Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

This piece by Ezra Klein from 2017 features a quote from the new Chief of Staff Ron Klain that shows he had Trump’s number from the get:

A few weeks back, I wrote a piece about Donald Trump titled “How to stop an autocracy.” The essay began with the premise that Trump has a will to power and a contempt for the basic norms and institutions of American democracy, and then explored how to limit the damage. The answer, basically, was that Congress needs to do its damn job.

But after I wrote it, smart people argued the piece was built atop a mistake. Trump might have the will to power, but he doesn’t have the discipline for it. Grim scenarios suggesting his presidency would grow too strong missed the likelier scenario that it would be extremely weak.

Yuval Levin, editor of the journal National Affairs and a leading conservative intellectual, made the case to me over email:

I think the more plausible cause for worry is that he will be a dysfunctional president. He seems to have come in without a clear sense of the nature and character of the presidency in our system, and he’s not playing that role but rather using the presidency as a platform for playing the role he has always played. And for now the White House team seems to be reinforcing that rather than counteracting it. The result of that seems more likely to be dysfunction than autocracy.

Levin’s argument is convincing.

Trump’s White House is the picture of dysfunction. He isn’t focused or effective in his application of executive power. His staff is riven with infighting, inexperienced with the mechanics of government, and unable to corral their boss’s worst impulses. Trump’s slipshod executive orders are being easily batted back by courts, and his agenda hasn’t even made it to Congress yet. How is he going to go from here to strongman?

I felt better. And then I talked to Ron Klain.

Klain served as chief of staff to both Vice President Al Gore and Vice President Joe Biden. He led Hillary Clinton’s debate prep — which is to say, he was deeply involved in their effort to understand Trump’s psychology — and he was widely rumored to be the frontrunner for chief of staff in Clinton’s White House. He understands how government works, and I’ve always found him unusually sober in his view of it.

Klain had a theory that combined Trump’s authoritarian impulses and troubled White House management in a way I found hard to dismiss. In Klain’s view, it’s Trump’s dysfunctional relationship with the government that catalyzes his illiberal tendencies — the more he is frustrated by the system, the more he will turn on the system.

“If Trump became a full-fledged autocrat, it will not be because he succeeds in running the state,” Klain said. “It’s not going to be like Julius Caesar, where we thank him and here’s a crown. It’ll be that he fails, and he has to find a narrative for that failure. And it will not be a narrative of self-criticism. It will not be that he let you down. He will figure out who the villains are, and he will focus the public’s anger at them.”

As we learned this weekend, he tried very, very hard to be that autocrat as his presidency was in its death throes. He found a flunky in the DOJ who would happily do his bidding and came close to making him the acting Attorney General to carry it out. It was only the last vestiges of institutional integrity left in the DOJ that stopped it when the top echelon of the department said they would quit if he did it. He saw the writing on the wall. But I don’t think you have to be an oracle to know that if the election had come down to one state where we would be today.

Klain had Trump’s number from the beginning. Let’s hope he has the same insight into Trump’s collaborators because they’re still there doing their worst.

Years ago, I wrote about this phenomenon from a different angle and I called the political and media establishment “The Village” because they came to think of DC as the voice of the “average American.”

In this piece from 2000’s I was referring to The Washington Post’s David Broder, at the time the “dean” of the press corps. (Today it would probably be Dan Balz.)

Broder and others …venture out into the American landscape with a sort of pre-conceived notion of what defines “the people” that appears to have been formed by TV sit-coms in 1955. They seem to see extraordinary value in sitting in some diner with middle aged and older white men (sometimes a few women are included) to “ask them what they think.” And invariably these middle-aged white men say the country is going to hell in a handbasket and they want the government to do more and they hate paying taxes. There may be a little frisson of disagreement among these otherwise similar people on certain issues of the day because of their affiliation with a union or because of the war or certain social issues, but for the most part they all sit together and politely talk politics with this anthropologist/reporter, usually agreeing that this president or another one is a bum or a hero. The reporter takes careful notes of everything these “real Americans” have to say and take them back to DC and report them as the opinions of “the people.”

