Members who attended a House Appropriations Committee briefing on the security failures of Jan. 6 “were left stunned,” says CNN. Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) told reporters members were “shaking their heads in disbelief” at how much worse the violence might have been:
“People said today that there was ample evidence, that the intelligence agencies had ample evidence, that an angry mob was going to descend on Washington with Congress’ meeting to certify the election as the intended target,” DeLauro added.
After participating in the hearing, Rep. Matt Cartwright, a Pennsylvania Democrat, told CNN, “It was only by pure dumb luck that elected officials, staffers and more Capitol policemen were not killed.”
Cartwright’s theory, confirmed by people he would not name, is that concern over the optics of more robust preparations played a role. Lack of manpower, proper equipment for repelling an assault, and more contributed to Capitol Police being quickly overwhelmed.
Insurrectionists had reason to expect they would be.
“Armed far-right mobs met little law enforcement resistance when they repeatedly attacked state capitols,” begins ProPublica’s Jan. 19 report. The lessons those mobs took away was that the U.S. Capitol would be a soft target:
In a year in which state governments around the country have become flashpoints for conservative anger about the coronavirus lockdown and Trump’s electoral defeat, it was right-wing activists — some of them armed, nearly all of them white — who forced their way into state capitols in Idaho, Michigan and Oregon. Each instance was an opportunity for local and national law enforcement officials to school themselves in ways to prevent angry mobs from threatening the nation’s lawmakers.
But it was Trump supporters who did the learning. That it was possible — even easy — to breach the seats of government to intimidate lawmakers. That police would not meet them with the same level of force they deployed against Black Lives Matter protesters. That they could find sympathizers on the inside who might help them.
And they learned that criminal charges, as well as efforts to make the buildings more secure, were unlikely to follow their incursions. In the three cases, police made only a handful of arrests.
“We had hundreds of individuals storm our Capitol building,” Michigan state Rep. Sarah Anthony told ProPublica. “No, lives were not lost, blood was not shed, property was not damaged, but I think they saw how easy it was to get into our building and they could get away with that type of behavior and there would be little to no consequences.”
Some armed invaders entered the Senate gallery. While none of the protesters faced charges, two of the men seen in a photo posted by state Sen. Dayna Polehanki looking down on lawmakers would be among the 14 people charged months later in a plot to kidnap Whitmer and bomb the state Capitol.
“It made national and international news, what happened in our Capitol,” Polehanki said in an interview. “People saw that, and it’s no coincidence that the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 had the same feel.”
“Eventually, you get to the point of entitlement where you can get away with anything and there will never be any accountability,” added Idaho House minority leader, Ilana Rubel (D), of the armed incursion in Boise.
New York Times Magazine‘s Charles Homans considers recent Lobby Day protests in Richmond, Va. A variety of armed gangs — self-styled militias, often white nationalists — flood the town strutting arsenals meant to impress or intimidate lawmakers considering gun control legislation. They want lawmakers’ attention and they get it, and that of the press.
One “protester” carries an AR-15 variant mounted with a grenade launcher and pounds of accessories, plus multitools strapped to spare magazines. He brought all his toys to show-and-tell.
These men want something but cannot say what. One group leader says of the Jan. 6 insurrection, “If they want to make the federal government or the state government fall, we can sort it out afterwards. It would be good to give this country a total reset.”
What would “afterwards” look like?
“I’ll leave that to the imagination. There’s not so much I can say on camera about stuff like that. Because it can get you in a lot of legal trouble.”
He wants people to know his boys mean business even if they have no idea what the business is.
When a press scrum formed around a masked, lone gunman, Homans sees how much it resembled a spin room. The man had no agenda, really, and little of substance to say about why he was there on the street with weapons.
The spin room lays bare the essential fallacy at the heart of bad political journalism, which is that proximity to power automatically grants a person an authority or insight that others lack. A similar logic was at work on the street in Richmond, where those of us who had come to cover the rally were operating on the tacit understanding that the simple act of carrying a gun in defiance of the local law gave a person standing to speak to a national political moment in which defiance of the law had become the de facto position of a political party representing the votes of more than 74 million Americans. This was, in a sense, its own kind of ideology — one that the desultory handful of militiamen on the street shared with the many factions of the Boogaloo, with the mob at the U.S. Capitol, with the outgoing president of the United States.
“The gun is the speech,” Homans realizes.
It is the voice of those who feel voiceless and have nothing to say anyway. The weapons displays shout of grievance they cannot or dare not speak aloud, “a really futile and stupid gesture” of defiance … until the shooting starts.
And so long as there are “little to no consequences” for violations of law, for explicit and implicit threats, for armed insurrection or for instigating one, and sympathy for such behavior inside police agencies, the republic’s fate will be questioned here and abroad.
Armed gangs learned that legislative buildings are soft targets, acted on that knowledge, and came close to creating a bloodbath. What will they learn if Trump faces no sanction for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection?