> 138 representatives —65% of GOP caucus—and 7 senators voted to discard PA. PA rules were voted in by the GOP but even the guy who got elected by them voted to throw out the ones for the president. They would have stolen that election if they had the numbers.
(The riot was an alternative approach to throwing the election by destroying the electoral college ballots https://twitter.com/SenJeffMerkley/status/134693870593264845... ; it's not clear to me whether that would be a mere paperwork hiccup or whether it could provide a pretext to really invalidate the electoral college somehow)
There was meaningful security in place last night in Washington DC: the legislators were evacuated to a heavily secured facility nearby.
The other difference is that not even a few months ago, police used massive shows of force against people who were unarmed (other than cameras for the reporters among them) and completely peaceful, in the same area.
If you think those three police officers at the Reichstag would have stopped those protestors if they action had wanted to storm the building, you are delusional.
Oh, and not too long before that Greenpeace members actually climbed the Reichstag and unrolled an anti-coal banner. Just that the media didn’t frame this into “an attack on democracy”.
If you listen to him, he's constantly negating what he just said, which comes across as open to interpretation (or completely insane).
No one man or woman is above the law.
Factual information is arrived at by consensus of people. That a certain group of people in this country refuse to accept or participate in the consensus mechanism (or threaten or dismiss that mechanism) then those people are against whatever it is that forms the consensus, such as the constitution, the US Govt., etc.
This is how dictatorships are born and it would do these people well to understand that replacing their made up fears with a dictator is not going to help anyone.
In the end the three officers in front of the Reichtag were able to act this way, because they knew that reinforcements in the form of 100 riot police were only 200 meters away. Badly positioned to prevent the initial compromise of the perimeter, but still there to handle a protest like this.
[1] Video of the incident in Germany. I think the intent of the protestors to enter the building is visible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdX5952CFTU
Context is important.
As to the infosec problems: legislature is run (even more in the US) by mostly senile, corrupt lawmakers and a staff of technically inept party groupies (or so I guess, clicking random aides linkedin-profiles). I doubt that any nationstate actor needs a raid of their offices to get to their computers (and that's why these people probably get the real national-security stuff on paper...)
A well known protest on a specific day, protesting a contentious issue, while all of the legislative branch is gathered together to confirm the results of the election, which the crowd believes was fraudulent, is an entirely different thing.
Not to mention, the crowd was allowed on the steps near the entrance with no opposition, with reports of policemen taking selfies and even opening a door. Had this happened with the shooter in Zug, would the policeman doing so have been investigated? Would his superiors?
The argument being that they do training exercises all the time, but there is no playbook for what to do if the president incites violence against his own Capitol. Split-second decisions made in a state of confusion and chaos which make sense from a security point of view could have enormous long term political implications. Up to a point, the risk of acting outweighs the potential reward.
But as organizations (Capital Police, Metro Police, FBI, etc.) this event was broadly known to be happening all over social media well in advance of Wednesday's event. There should have been a response as soon as that crowd made it to the steps of the building.
What concerns me is how this could have played out if that rioting group was even 10% more organized than they were. Or if they were intending to destroy/damage the building beyond windows and doors. Could you imagine if instead of just taking selfies in the senate president's chair, they piled up the desks and lit them on fire?
I hope this event sparks some changes in security protocols, because now any extremist group intending to disrupt government or make a bold statement know exactly how to do it and know they'll get far enough to do some serious damage.
The security staff know how to deal with extremist groups. But they were not dealing with an extremist group in the traditional sense - where the overwhelming majority of the population are in agreement that their actions are wrong e.g. 9/11, Boston Marathon, Orlando nightclub. They were dealing with a group claiming to act on behalf of the leader of one party in a two party system - in other words, a very significant percentage of the population.
It wasn't failing to act, but confusion about choosing whether or not to act and to what extent. They were not prepared for a scenario where taking action could genuinely be a trigger for wide scale insurrection, violence and even civil war affecting millions - the trolley problem on steroids.
> Or if they were intending to destroy/damage the building beyond windows and doors.
They were - pipebombs and molotov cocktails were recovered. But as uncomfortable as it feels, it might not have been as simple as shooting the bad guys.