Meanwhile, someone like me, who lives in a big city on the west coast and who doesn’t hang out in diners with middle aged white men are used as an example of the “fringe” even though I too am one of “the people” as are many others — like hispanic youths or single urban mothers or dot-com millionaires or elderly southern black granddads or Korean entrepreneurs (or even Sheryl Crow.) We are not Real Americans.

This fetishization of that other mythical “Real American” seems to stem from a public epiphany that the previous “Dean” of the DC press corps, Joseph Kraft, had almost 40 years ago when confronted with the disconcerting sight of violence in the streets perpetrated by nice boys and girls:

“Are we merely neutral observers, seekers after truth in the public interest? Or do we, as the supporters of Mayor Daley and his Chicago police have charged, have a prejudice of our own?

“The answer, I think is that Mayor Daley and his supporters have a point. Most of us in what is called the communications field are not rooted in the great mass of ordinary Americans–in Middle America. And the results show up not merely in occasional episodes such as the Chicago violence but more importantly in the systematic bias toward young people, minority groups, and the of presidential candidates who appeal to them.

“To get a feel of this bias it is first necessary to understand the antagonism that divides the middle class of this country. On the one hand there are highly educated upper-income whites sure of and brimming with ideas for doing things differently. On the other hand, there is Middle America, the large majority of low-income whites, traditional in their values and on the defensive against innovation.

“The most important organs of and television are, beyond much doubt, dominated by the outlook of the upper-income whites.

“In these circumstances, it seems to me that those of us in the media need to make a special effort to understand Middle America. Equally it seems wise to exercise a certain caution, a prudent restraint, in pressing a claim for a plenary indulgence to be in all places at all times the agent of the sovereign public.”

Joseph Kraft defined “Middle America” as a blue collar or rural white male, “traditional in his values and defensive against innovation.” Ever since then, the denizens of the beltway have deluded themselves into thinking they speak for that “silent majority.” (And what a serendipitous coincidence it was that this happened at the moment of a right wing political ascension that also made a fetish out of the same blue collar white male.) The converse of this, of course, is that they also assume that the “fringe” liberals from the coasts are way out of the mainstream, even to the extent that editors of Time simply make up data to conform to Kraft’s outdated observations.

The Village may not be dead yet.

Update: I should also add this great piece by Josh Marshall from last decade which looks at the same phenomenon from yet another angle. As he puts it, “DC is wired for Republicans.”

Here’s the best way to unify: accountability, justice then reconciliation — in that order

If people can’t unify around the fact that a violent insurrection to overturn the election is wrong, I’m afraid there isn’t much hope. But the fact is that most of the people who think that was justified have been lied to. (A fair number know very well that the election was fair, they just believe they are entitled to win and that the ends justify the means.) Some of those people can move off their position with enough time and a change in the social incentives.

It will be possible to turn down the temperature eventually. But it cannot happen without accountability.

Joe Biden announced his run for president with these words:

Charlottesville, Virginia is home to the author of one of the great documents in human history.

We know it by heart:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.

We’ve heard it so often, it’s almost a cliché. But it’s who we are.

We also haven’t always lived up to these ideals.

Thomas Jefferson himself didn’t

But we have never before walked away from them.

Charlottesville is also home to a defining moment for this nation in the last few years. It was there, in August of 2017, that we saw Klansmen, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis come out into the open — their crazed faces illuminated by torches, veins bulging, bearing the fangs of racism. They chanted the same anti-Semitic and racist bile heard across Europe in the 1930s and 40s.

They were met by a courageous group of Americans, and a violent clash ensued. A brave young woman lost her life.

And that’s when we heard words from the President of the United States that stunned the world and shocked the conscience of our nation. He said there were some “very fine people on both sides.”

