It is now a year to former US president Donald Trump asking Americans to "fight like hell" to stop certification of Joe Biden’s election, which led to the unrest and riots at Capitol Hill on January 6. The riots only seem to have pushed lawmakers further apart. Some members are planning to mark the anniversary of the Capitol insurrection with a moment of silence. Others will spend the day educating Americans on the workings of democracy. And still others don't think the deadliest domestic attack on Congress in the nation's history needs to be remembered at all.
Where they stand on remembrance can be largely attributed to their political party, a jarring discord that shows the country's lawmakers remain strikingly at odds over how to unify a torn nation. At the time, a fired-up Trump had said he would march with them to the Capitol, though he did not. The result was violence and mayhem that left five people dead in the immediate aftermath, and hundreds facing charges and millions of dollars in property damage. But, the lack of a bipartisan resolve to assign responsibility for the siege, or acknowledge the threat it posed, has eroded trust among lawmakers, turned ordinary legislative disputes into potential crises, and left the door open for more violence after the next disputed election.
Post the riots, Trump's excommunication from the Republican Party seemed a near certainty, his name tarnished beyond repair. He certainly became the first president to be impeached twice. But the second time round too, the Senate acquitted him.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader who worked closely with Trump to dramatically reshape the judiciary, later denounced him as “morally responsible” for the attack. A year later, Trump remains an undisputed leader of the Republican Party, and one of the leading contenders for the 2024 presidential nomination.
There is no credible proof that the election was tainted, according to federal and state election officials, as well as Trump's own attorney general. Most Republican leaders have acquiesced in to Trump's refusal to accept reality, fearful of dividing a party whose base remains strongly allied with Trump and his effort to downplay the severity of what happened on January 6. Critics from both parties have been startled and depressed by the situation, believing that the uprising would push Republicans to forsake the Trump era for good.
The aftermath of Jauary 6 hangs heavy over Capitol Hill, and the Capitol. A symbol of the openness of American democracy, it remains closed to most visitors in part because of the coronavirus pandemic public health concerns, but also because of the escalated number of violent threats against lawmakers. Trump's false claims of voter fraud have continued to foment, met mostly with silence from Republicans in Congress unwilling to contradict his version of events. Some two-thirds of House Republicans and more than a handful of GOP senators voted against certifying the election results that night, after police had battled the rioters for hours, sometimes in hand-to-hand combat.
According to an investigation by news agency AP, less than 475 cases of voter fraud among 25.5 million ballots cast in the six battleground states were disputed by Trump, a minuscule number in percentage terms. The two Republicans on the House panel investigating the attack, Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, face calls to be banished from their party. Further polarisation of ideals isn’t the only result of the fateful riots last year. The riots have polarised the fight against COVID-19 too, it seems. Chief medical advisor to the president of the United States, Anthony Fauci, in June 2021 had warned that America would be divided into two—the vaccinated population that is more equipped to fight the virus and the unvaccinated population, more susceptible to the virus. And it does look like Dr Fauci’s warning was on point. While the Delta variant increases risk of hospitalisation and the new transmissible Omicron variant is still an enigma, Biden’s target to have all of America vaccinated seems to be hitting a wall. “Partisanship is now the strongest and most consistent divider in health behaviors,” Shana Gadarian, a political scientist at Syracuse University told Vox. The US is facing a different kind of COVID-19 crisis as more people get infected—hospitals are facing staff shortages causing hospitals to close wards and hold back non-emergency surgeries. About 85,000 Americans are in the hospital with COVID-19, just short of the Delta-surge peak of about 94,000 in early September, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Republicans still don’t want to hold former president Trump accountable for the events of last year. According to a poll by The Washington Post and the University of Maryland, 72 per cent of the Republicans polled think that Trump bears just some or no blame at all for the insurrection at Capitol Hill. The Democrats, on the other hand, want to hold the party accountable for holding self-interest over American democracy itself.
On getting the Republicans to take accountability for the insurrection seriously, Rep. Mondaire Jones told the What a Day podcast, “It is not going to be through kindly asking them to reconsider their position. It’s going to be through the kinds of democracy reforms that get more representative government. It is also the case that when you get people in Congress on the Republican side who are willing to tell the truth about what happened on January 6th, to say nothing of the truth about vaccines and COVID-19, you will see, I think, a recalibration on Fox News and similar networks, which weren’t as bad a few years ago before Donald Trump at least. They are responding to this new dynamic where Donald Trump has empowered people to say certain things, to lie about things, largely through coercion. I mean, because if you oppose him, then he’ll endorse your primary opponent and then you’ll be out of elected office.”
Chillingly enough, Jones isn’t entirely wrong—as per a recent study on domestic terrorism by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats and the National Opinion Research Centre 21 million adults sympathise with the insurrectionists. The insurrection was clearly about white nationalism—of something Trump had been sowing seeds of during his four years while in term. President Biden surely has a task cut out for him, with fighting a battle with the coronavirus (something Trump sidelined for a long time too) and bringing a divided nation together.
-Inputs from AP via PTI