This Thursday, January 6, marks the first anniversary of what was undoubtedly the most severe crisis that American democracy has faced in almost 200 years. That day, the world watched with horror as a mob of Trumpists violently seized the US Capitol to try to prevent Congress from ratifying the victory of Joe biden in the presidential elections of November 2020.
(Read here: Trump will give a press conference on the anniversary of the assault on the Capitol)
For more than four hours, the former president’s supporters Donald trump – who refused to accept his defeat in the elections – caused chaos in the hallways of the precinct while hundreds of legislators, and even Vice President Mike Pence, barricaded themselves in the offices.
(Also: Washington sues far-right groups for storming the Capitol)
The Capitol police, in charge of congressional security, were completely overwhelmed, and calm only returned after a belated response from the National Guard, which is still the subject of criticism, when five people had already lost their lives.
“The insurrection of January 6 was the worst threat that our democracy has suffered since the Civil War,” said the president during a gloomy two-week inauguration, as there was still fear of a new assault on the Capitol.
A lot has happened in the year that has passed since then. And on several fronts. To date, the Department of Justice has charged more than 700 people for their participation in the events and the first convictions have already been presented, ranging from two to five years in prison in some cases.
Various agencies, including the Pentagon, have been conducting internal investigations to determine the mistakes that were made when protecting the venerated compound and whether the authorities of the moment acted negligently or maliciously when reacting.
(You may be interested: Indictment against Trump’s adviser agitates inquiries about assault on the Capitol)
In the political arena there have also been many movements. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives created a commission to investigate not just the events of January 6, but the circumstances that preceded it. Likewise, the Senate Judiciary Committee conducted its own investigation focused on how Trump tried to use the Justice Department to block Biden’s triumph.
And the conclusions have been devastating. According to the Senate report, Trump tried, at least nine times, to twist the arm of the judicial authorities -which are independent- to declare that fraud had been committed in the elections and thus be able to “suspend” Biden’s certification or testify a state of exception. In the words of Dick durbin, the chairman of the Committee, the US was “half a step” from a constitutional crisis that could only be avoided thanks to some officials resisting the pressure.
“The assault happened in three phases. In the first, Trump went to court claiming that there had been fraud. When all of them rejected his demands for lack of merit, he chose to take over the Department of Justice and the Attorney General so that they would support his narrative before the states and prevented the sending of the certification of Biden’s triumph to Congress, And when that failed, and our The report graphically describes these efforts, the third phase was to launch a mob against the Capitol to prevent the votes from being counted, ”said Durbin.
On the side of the Chamber, whose investigation is much more extensive, developments have also been presented. Two of the people closest to Trump, his former adviser Steve Bannon and his last chief of staff, Mark Meadows, were accused of contempt of Congress for resisting to collaborate with the investigation and will be prosecuted throughout this 2022.
Despite this, the Commission has collected thousands of documents, videos and testimonies that leave Trump and his lieutenants in a bad light. Sections of the investigation have been leaked to the press. Among them are files that describe strategies to block congressional certification, declare martial law and keep Trump in the White House.
(Also: Inquiries about January 6 reveal the end of Trump’s presidency)
They have also documented the way in which the Republican president ignored for hours what was happening on Capitol Hill, despite the fact that legislators from his own party, and even his own children, implored him to condemn the takeover and ask the protesters to withdraw. .
Videos, hitherto unreleased, have also circulated of the mob’s violent beatings against the police and the weapons they used, despite Trump’s insistence that it was a peaceful protest.
The Commission has also begun to collect bank records as it believes that the demonstration was not a spontaneous act but something financed and directed by people in the former president’s political circle.
Despite the evidence, and the Republicans themselves declaring in horror at the time, the Commission’s work has been hampered from the start. In fact, the party boycotted the investigation and only two of its members ended up on the investigative team.
And over the months they have begun to minimize what happened, aligning themselves with Trump’s vision that the elections were stolen and that the real insurrection was the fraud that was committed in the elections.
Of course it is a fallacy discarded by Republican and Democratic judges throughout the country, including the Supreme Court of Justice, where three of the nine justices were appointed by Trump and the Prosecutor’s Office itself when it was headed by Bill Barr, one of the most loyal officials of the former president.
But the “big lie”, as many call this phenomenon in the US, has been penetrating the imagination of Americans. According to a University of Massachusetts poll released this week, nearly 75 percent of Republicans believe Biden is an illegitimate president and two out of three believe that what happened on January 6 was not as serious as what they have. wanted to show.
(In other news: The ‘shaman’ of the assault on the Capitol is sentenced to 41 months in prison)
Likewise, instead of movements to strengthen the electoral system and avoid a similar challenge in the future, many Republican-dominated states have passed laws that make voting difficult under the premise that they are trying to avoid a fraud that – according to the cuts – never happened.
Developments that prove the deep polarization that exists in a country where reality seems based on political interests and conspiracy theories.
In fact, and in a sense, the Commission is in a kind of race against the clock. This week they hinted that they would deliver a preliminary report in June this year and a final one shortly before the legislative elections in November.
The rush, in large part, is because Republicans have made it clear that they plan to dismantle it if they win the election. Which, according to the polls, is very likely by now.
The serious thing, says historian Joanne Freeman of Yale University, is that by ignoring the gravity of what happened, the ground is being plowed for a debacle in the near future.
“The essence of a democracy is the idea that those in power are accountable for their actions and that violations will be punished to avoid a repetition. When that does not happen, trust in the government is eroded and without trust, democratic governments lose power. That’s what’s at stake, ”Freeman says.
A crossroads that the United States is already experiencing and from which it is not known how it will get out.
SERGIO GÓMEZ MASERI
TIME CORRESPONDENT
WASHINGTON
More news
.
#Assault #Capitol #year #Americas #worst #democratic #crisis