“Very fine people on both sides.”

With those words, the President of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it.

And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had seen in my lifetime.

I wrote at the time that we were in the battle for the soul of this nation. That is even more true today.

He said this throughout his campaign, it obviously was a major motivation for running and one of the reasons people voted for him. So why are the right wingers screeching like a bunch of crazed harpies over his inaugural address in which he hit some of the same themes?

Jonathan Chait:

The portion of the speech that rankled was Biden’s renunciation of racism and violent white-supremacist terrorism.

“If you read his speech and listen to it carefully, much of it is thinly veiled innuendo calling us white supremacists, calling us racists,” protested Rand Paul on Fox News. “It’s an odd way to seek national unity: Call a significant portion of the American public white supremacists, racists, and nativists,” complained Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald. Tucker Carlson devoted an entire segment to angrily denouncing Biden for opposing white supremacy, which he interpreted, not unreasonably, as a veiled criticism of himself and his most fervent supporters.

None of these right-wingers self-identify as racist or white supremacist. And at no point did Biden say, or even imply, that all — or even most — Trump supporters are racist. Why, then, do they object to a fairly rote denunciation of ideas they claim to abhor themselves?

To understand why it rankled them, you should start with Biden’s reasons for including an attack on white supremacy in the first place. From Biden’s standpoint, he needed to do this in order to contextualize his call for “unity.” Historically, unity has been used as a device to encourage white Americans to come together while ignoring racism. The basis for the post-Reconstruction healing of the regional and partisan split was that white northern Republicans withdrew their protection for freed slaves and allowed white Southerners to violently repress and disenfranchise black people. That sub rosa agreement became the foundation for the century-long period of depolarized politics that ran from the end of Reconstruction through the civil-rights era, which triggered its demise.

Black Americans have particular cause for suspicion of “unity” as a transcendent value. (Biden himself has inadvertently articulated their reasons for questioning the old, bipartisan era when he touted his history of making deals with segregationists.) Biden’s explicit renunciation of racism and white-supremacist terror was a way of clarifying that his idea of unity would exclude, rather than include, racism.

Then, of course, there was the recent insurrection by a mob that, if not white supremacist in toto, was led by a militant white-supremacist vanguard. Biden is attempting to define a (small-d) democratic order that excludes a violent authoritarian faction that refuses to accept political equality for fellow citizens.

And that is what makes Biden’s statement an implicit rebuke to Trump and his fans. One of the most significant realignments of the Trump era was an extension of the Republican coalition to the more distant edges of the far right. As early as 2015, observers like Evan Osnos recognized that Trump had activated Nazis and Nazi-like white supremacists. (Ron Paul, Rand’s father and formative influence, was a precursor in bringing these fringe groups into his coalition.) Trump’s presidency inspired extremists, and brought into existence new ones, like the Proud Boys and QAnon.

Biden is implicitly demanding Republicans renounce those fringe groups. That’s what makes his speech so offensive to Trump enthusiasts. Carlson, indeed, all but admits that his refusal to denounce right-wing extremists is the hangup. In his segment on Biden’s speech, he said:

Other channels fill their air with attacks on the Proud Boys, whoever they are, or QAnon enthusiasts or gun owners in central Pennsylvania who fix air conditioning for a living and tend to vote the wrong way. They go after those people, and you can see why…. Attacking those people isn’t hard. None of them have real power.

Whether or not they have “real power,” they did overpower the security at the U.S. Capitol, occupy the Congress, get a lot of people injured or killed, and scare the entire country. If they were totally powerless, Trump and Carlson would be happy to renounce the far right. They won’t, because they value its small but energetic contribution to their audience and movement.

Carlson, MacDonald and Paul heard Biden denounce white supremacy, and decided he was talking about them. That’s a choice they made, and it says more about them than it does about Biden.

They clearly identify with the White Supremacists even if they don’t identify themselves as white supremacists. I don’t know why they don’t just go for it.

