday to bar the certification of Trump’s election defeat donned QAnon-related merchandise, including hats and T-shirts, and the action was discussed weeks in advance on many QAnon-related groups and forums.QAnon theories and communities have flourished on Facebook this year. By the time the company banned QAnon-themed groups, pages and accounts in October, hundreds of related pages and groups had amassed more than 3 million followers and members.YouTube removed “tens of thousands of QAnon-videos and terminated hundreds of channels” around the time of Facebook’s measures. It also updated its policy to target more conspiracy theory videos that promote real-world violence, but it still stopped short of banning QAnon content outright. A spokesman from YouTube noted the company had taken a number of other actions to address QAnon content, including adding information panels sharing facts about QAnon on videos as early as 2018.Trump’s leverage of social media to spread propaganda has gone largely unchecked amid a vacuum of laws regulating government speech on social media, said Jennifer M Grygiel, assistant professor of communication at Syracuse University and expert on social media.Grygiel cited the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which regulates the distribution of government propaganda, as an example of one law that limits the government’s communication. But such regulation does not exist for the president’s Twitter account, Grygiel said. Instead we have relied on the assumption the president would not use his social media account to incite an insurrection.“What happened this week is the product of four years of systematic propaganda from the presidency,” Grygiel said.In the absence of any meaningful regulation, tech companies have had little incentive to regulate their massively profitable platforms, curb the spread of falsehoods that produce engagement and moderate the president.That’s why experts say things have to change. In 2020, Republicans and Democrats amplified calls to regulate big tech. The events this week underscore that the reckoning over big tech must include measures aimed at addressing the risks posed by leaders lying and promoting violence on their platforms, some argue.“The violence that we witnessed today in our nation’s capital is a direct response to the misinformation, conspiracy theories and hate speech that have been allowed to spread on social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter etc,” said Jim Steyer, who runs the non-profit children’s advocacy organization Common Sense Media and helped organize the Stop Hate for Profit campaign (with the ADL and a number of civil rights organizations), which called on advertisers to boycott Facebook over hate speech concerns and cost Facebook millions.“Social media platforms must be held accountable for their complicity in the destruction of our democracy,” he added, arguing that in absence of meaningful enforcement from social media, Congress must pass better legislation to address hate speech on these platforms.Facebook and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.Grygiel said it was time to move away from the idea that a president should be tweeting at all. Adam Mosseri, head of Facebook’s subsidiary Instagram, said on Twitter on Thursday evening that Facebook has long said it believes “regulation around harmful content would be a good thing”. He acknowledged that Facebook “cannot tackle harmful content without considering those in power as a potential source”.Grygiel said: “We need non-partisan work here. We need legislation that ensures no future president can ever propagandize the American people in this way again.” More

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      Democratic leaders call for Trump's removal from office

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      Democratic leaders have called for Donald Trump to be forced from office before his term ends on 20 January for his role in inciting what his successor, Joe Biden, described as “one of the darkest days” in US history.As a new 7ft fence was belatedly erected around the US Capitol on Thursday, an inquiry was launched into why the seat of US democracy was left so poorly defended against a predictable assault.But the principal political focus was on the dangers of allowing a president widely seen as being the ultimate instigator of Wednesday’s mob attack to retain power in the remaining two weeks before Biden’s inauguration.The president-elect said Wednesday’s insurrection marked “one of the darkest days in the history of our nation”, saying the attack was carried out by “domestic terrorists”. Biden accused his predecessor of unleashing an “all-out attack” on the country’s democratic institutionsChuck Schumer, who is the incoming Senate majority leader following the Democratic sweep of Georgia, and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, called for Trump to be removed through the 25th amendment to the constitution, which allows for a president to be replaced by their vice-president, if they become incapable of doing their job.Failing that, they argued he should be impeached for a second time.Pelosi described Trump as “a very dangerous person who should not continue in office”.“This is urgent. This is an emergency of the highest magnitude,” Pelosi said.Several Democratic members of Congress drafted new articles of impeachment for inciting Wednesday’s violence and deliberating subverting US democracy.“What happened at the US Capitol yesterday was an insurrection against the United States, incited by President Trump. This president must not hold office one day longer. The quickest and most effective way – it can be done today – to remove this president from office would be for the Vice President to immediately invoke the 25th amendment,” Schumer said in a tweet.