Sen. Patty Murray Responds to My Letter Regarding President Trump's Responsibility for the January 6, 2021, Attack on Our Nation's Capital

 

Dear Dr. Badalamente,

Thank you for contacting me regarding the transfer of power between President Donald J. Trump and President-Elect Joseph R. Biden. 
 
 I come to the Capitol every day to fight for what I believe in. I often have issues I feel very strongly about—whether it’s a woman’s right to choose, or immigration, or health care, or the issue of the day. I use my voice to tell people what I believe to be right, and I listen to the other side. We hear each other out, we vote, and whoever has the votes wins. That is what our democracy requires: people having a voice, being able to use it, and all of us accepting that no one person or group should get their way all the time.
 
On November 9, 2020, people used their voice and elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as our next President and Vice President by a wide margin in both the Electoral College and in the popular vote. They won, as well, with historic turnout—the highest in over 100 years. Make no mistake: President Trump decisively lost a legitimate election.
 
However, instead of accepting the will of the people, as our democracy requires, President Trump and the Republican Party have repeatedly attacked the results at every turn: peddling false, baseless allegations of election fraud; pursuing meritless lawsuits which have been repeatedly rejected in court; ignoring multiple recounts states have conducted to ensure the accuracy of the vote; and ultimately, by inciting and then unleashing against Congress a violent mob, fueled by white supremacy, dangerous conspiracy theories, and Far-Right authoritarianism, in a lethal domestic terrorist attack and act of insurrection.
 
President Trump told a crowd of his supporters on January 6, 2021, that they should never accept defeat, saying, “you’ll never take this country back with weakness.” In response, his band of insurrectionists stormed our nation’s Capitol with weapons, zip-tie handcuffs, Confederate flags, and more. They violently attacked and injured police, assaulted members of the press, smashed windows and offices, called for the hanging of public officials, erected a gallows with a noose outside of the Capitol, planted pipe bombs and incendiary devices at other nearby buildings, and tried to rush the halls of Congress with members inside—all in an attempt to upend a democratic election. Their siege tragically resulted in several deaths and the murder of a Capitol Police officer—however, it did not stop Congress from certifying the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris at 3:41 am on January 7, 2021.

 There can be no normalizing this attack. To fully heal from the damage of that attack, we need transparency and accountability for everyone responsible. 
 
We need questions answered about the profound breakdown in security. The stark difference in the treatment of this violent mob compared to legions of women, people with disabilities, members of the clergy, and activists of color who have peacefully protested in and around the Capitol complex needs to be recognized as unjust and accounted for. The insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol must be held fully accountable for their actions under the law. The House has already impeached President Trump a second time, and the Senate must now hold a trial—as quickly as possible—and bar him from holding future office. 
 
As a Senator. I reserve my right to use my voice to fight for what I believe in, and I respect those who disagree with me. But at the end of the day, our job is to keep this country a democracy where voices win, not brute force. Any Member who stands up and supports the power of force over the power of democracy has broken their oath of office and should no longer serve. That is why I have called for Senators Hawley and Cruz to resign, which is something I do not do lightly.
 
To families in Washington state and nationwide, please know that as frightening as this has been, there is reason for hope because of your participation in the very same processes the President and his followers are seeking to undermine. Because of you, we will soon have a President and Congress determined to protect and strengthen rather than dismantle our democratic institutions. We will soon have a President and Congress who are committed to fighting white nationalism and the mass radicalization, facilitated by online platforms, that continues to threaten our communities, and especially communities of color. Continue to have faith in yourselves, be kind to each other, participate in our democracy, and we will get through this together. 

Again, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with me. If you would like to know more about my work in the Senate, please feel free to sign up for updates through the subscribe button below.

Sincerely,

Patty Murray
United States Senator     

To Further Divide the Country

Charlottesville "Unite the Right"

Republican Senate and House members, Republican politicians generally, conservative pundits appearing on the “fair and balanced” Fox News, and evangelical pastors with their faces at once beatific and doleful, all joined in expressing unctuous concern over Speaker Pelosi’s intention to move ahead Monday with the impeachment of Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, for “Incitement of Insurrection.” The politicians, pundits, and pastors seem united in their opinion that impeachment will “further divide the country.”

