Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
U.S. Capitol Police with guns drawn stand near a barricaded door as supporters of President Trump try to break into the House Chamber at the Capitol, January 6, 2021, in Washington.
In 1982, the economy was sick, a consequence of Paul Volcker’s death dance with inflation. Unemployment was at double-digit levels, a place it wouldn’t reach again for more than 25 years. And whenever Ronald Reagan, who had been president for a couple of years to that point, was asked about this, he would blame Jimmy Carter. In successive State of the Union speeches in 1982 and 1983, he said that the economic damage, which during the campaign he called the “Carter depression,” was worse than expected and devilishly difficult to get out from under. He blamed Carter for everything he was challenged on pretty much throughout his presidency, and the conservative movement took the hint, heaping on the scorn.
After years of this, Carter, a moderate at best, was synonymous with liberal profligacy and proof positive of the failure of those ideas. The famed 1988 Saturday Night Live debate sketch between George Bush and Michael Dukakis featured Bush asking the audience, “Do we want to go back to the malaise days of Jimmy Carter?” It was a laugh line, because it had been repeated so often by conservatives over the previous eight years.
Jimmy Carter’s supporters, or the few that were left by January 6, 1981, didn’t invade the Capitol building in an attempted coup, to stop electoral vote-counting. They didn’t wave the Confederate flag in the Capitol, 155 years after defeat at Appomattox. They didn’t push the government into a lockdown, they didn’t vandalize offices, and they didn’t shout, “Next time we come back, we’re going to be armed.”
This was Insurrection Day, and the Republican Party is now an Insurrection Party. And like Reagan did with Carter, that should be the first, last, and only thing that Democrats say about the insurrectionists, until their last day in office and their last day on Earth. Anyone who runs under the banner of the Insurrection Party is associating themselves favorably with treason. January 6, 2021, must be remembered and acted upon, or it will be the beginning rather than the end of this chapter in history.
What does it mean to never forget? It starts by using the copious amounts of film and photography from this event as physical evidence in a sedition investigation. In many cases, we know the names of the plotters, and we know their faces. The incoming attorney general, bizarrely and incongruously enough Merrick Garland, needs to conduct this investigation seriously and relentlessly. The Capitol Police may have escorted the seditionists out of the Capitol today, but every single one of them should be tracked down and brought to justice. If you don’t, they will return. It’s not like we haven’t been warned.
It also means that the Republican Party is tarred with the legacy of Donald Trump forever. In random committee hearings on transit spending, in stump speeches for school board races, in every public utterance where a Democrat has occasion to talk about a Republican, their tolerance of violent overthrow of the U.S. government should be discussed in full-throated fashion. Josh Hawley’s political career should be over. Ted Cruz’s political career should be over. Everybody who humored, abided by, accepted, and backed up Donald Trump should be called exactly what they are: traitors.
Donald Trump should obviously be impeached, removed from office, and barred from ever taking office again, preferably within the next 48 hours. Any member of Congress who supports his effort to overturn a popularly elected president should join him out of office. The mechanism for ridding ourselves of insurrectionists was placed in the Constitution during the last traitorous uprising, and it ought to be used.
Furthermore, anyone running for anything at all under the Republican banner should be asked to explain their support of the Coup of 2021. Those Republicans who have denounced this effort—and there have been quite a few—have a sure choice to make: They can leave the Republican Party if they don’t like being associated with treason. That’s the only single way that they can escape this reckoning. Maybe they can join with the Democratic Party, and as progressives leave to form their own, we can have a two-party system based on policy differences rather than eliminationism.
This had been brewing long before Donald Trump. The last insurrection of 2000 was successful, as vote-counters in Miami stood down and the Supreme Court finished the inside job. Prior to that, the same cabal impeached a Democratic president over infidelity. Shortly thereafter, a small but loud faction tried to claim that the nation’s first Black president was unable to serve because he was a foreigner. That faction then took over the party and led the charge today. The overwhelming evidence is that Republicans—not “conservatives,” not “extremists,” but the Republican, Insurrection Party—believe that it’s illegal for a Democrat to win the presidency.
I descend from ancestors who suffered the consequences for tolerance of fascism. Allowing the Republican Party to sneak away from their actions would put this country and this democracy at similar risk. Donald Trump is a narcissist and an idiot. But explaining away the actions of his followers as hapless would be a grave mistake.
Chuck Schumer stood on a regained Senate floor on Wednesday night and called those who stormed the Capitol domestic terrorists. That’s a start, but he should extend the statement. Republicans are domestic terrorists. And that should never, ever be forgotten. If Republicans are allowed to get through this by just excising “a few bad apples,” if we are told that we should “look forward,” this won’t end. The traitors and seditionists will return. And we’ll have to answer to future generations why we allowed it to happen.