Exactly my take on this. And why I got so baffled it actually happened. I, a Brazilian living in Sweden with a passing interest in US politics (just due to its repercussions to my life and countries), was aware of the radio chatter that something like this was bubbling. How can security forces of the most powerful country on Earth's history let this roll?
While at the individual level it probably makes sense to err on the side of inaction, at the organizational level this is a massive failure.
People used to call this “deescalation” and considered it the prime example of how to deal with protesters. When protesters are taking selfies with the cops then something is clearing going right.
On the other hand, an unarmed protestor was shot and killed, but almost certainly there will be no riots or sacking of small town centers in response.
The Federal courthouse was under constant siege for weeks in Portland, but that was “mostly peaceful”. This on the other hand was clearly a “mob” according to NYT.
I just want to see people be consistent with how they describe and respond to protesters regardless of the political affiliation of the protest.
Relative to the scale of rioting throughout 2020 this was objectively pretty tame, minus the fatal shooting. At least you can say it wasn’t a targeted assassination unlike other cases last year.
Well, another recent example of "police brutality" was shooting a guy holding a knife who was trying to get into a car with kids, after attempting nonlethal takedowns. I think that's quite comparable.
You're giving them too much credit. They got in. Then what? It was like a carnival, walking off with furniture, posing for pictures, smiling while sitting in important chairs. Lots of screaming, a few broken windows.
In a country where you can buy guns in supermarkets, they didn't fire a single shot. They could have set fire to the place, taken people hostage. It could have been so much worse.
Most of those people probably couldn't subvert or overturn anything more than a paper bag.
You can also buy ps5’s in supermarkets. Is the absurd part that you could buy non food related items in a supermarket or that supermarkets have devolved into a one stop shop for everything?
It’s not just related to guns
Then: four people killed
There are lots of ways to do harm without shooting. Many politicians are elder. Somebody could have suffered a heart attack, Biden for example... and then what?.
And some of the rioters were trained professional soldiers. Do they had access to harmful substances?, chemical poisons?, Nobody knows. Do we remember the 2001 Anthrax mail attacks to democrat senators and journalists finally linked to a Fort Detrick employee?.
In fact is even easier, in the middle of a pandemic just collaborating to spread a lethal virus between smiles and selfies would do the job. Videos show people touching three times each inch of the same knob door in a minute for no evident reason.
Those people was armed, organized, directed and manipulated.
If that had happened when protestors burned down a police station, destroyed miles of shops, threw molotov cocktails at a federal courthouse or any of the other riots in the past few months, there would be half of our politicians shouting to end all policing.
Or is trespassing on federal property worth a death sentence now?
You could not come up with a more justified police shooting.
There have been countless situations more dangerous to the lives of police or bystanders than this, where the assailant was not killed. But perhaps none with so many “important” people in the same room.
They could have easily arrested her. They shot and killed her instead. She had no weapon and had made no physical contact with any officer. Just shot as she came through the door.
At the same time, there are a half dozen well armed officers on the same side of the door as the protestors who are not being attacked and freely arrive at the scene within seconds of the shooting.
[1] - https://twitter.com/dancohen3000/status/1347076676342185984?...
You want people fighting in the streets for social and racial justice in the face of quantifiable repression to be treated the same as people storming the national Capitol to overturn an election result they don't like based on provable lies?
I guess the answer is... calm down? A few hundred (even heavily armed) people do not stand a chance changing the results of the election, or almost anything in the US.
The event was for show. Although, unfortunately, one of them died. But it should remain that way and there is no reason to escalate further. (I guess we already have precedents of how escalation usually lead to innocent deaths).
This is not the issue here. It is not even that the outgoing president very deliberately provoked the attack, as well as a much wider opposition to the democratic process. The biggest problem is that the president was actively supported, in his provocation, by more than a few US senators, along with elected officials of several states (some of whom are plausible presidential candidates themselves.)
There is little doubt that if any of the extra-legal or simply bogus attempts to overthrow the election had succeeded, these senators, and most likely the republican party as a whole, would have been happy to go along with that act, in what would, in reality, have been a coup d'état.
Even if the supreme court put a stop to it - which is not a certainty - much damage would have been done.
You could describe the 2000 election as a successful bogus attempt to overthrow an election. Has America already had a coup d'etat?