This guy…

Stephanopoulos immediately kicked off Sunday’s This Week interview with Paul by asking him a “threshold” question about the results of the election, wondering aloud if he accepted that President Joe Biden’s victory was legitimate and “not stolen,” something former President Donald Trump and his allies have baselessly insisted and which eventually resulted in an insurrectionist riot.

“Well, what I would say is that the debate over whether or not there was fraud should occur, we never had any presentation in court,” the Kentucky lawmaker deflected. “Most of the cases were thrown out for lack of standing, a procedural way of not hearing it.”

As Paul said there was “still a chance” that some cases challenging states’ voting laws or alleging irregularities could make their way to the Supreme Court, the ABC moderator pushed back to point out that Republicans’ election challenges have been laughed out of court.

“I have to stop you there,” Stephanoulous noted. “No election is perfect. But there were 86 challenges filed by President Trump and his allies in court, all were dismissed. Every state certified the results.”

The Republican senator contended that the majority of Republican voters believe that “we do need to look at election integrity,” prompting Stephanopoulos to claim that those voters agree with Paul “because they were fed a ‘big lie’ by President Trump and his supporters.”

Cornered on the issue, and still refusing to admit that the election was not “stolen,” Paul then framed the argument as a partisan and ideological issue, complaining that “people coming from the liberal side” immediately “say everything’s a lie instead of saying there’s two sides to everything.”

Stephanopoulos, meanwhile, again explained that Trump falsely claimed the “election was stolen” when, in fact, it wasn’t. Furthermore, as the ABC host stated, Trump’s own attorney general and Department of Justice found no evidence of widespread voter fraud that would impact the election’s results.

“I won’t be cowed by liberals in the media who say ‘there’s no evidence here and you’re a liar if you talk about election fraud.’ Let’s have an open debate this is a free country,” Paul grumbled in response.

The Trump-boosting senator went on to dismiss former Attorney General William Barr’s declaration about the lack of evidence of voter fraud, claiming it was just a “pronouncement.” From there, he complained that the media is unfair to Republicans and says they are “all liars.”

“There are two sides to every story,” he blared.

“Sir, there are not two sides to this story. This has been looked in every single state,” Stephanopoulos shot back.

“There are two sides to every story,” Paul wailed. “George, you’re forgetting who you are as a journalist if you think there’s only one side. You’re inserting yourself into the story to say I’m a liar!”

“There are not two sides to facts,” the ABC anchor retorted.

Stephanopoulos would then circle back to the original question about whether Paul felt the election was stolen or not, something Paul still refused to answer.

“I think there was great deal of evidence of fraud and changing of the election laws illegally,” he asserted. “A thorough investigation is warranted.”

He’s a liar. Even Chris Christie agrees:

This is happening in state parties all over the country apparently:

Arizona Republicans voted Saturday to censure Cindy McCain and two prominent GOP members who have found themselves crosswise with former President Donald Trump.

The censures of Sen. John McCain’s widow, former Sen. Jeff Flake and Gov. Doug Ducey are merely symbolic. But they show the party’s foot soldiers are focused on enforcing loyalty to Trump, even in the wake of an election that saw Arizona inch away from its staunchly Republican roots.

Party activists also reelected controversial Chairwoman Kelli Ward, who has been one of Trump’s most unflinching supporters and among the most prolific promoters of his baseless allegations of election fraud.

The Arizona GOP’s combative focus has delighted Trump’s staunchest supporters and worried Republican insiders who have watched the party lose ground in the suburbs as the influence of its traditional conservative establishment has faded in favor of Trump. A growing electorate of young Latinos and newcomers bringing their more liberal politics from back home have further hurt the GOP.

“This is a time for choosing for Republicans. Are we going to be the conservative party?” said Kirk Adams, a former state House speaker and chief of staff to Ducey. “Or is this a party … that’s loyal to a single person?”