For myself, I find this another example of Republicans and their constituencies lacking what I refer to as an “irony gene.” They seem immune to the fact that what they say is the exact obverse of what they do. Republicans have been going about dividing America at least since Newt Gingrich made a science of combative, take no prisoners, partisan politics. Gingrich is remembered for a 1978 talk he gave to young Republican activists at college in Georgia in which he said, “One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.”*

Republicans have been led for the last 4 years by the “Divider in Chief,” Donald J. Trump. They have followed him slavishly, and parroted his divisive, crass, insulting dialogue and Twitter feed. They have refused to criticize him even when his behavior is beneath contempt and his policies are contemptible. There weren’t “very fine people on both sides,” but Republicans, fearful of losing a significant portion of their constituency, were loath to call out white supremacists. And when Trump told them to "stand back and stand by," these Republicans said nothing, until they began saying, "they stole the election from you."

Well, at least most of these irony-challenged Republicans aren’t saying that incitement of an insurrection isn’t impeachable. They’re just concerned that actually impeaching the son of a bitch that did it will “further divide the country.

 

Insurrection, January 6, 2021

 _______________________________________
* Mitch McConnell is said to have “transformed from a moderate Republican who supported abortion rights and public employee unions to the embodiment of partisan obstructionism” as a result of observing the effectiveness of Gingrich’s tactics (Alec MacGillis, “The Cynic: The Political Education of Mitch McConnell,” 2014).

Sedition

President Donald J. Trump speaking at his "Stop the Steal" rally in Washington D.C., January 6, 2021.

On January 6, 2021, Donald J. Trump, the sitting President of the United States, incited a riot that resulted in the storming of the U.S. Capital, and the successful breaching of its defenses by domestic terrorists, led by a “huge contingent of Proud Boys.” This occurred as the Congress, with Vice-President Pence presiding, was counting the 2020 Electoral College votes.

This count was to be a ceremonial function celebrating America’s democratic institution of free and fair elections, as Congress has no power to change the vote of the electors chosen by the 50 states. Joe Biden had amassed 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232.

Trump told a crowd of raucous supporters on the Ellipse just south of the White House, “All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical Democrats.”

Trump went on to reiterate his evidence-free charges of fraud, made erroneous statements about how elections were run in swing states “by Democrats," and in a rambling aside bragged about his “history-making” achievements, berated the Media’s corruption, asked where Hunter Biden was, berated Georgia Governor Brian Kemp for not overturning the Georgia result, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, and commended Rudy Giuliani as a “real fighter.”

Trump concluded by exhorting his followers, “We will never give up. We will never concede. It will never happen…" Pointing at the crowd with his black-gloved hand he said, "We’re going to walk down to the Capitol. And I’ll be with you…because you'll never take back our country with weakness, you have to show strength and you have to be strong.”

And they did as the President asked them. They marched to the Capital, and stormed the Capital, and desecrated the Capital. People died.

Trump did not go with them. He was driven back to the White House where he watched what he had wrought on television.

The U.S. Capital, January 6, 2021

 

Welcoming 2021 [and everything that comes with it]

Happy New Year!

I’m not sorry to see 2020 go — you? On the other hand, I’m not expecting to dance in the streets welcoming 2021 (that would be exhausting), because all we’re talking about is a tiny mark on a bone.

The bone, found in Ishango in Central Africa (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) was an early version of our calendar. It dates to about 9000 BCE and was marked with scratches to show lunar phases* and track the passage of “time” (really just the behavior of a mottled silver disk in the sky). This is not a calendar you’ll receive from the World Wildlife Fund — they’ve converted to paper (although an animal bone would seem appropriate for the WWF).

My point is that moving from one mark on a bone to the next doesn’t change the spread of disease, the distribution of vaccine, the exploding U.S. national debt, or the play of the Jacksonville Jaguars. So, we’ll still be wringing our hands (and hopefully washing them frequently) over all the worrisome things happening in our world.

I hope you have a plan for how to survive 2021. I’m working on mine, and hope to have it finished before Mitch McConnell is revealed as an alien “Lizard Man,” because although a lot of Americans might be pleased to say, “I told you so!” I’d be scared out of my Gourd.

Please be safe, be well, and try to bring some happiness into your lives and that of others as you move through the New Year towards the light at the end of the tunnel.

* It was Claudia Zaslavsky, an ethnomathematician, who suggested that the creator of the tool may have been a woman, tracking the lunar phase in relation to the menstrual cycle.