Sure, I'm not proposing to escalate and it's wonderful that it is over with no real effects. But the security handling was atrocious, and the results would have been much worse if the mob were only slightly more organized and intent on bloodshed.
I'm not claiming that they would have succeeded to actually install Donald Trump for a second term. But I do believe that they could have forced a mock result to eb proclaimed on the senate floor, creating a much larger problem for the future and giving much more power to their narrative.
Also, note that the quote from me was supposed to reinforce the idea that there were compelling reasons for the police to take their presence as a serious threat. These weren't protesters chanting to save the whales, they were protesters asking for the election to be overturned (even if I agree with you that they had no real chance of achieving this goal).
I admit to being a little shocked at the glibness of this statement. As a non-USian, I see a profound shock among other thoughtful non-USians that it has come to this. Regardless of political affiliation, I believe most honest, ordinary non-USians have held in high regard the robustness of the American democratic system and its resilience to the wholesale corruption that plagues many other countries. The democratic ideal, and America as exemplar, has always been held in lofty regard. However, I’m more certain than ever that this ideal has now been firmly relegated to a historical oddity. A 200 year blip in the record of human governance, with a forthcoming return to mean. Watching this slow motion disaster unfold has mad me very, very sad.
Pleasantly surprised that the death toll was only four, of which only one was shot; much better than the regular death toll of single mass shooter incidents.
... no, I probably shouldn't joke about this, however dark, but if there's one thing that last year has made clear is that death tolls barely move the needle politically and that symbols stick in people's heads and effect real change. Even if the symbols aren't tied to underlying reality. The revenge of Baudrillard.
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20201210/covid-19-deaths-sur...
The symbolism of protestors in the capitol was "shocking" upthread. I worry that next month we'll have forgotten about it because something worse will have happened. We've already moved on from the guy who blew up a telephone exchange, and the other occupations of state capitols, and those guys who tried to kidnap a state governor despite being infiltrated by the FBI.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I am with John Donne that anyone's death diminishes us, but avoidable and preventable deaths doubly so, which is why I'm in favour of responsible politics and the politicisation of preventable deaths)
Whole countries can freak out about the disappearance of one child or a car accident caused by some random intoxicated person and then everybody talks about their names, there are political leaders chiming in etc. Whole countries can come together to donate millions for the treatment of a rare disease of a single child. It's kinda random.
Humans are not calibrated to care about actual stats, just stories. A good story of one person can weigh more than a boring story of millions.
It's all theater, nothing more, whichever party wins... It's circus.
Where are you from, how old are you? Watching too many Hollywood hero movies?
I think the above attitude is less common outside the US than within. It's usually Americans who view themselves as through the lens of American exceptionalism, the rightful police of the world, just bringing democracy everywhere out of altruism and a care for people everywhere etc.
In Europe, the US is definitely seen in a more ambivalent light with lots of corruption etc.
Aren't you shocked to see thousands of cars burned in France over NYE? About seeing the American riots last summer?
It's blown out of proportion. This Trumpist crowd was disorganized. They didn't have a plan, didn't have leaders, didn't have demands or any credible way to win. Life goes on.
There is no way to make Trump win this way and actually get obedience from the institutions of the country. They would just not recognize Trump, even if somehow senators, under duress, said he won.
It was 0 rods of the 7. Power is not in the buildings. It's in the network of interests of powerful people in the background across the country.
France has famously unstable politics, which is why they are on their fifth Republic. No one was surprised to see something like BLM because the US has long-running problems with racism. But this? This was new.
> the American democratic system and its resilience
because there was a half-hearted attempt at a coup, and it failed miserably, even when indirectly backed by the current president.
You're absolutely right that the symbolic effect is huge and will likely be long-lasting - both inside the US and outside.
They (some) did have guns on them, along with knives, restraints, bombs (allegedly) and probably other weapons hidden on their person.
It was for show, but the police allowed it to go way too far. Not to mention, where was all the surveillance power of the NSA to provide advance warning?
The disturbing part of what happened yesterday was not that a bunch of assholes formed a mob to disrupt Congress. The disturbing part is that they were obviously allowed to do so.