It’s a question of Republican identity that party officials and activists are facing across the country following Trump’s 2020 loss, and particularly after a mob of his supporters laid siege on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

The cult members didn’t know quite what to do about Mitch. Yet:

The Republican Party of Kentucky’s State Central Committee rejected a resolution Saturday that would have urged Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to fully support former President Donald Trump and condemn his second impeachment.

The committee met Saturday to consider the proposal after the Republican Party of Nelson County announced more than 30 GOP county chairs and vice chairs had called for a meeting to consider the resolution aimed at the commonwealth’s longtime senator. 

Republican Party of Kentucky Chairman Mac Brown called the resolution out of order, and the majority of the committee agreed, a member told The Courier Journal after the meeting. The final vote agreeing the resolution should be deemed out of order was 134-49, the member said.

The party released a statement following the meeting, which it said had been called for by 28 members of the body.

“As a political party, we’re in a unique position to bring all sides of our organization together to have conversations about the direction we are going in and what we expect from our elected officials,” the statement said. The central committee “met in a special meeting called by a small group of individuals. In the end it is our intention to return our focus to bringing civility to the party and continue having larger conversations about how we can attract more voters and grow our party.”

Republican Party of Nelson County Chair Don Thrasher, who led the resolution effort, said the chairs who supported it will now bring a motion asking for McConnell’s resignation, which he said is in the purview of the rules. 

Meanwhile, Trump is seriously talking about a third party.

Lol.

“Why can’t we have nice things?” asks Heather McGhee. At “The.Ink” last week, McGhee discussed her new book  “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” with Anand Giridharadas. She explains, “Part of what American racial consciousness has done is to ratchet down white people’s expectations for themselves.”

MvGhee illustrates the problem with the decline of public swimming pools:

HEATHER: The parable is a story that I grew up learning from family members. It was a very visceral memory for many of them. There was a grand, resort-style public swimming pool in the heart of their community. In fact, in the United States there were more than 2,000 of them that were built with tax dollars over the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s. In many ways, it was one of the most real, everyday examples of the New Deal consensus of government being a force for the improvement of the everyday quality of life of its citizens.

Yet in so many of these communities, the pools were for whites only or were segregated. In the 1950s and ’60s, as the courts began to knock down these segregation codes in recreational facilities, many towns in virtually every region of the country decided to drain their public swimming pools, rather than integrate them. This happened in St. Louis. It happened in West Virginia, in Ohio, in Florida, and Louisiana. 

When racism drained the public pool, everyone in the town — including white families — lost out. 

The derelict pool illustrating the her parable at “The.Ink” resembles one here in town once used by Black residents and long abandoned.*

The decline in belief in public goods has a racial component, McGhee argues. It is not a matter of whites voting against their best interests (an expression I loathe):

HEATHER: They vote in their perceived racial interest, and against their class interest. I don’t understand how you can be a student of American history or be alive in today’s politics and not understand how powerful that racial interest is. Even if it only affords you the ability to be able to march into the Capitol and walk back out and have daiquiris, it’s clear that there are material and social benefits to whiteness in a vastly unjust society.

But in the nation with the largest economy on Earth, and potentially the largest representative multiracial democracy on the planet, we could have, for all of us, a much higher standard of living and much more economic security.

There is much more worth reading at the link.

I’d add that there is also an interplay between technological change (thought morally neutral) and concomitant social change for which we blame people (minorities and immigrants are always handy). Racial animus gives us villains to blame for loss of “Scrantons” and political cover for people who profit from technology and from a divide-and-conquer approach to maintaining their places atop the economy.

We’re animals in the end. Our enemies/predators have faces; systems have none. It’s very convenient.

*Update: To be clear, the pool atop this post, after being idle for years, has been renovated and put back in service.

Pour a fresh cup of coffee and take in this 2000-word celebration of progressive organizing from the New York Times.