“If the Vice President and the Cabinet refuse to stand up, Congress must reconvene to impeach President Trump.”Charges for Trump’s second impeachment were drawn up by several Democratic congress members – Ilhan Omar, Ted Lieu, Jamie Raskin and David Cicilline – accusing him of “wilfully inciting violence against the government of the United States” and warning he remained “a threat to national security, democracy and the constitution, if allowed to remain in office”.Use of the 25th amendment, on the grounds unfitness for office is a form of incapacity, would rely on the cooperation of Republicans including the vice-president, Mike Pence, who would take over the administration in its final two weeks. That seemed unlikely on Thursday.Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a frequent Republican critic of Trump, joined the calls for the 25th amendment to be invoked, saying in a video message: “The president must now relinquish control of the executive branch voluntarily or involuntarily.”But the GOP leadership did not appear sufficiently shocked to jettison their leader, who was reportedly warmly received on a conference call with the Republican National Committee on Thursday morning.There was a handful of resignations by second-tier officials, including the transport secretary, Elaine Chao (married to the current Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell); the deputy national security adviser, Matthew Pottinger; the Northern Ireland envoy (and former White House chief of staff), Mick Mulvaney; and the first lady’s spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham. But there was no sign yet of a sweeping exodus or mutiny that would be required to force the president from office.Trump loyalists in Congress and on Fox News quickly began circulating groundless conspiracy theories that disguised members of the leftist antifa movement had provoked the insurrection.The president himself made no public statements on Thursday, and after a call with the Republican National Committee spent part of the day awarding the presidential medal of freedom to two golf players and one Olympic athlete, one of them posthumously.Facebook imposed an indefinite ban on Trump, whose campaign has long used the platform to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories. The decision may also have been influenced by the Democratic success in taking control of the Senate.Former administration officials were scathing about the president’s role, most notably the recently departed attorney general, William Barr, who said Trump was guilty of “betrayal of his office and supporters” by “orchestrating a mob to pressure Congress.”.The former defence secretary James Mattis said Trump “fomented” the attack, intended “to subjugate American democracy by mob rule”.But current Republican leaders were much more guarded. McConnell said the blame for the attack lay with the “unhinged criminals” who carried it out “and with those who incited them” but did not name the president.Lindsey Graham, one of Trump’s top congressional allies, called on the president to accept his own role in the violence, saying that Trump “needs to understand that his actions were the problem, not the solution”.But asked about calls for Trump to be removed from office, the South Carolina senator said: “I do not believe that is appropriate at this point. I’m looking for a peaceful transfer of power.”A YouGov poll of Republicans found 45% of them supported the storming of the Capitol, 2% more than those who opposed it.At least some of Trump’s leading supporters abroad sought to distance themselves, including Boris Johnson, who said it was “completely wrong” for Trump to “encourage people to storm the Capitol” and cast doubt on the election result.In Washington, law enforcement agencies tried to respond to widespread outrage over the apparent impunity of the insurrectionists (only 14 of whom had been arrested by Thursday afternoon) and the lack of adequate defences for a vital organ of government.McConnell said it was a “massive failure” and called for a full investigation. The congressional sergeant at arms, responsible for overall security in the building, resigned on Thursday but Pelosi called for the chief of the Capitol police, Steven Sund, to step down as well.Sund issued a statement saying the storming of the legislature was “unlike any I have ever experienced in my 30 years in law enforcement here” and argued that his officers had been spread thin by having to respond to two pipe bombs found near the Capitol at the same time as the assault.Pelosi also said she had not received a satisfactory reply from the defence secretary, Christopher Miller, on why the national guard was so slow to respond, arriving in significant numbers only after the Capitol was occupied.The army secretary, Ryan McCarthy, told reporters that he had expected Wednesday’s events to be like other recent protests, adding that Pentagon officials had not imagined a breach of the Capitol in their “wildest imagination”.The head of the Washington metropolitan police department also claimed: “There was no intelligence that suggests that there would be a breach of the US Capitol.” Critics responded that those responsible had telegraphed their intentions in advance.“It was all in the open on public social media sites, not to mention in the President’s speech,” John Sipher, a former senior CIA officer, commented on Twitter. More

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      We must impeach Trump and bar him from holding office again. Now | Corey Brettschneider