To extend the comparison, the CIA is roughly the USA’a MI6 and the NSA is very roughly equivalent to the GCHQ but not exactly as the NSA are not meant to spy domestically while the GCHQ don’t have that explicit limitation.
The point is that the US federal government has a huge intelligence organization, with a huge amount of resources invested in dragnet data collection and surveillance on anyone and everyone.
The specific 3-letter organization that is technically supposed to be looking at and taking action based on that data isn't that relevant.
It wasn't a protest of a bill, or a protest for a particular legislative action. It was a protest against the election of the President itself - against all evidence, all facts, and all testimony from just about every official except the President, who egged this on.
I didn't want to see heads rolling, but I was shocked at how delicately they were handled - cops even let them through barricades.
Contrast this with left-wing protesters and their treatment by cops, and you see a much different picture, of people walking or sitting down getting pepper sprayed, or 70-something men getting shoved to the ground in a public square by a team of armored officers.
There are a number of reasons to be angry at this stunt, and a number of conclusions to draw from it. First thing is first, if we had any kind of collective conscience, Trump would be impeached today.
Rioters inflamed by years of Trump's gross lies storm the Capitol, demanding to overturn the results of the election, four die, and your response is, "Calm down"?
What good would come of that?
The right thing to do here is to break the feedback loop and take some energy out of the system.
Breaking the loop requires a deterrent, not only verbal "we will not stand for this".
It’s over let’s move on.
Personally I'm exhausted at trying to "score" the actions of two teams when in fact I really don't want either team to win. It has become an absurd attempt to decide which team is less awful while each side fools itself into thinking it exclusively represents political virtue.
I'm hoping that events don't escalate further and that perhaps there is some opportunity for the emergence of some alternate political parties and more thoughtful political leadership in order to let the existing parties fade into history.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...
The latter seems to wander dangerously close to treason, depending on their goals.
Just for clarity: People standing peacefully nearby whose worst law-break is a curfew violation? I don't think they should face any consequences, which I realize makes the curfew on its own fairly toothless, but that's already the case now. But when you pick up a rock or bottle and throw it at police, that's AB-DW on police in my book. (Same thing with criminal trespass and malicious destruction of property for the events yesterday.)
Basically, if you're acting like a lawless idiot, I don't care what your shirt says or what sign you're carrying while you do it.
There's one absolutely huge difference here, and that is that the streets are designated for public access, while the seat of government and the offices of elected representatives are not.
Just because something is publicly owned does not make it legal to access, protest in, or damage. Consider some other publicly-owned properties: nuclear missile sites, courtrooms, the President's bedroom, police evidence rooms.
This is such an obvious distinction I am puzzled why it apparently needs pointing out.
I don't care if they're arrested right now (as the violence has ended), but I care greatly that they are eventually charged and that those facts are transparently shared with the public.
In interviews on C-SPAN last night, the DC Attorney General (an elected official by the city) made clear that many of yesterday's actions fall under his jurisdiction, but that (because DC is a federal district directly controlled by the executive branch) he is only able to operate under the guidance of the US Attorney for the District of Columbia, a Trump appointee named Michael Sherwin [0]
And, the police killed an unarmed woman -- no outrage for that?
At some point, an element of “what did they think would or should happen?” has to be considered.
It seems that usually when those things happen, however, that itself is cause for riots.
Can we ditch the "treason" talk? It is just technically inaccurate. I wouldn't even say "insurrection". This was basically a low-grade riot at a symbolically significant location. Everyone should be prosecuted, including perhaps the people responsible for the atrocious police preparation and response. Even if the mob had managed to physically control the building there was no way that would have resulted in any actual change in the proceedings.
I'm not going to defend Trump on this either, but it is a mistake to think that Trump is the source of the discontent. He has taken advantage of the discontent but he isn't the source.
That storming the capital doesn’t result in a similar slew of arrests is weird to me
There can be no equivocation between a protest sparked by continued police brutality against citizens; and a protest sparked by massive lies from a leader with fascistic tendencies trying to overturn his democratic loss.
One is a net social good, even if it had deplorable bouts of violence; the other is strictly a social evil.
One group perceives widespread (their word 'systemic') racism -- the reality is that is isn't widespread, at all. Yet, they riot.
Another group perceives widespread election fraud -- the reality is that is wasn't widespread, at all. Yet, they riot.