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      As protecting our democracy becomes an urgent national focus during the final two weeks of Donald Trump’s term, a growing number of officials and citizens have begun debating whether to remove Trump from power, either through the 25th Amendment or impeachment. Regardless of what happens in these coming days, it is imperative that Congress ensure that this president never takes power again. The clearest and most constitutionally appropriate way to do this is for the House to impeach President Trump, and then for the Senate to vote to disqualify him from holding any future federal public office.The power of Congress to disqualify an impeached president from holding office has received less attention through history than the power of Congress to remove a president from office. The Constitution is clear that after a House majority vote to impeach and a two-thirds Senate vote to convict, the president is removed from office.Yet Article I Section VII clarifies that removal is not the only punishment impeachment can bring. It reads: “Judgment in Cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States.” This clause shows definitively that the Senate can inflict a penalty that would prevent Trump from holding office again. Under established Senate practice, that vote to disqualify would require only a simple majority vote in the Senate, less than the two-thirds vote required for conviction.Two historical precedents have established this procedure. In 1862, a federal judge named West Hughes Humphreys was impeached by the House. When it came time for the Senate to pronounce judgement, the body determined that the decisions of whether to remove and whether to disqualify were separable. The Senate first voted by two-thirds majority to convict and remove Humphreys, and then took a second vote, under a simple majority requirement, to disqualify him from future federal office. In an eerie foreshadowing of what we just witnessed with Trump, one impeachment article accused Humphreys of acting “in disregard of his duties as a citizen…Humphreys endeavor[ed] by public speech to incite revolt and rebellion’ against the United States.”A second disqualification was voted upon in 1913 in a case involving federal judge Robert Archbald. Archbald was convicted by a two-thirds majority in the Senate, and then, in a separate vote, he was disqualified from holding future office on a simple majority vote of 39 to 35. In a later 1936 trial involving Judge Ritter, the Senate cited the Humphreys precedent for the simple majority requirement for disqualification, though ultimately the Senate did not impose the penalty of disqualification.These precedents show the Senate is permitted to disqualify President Trump from future officeholding on a majority vote if he is impeached and convicted. Disqualification is a severe punishment for a “high crime and misdemeanor,” and although it has been used in impeachments of federal judges, it has never been imposed on a US president. Now, however, we have crystal clear evidence that the president has engaged in conduct that requires this extreme punishment.On Wednesday, the president of the United States incited a mob to descend on Congress in order to stymie the vote to certify Joe Biden’s election as president of the United States. It was clearly a crime. The president, like all Americans, has a right to free speech. But the First Amendment does not protect the right to incite a violent riot.What is more crucial for the punishment of disqualification is that this was a “high crime,” meaning a gross abuse of power. Nothing is more important to a democracy than the peaceful transition of power between administrations. Without it, the country risks a collapse into the kind of violence we saw Wednesday as a way of life, not a momentary disruption.This week, Trump welcomed that violence, saying he “loved” those participating in the insurrection. He claimed that the nation had never seen an election “stolen” like this one. He added, “I know how you feel.” The president was not only stoking violence. He was undermining democracy.As the insurrectionists entered the Capitol, one declared “we are the people.” The rioters saw their actions as the rightful replacement for the constitutional way presidents are elected in this country. There was no better symbol of the threat to that legal process than that the electoral ballots themselves had to be ushered out of the Senate chamber to protect them from the rioters.The obligation of Congress—beyond just what it is allowed to do—in such a circumstance is to ensure that such an enemy of democracy and law never holds office again. Congress can do that by impeaching President Trump, convicting him, then disqualifying him from holding public office again. This disqualification would further deny Trump the ability to use his sizeable reelection fund to seek future office, a restriction which would place an important limit on the resources he has at his disposal to undermine democracy.Invoking the 25th Amendment would allow the Cabinet to remove a president “unable” to do the job—an important option in restoring our democracy. However, it is crucial to note that this removal would not affect his ability to run for office again. Only impeachment and a Senate vote to disqualify can do that, so it is essential that, regardless of the Cabinet’s actions, the Congress act to impeach, remove, and disqualify him.Even if the House does not impeach Trump within the next two weeks, Congress should still move to impeach and disqualify him after he has left office. There is an active scholarly debate on whether a former president can be impeached, and no court has yet definitively ruled on the matter. Still, Congress should attempt this approach after the two new Democratic senators from Georgia are seated to ensure it does everything in its power to keep Trump from threatening democracy in the future.On Wednesday, the Congress lived up to its proud democratic duty by reconvening to continue the process of certifying the election. But if Trump is allowed to take office again, what we saw might just be a dress rehearsal for broader efforts to destroy democracy and the rule of law. Disqualification would deny him the chance to even try to wreak such destruction.Corey Brettschneider is a political science professor at Brown. He is the author of The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents, and the editor of the new book The Decisions and Dissents of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, part of his new series, Penguin Liberty More