It's all freedom of speech, except for the violence and destruction, right?
Literally shaking my head. I just can't fathom how this is so unremarkable to you.
Defunding the police doesn't seem like a great idea anymore now, does it.
It means reducing the scope of the police so that they aren't the ones dealing with things like homelessness and mental illness, things that they usually are not trained to deal with.
Here's a good explanation [1].
[1] https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/a33024951/defund-the-p...
No, not really.
The US government isn't a dictatorship, and power is not held by a narrow few people. More importantly, the whole government is structured to prevent someone making themself king.
Let's say that the worst case scenario had happened, and the terrorists had taken members of congress hostage and used the situation to demand that Trump be retained in power indefinitely.
They wouldn't have any leverage beyond the ordinary because in the US, our political officials are easily replaced. In fact, the problem we usually have is that they aren't replaced often enough.
Holding the capital building and the entire congress hostage doesn't mean they have control of the US... it only means they control a building and some hostages.
That's the thing that so many anarchist/white supremacist/revolutionary plots in the US fail to consider... that you can't decapitate the US government and then just take the place of the people you killed, because the rest of the country will just refuse to follow you.
The only way a Germany-style takeover of the government is really possible is with years of slow changes... that has been happening, but hopefully now that it's out in the open we can do something about it.
What would happen next? Who would cancel these acts of Congress? What if the Supreme Court (filled with partisan judges) decided to accept the results as well?
Ultimately, the question of who controls the US government (and its monopoly on the legitimate use of force) falls to "who can order the army to collect taxes from the states". In the absence (or ambiguity) of guidance from the representatives of the states, the decision would come down to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US armed forces, to decide whose orders he takes and to give the nuclear football to somebody.
It is not acceptable for the certification of the legal election to even be delayed as it has by a mob.
I assure you that I would believe the same if pro-Hillary crowds would have amassed in hopes of convincing or forcing Congress to overturn the electors vote in 2016. Especially if police had done little to deter them.
After spending the last 4 years hearing that Trump conspired with the Russians to steal his election.
But this suddenly is a mob committing treason and sedition.
The attacked federal courthouse is also a nice contrast - despite weeks of trying, the protesters never made it inside the courthouse. The fascists trying fruiessly to overthrow the election last night however made it inside Congress while it was in session.
The Russia conspiracy theory was a massive red herring, but it also didn't succeed in motivating people to try to overturn the election. Hillary Clinton conceded her election immediately following the result estimates, and Obama immediately started the transition process with Trump's people. There were no lawsuits seeking to disenfranchise 5 million voters for vague reasons.
The democratic quibbling about Trump's legitimacy was just that - quibbling. To compare this to what Trump and his cronies have been doing since the election is laughable.
https://twitter.com/unsafespace/status/1347273909280923648?s...
Turns out that Viking Man is actually a paid actor from Arizona. I don’t think you could make this stuff up if you tried.
First unarmed person shot to death by police in 2021 was Ashli Babbit.
I think you can choose to take a principled stand in support of protestors, or maybe you can call people who shutdown courts or congress and takeover city blocks domestic terrorists, but you don’t get to pick and choose one side or the other depending on whether you agree with the protestors or not.
The next fascist president may be less incompetent and achieve far more sinister goals.
I am comforted by the fact that our electoral institutions appear to be holding as they were designed to. It proves why separation of power is needed, and why it is critical.
Sadly it has been historically the democrats that want to tear down this separation for political expedience, one of the reasons Trump had sooo much power in the first place is decades and decades of consolidation of power into both the federal government and the presidency
However to believe there was no legit legal claims in an election where the rules where being rewritten on the fly often times with no legislative oversight at all by governor executive fiat is completely delusional
There was a lot that was done over the last year that eroded trust in this election, the objections on the day of the electoral count being the final perfunctory domino.
Trust in a system has to be earned, and the way that we go about setting the rules for voting, counting valid votes, and reporting the count has been frankly a very chaotic process. It’s no doubt millions of people doubt the outcome.
But this isn’t really anything new. In 2016 50% of Democrats believed that it was somewhat or highly likely that Russians directly altered vote totals to elect Trump.
Harry Reid said there’s “no question” in his mind that Russian hackers covertly altered the 2016 vote count. “I think one reason the elections weren’t what they should have been was because the Russians manipulated the votes. It’s that simple.”
> @RepFredKeller LIE: PA officials violated the law in regards to signature verification on mail-in ballots.
FACT: Our Election Code-which a Republican-controlled state legislature revised in 2019-does not provide for rejecting mail-in ballots based on signature verification.
https://twitter.com/joshshapiropa/status/1347063329404178432...
I don’t see how this is supposed to build trust that the election was run fairly and securely, in fact quite the opposite.
My point is not to debate specific failures. My point is it’s the responsibility of the systems and processes in place in the electoral system to instill trust in the populace that there is no fraud in the voting or the counting.
Instead, people were lied to about how votes would be cast, lied to about how votes would be counted, and the rules were changed arbitrarily in many places up to the final days and even hours of actual voting.
Again, my point is not how much fraud was actually present. But you can have a system people mostly trust even if they don’t like the outcome, or you can do things like not even checking the signature on millions of mail-in ballots.
The problem is stating without evidence that the signatures are absolutely fraudulent. The claims made by Trump and the GOP over the last decade about voter fraud are to blame.
Also, Trump has sought to buy out election officials with 'gifts', has cajoled and petitioned various others to ask for votes to be thrown out or 'discovered', has tried to convince congressmen and senators to overturn the result of the vote, has cobtemplated invoking marshal law and redoing the election and so on.
In all of this he has been successful in conning a large number of people that the most important democratic institution, the vote, has been stolen from them by the federal government and several states. They were convinced enough that they tried attacking Congress to force it to overturn the results.
If these are not aspects of an attempted coup, I don't know how they should be interpreted.
But that's not what happened. What really happened was that Donald Trump and his lawyers repeatedly committed perjury and barratry by deliberately filing cases that were either false or meaningless.
Any petitioner acting in good faith needs their day in court.
There are already penalties in law for people who attempt to abuse the court system for their own benefit and these penalties need to be applied with maximum force to the Trump administration and their legal "professionals".
There is a massive difference between police keeping people out of a public building and police actively attacking even quasi-peaceful protesters like we've seen a lot of times during the BLM protests. I, for one, don't have a real problem with police launching tear gas at BLM protesters trying to enter the Portland courthouse. I do have a problem with police shooting rubber bullets and throwing tear gas at protesters on the streets chanting.
The whole point is that we should re-establish the supremacy of the rule of law. What happened last night was an assault on this. Enacting your suggestion would be the same.
And collective punishment of employees is perfectly valid in law.
Considering congresspeople are also directly charged with defending the rule of law, the federal legislature could always take the Texas approach ..
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/us/guns-get-a-pass-at-tex...
would have been 'interesting' (albeit even more tragic) to see how this would have played out in that environment
The second job is more difficult to do effectively (with the potential that some of the protesters were armed, any armed response could have escalated into an actual battle), and was almost certainly compromised by the absence of the personnel needed to evacuate and secure the legitimate occupants of the complex (I don't see any numbers at a quick glance, but almost certainly thousands of people on what was a normal workday until 2:30PM).
Not to mention the inexplicable absence of last summer's no-badge secret police in guarding this protest, and an unwillingness of the executive branch to provide requested national guard allocations to support the Capitol Police.
That does not mean that they should have ever allowed protesters to attack the Capitol building while Congress was in session.
It's also important that the BLM protests were not about wanting to overturn the results of the election and install their preferred candidates. The cause that is at least proclaimed by a protest movement matters, it is not just a detail when considering a valid response to it. And even so, any police officers who fought BLM protesters to keep them from attacking democratic institutions, especially those in session, were fully justified.
This was a shameful display by the police charged with defending the rule of law in the USA, and even more than protesters, the police who plainly allowed this to happen must be investigated and tried. Whether those are the boots on the ground or the higher ups I have no idea, but this can't be left to stand.
Given what we've seen tonight, this could have easily turned into a putsch attempt, and it would have been very hard to stop it once the mob was allowed inside the building. They could have taken senators and congressmen hostage, they could have forced them to overturn the elections in a mock session, they could have killed dissenters - it was only by luck that it turned out they were disorganized and essentially there for a stunt.