The deadly coronavirus pandemic had a silver lining for progressive organizers from coast to coast. Zoom meetings and conference calls meant activist leaders stuck inside could still brainstorm and strategize:

The video call was announced on short notice, but more than 900 people quickly joined: a coalition of union officials and racial justice organizers, civil rights lawyers and campaign strategists, pulled together in a matter of hours after the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill.

They convened to craft a plan for answering the onslaught on American democracy, and they soon reached a few key decisions. They would stay off the streets for the moment and hold back from mass demonstrations that could be exposed to an armed mob goaded on by President Donald J. Trump.

They would use careful language. In a presentation, Anat Shenker-Osorio, a liberal messaging guru, urged against calling the attack a “coup,” warning that the word could make Mr. Trump sound far stronger than he was — or even imply that a pro-Trump militia had seized power.

Subtlety is not the typical response from the progressive left, and rarely valued or practiced. Reaction appears more the norm to those on the outside. In this case, however, advance planning meant executing an effective response to Trump’s attempts to control the outcome of the Nov. 3 election.

The Democracy Defense Coalition led by Deirdre Schifeling, a former top strategist for Planned Parenthood, grew from “a long season of planning and coordination by progressives.” When the doomsday scenarios war-gamed in the spring and summer emerged after the fall election, progressives were ready. Not with “fiery rhetoric and divisive demands” but with a “more studied vocabulary, developed through nightly opinion research and message testing.” And perhaps more importantly, with relationships born of months of cooperation aimed at protecting the vote:

For the most part, the organized left anticipated Mr. Trump’s postelection schemes, including his premature attempt to claim a victory he had not achieved, his pressure campaigns targeting Republican election administrators and county officials and his incitement of far-right violence, strategy documents show.

Ai-jen Poo, a prominent organizer involved in the effort, said the realization had dawned on a wide range of groups: “We all had to come together and bring everything we could to protecting our right to vote.”

Those groups ordinarily pursue their own goals from women’s issues to labor organizing. But in this effort, everyone’s interests were on the line.

Michael Podhorzer, an A.F.L.-C.I.O. strategist, was one of the new coalition’s architects. As the pandemic took hold in April. he drafted “Threats to the 2020 Election” outlining how cyberattacks, mass disinformation and more might disrupt voting and vote-counting.

“We are eight months away from crisis,” Mr. Podhorzer wrote in a missive to his allies. “Our efforts over the last three years to create a political infrastructure to mobilize and persuade voters has been extraordinary, but our preparation for the coming crisis has been woefully inadequate.”

Other progressive strategists, at organizations founded after 2016 like the Fight Back Table and the Social and Economic Justice Leaders group, had been mulling the same perils ahead.

As detailed here in August:

The Transition Integrity Project ran a series of war games in June to simulate what might happen after Election Day. About 100 bipartisan players from former Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta to former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, plus pundits and academics participated.

Over the summer and into the fall, weekly coordination calls over Zoom brought together hundreds of progressive organizations focused on winning the fall elections. With a coalition of over 200 strategists and activist groups, the Democracy Defense Coalition became “the largest of several interlocking progressive federations that prepared for a contested election.”

So when election night tipped in Joe Biden’s direction, organizers were prepared and coordinated. Planned pos-election rallies were replaced by targeted actions in places at vote-counting facilities. If the right attempted to revive the Brooks Brothers riot of Florida 2000 in Philadelphia and Detroit, progressives were prepared to head them off, the Times explains:

Anna Galland, a prominent progressive organizer involved in the deliberations, said it had been a “tough decision” not to mobilize nationwide demonstrations. Part of the concern, she said, had been that they might “inadvertently turn the tide of media momentum” by depicting a defeated president as a fearsome adversary.

“Organizing any kind of massive ‘It’s a coup’ mobilization, in the midst of those contested days, would have just been bait for the right,” she said.

Where they did gather, organizers were urged to take a tone of celebration and triumph. The goal, leaders agreed, would be to make Mr. Trump’s actions look impotent. Ms. Stamp described a midweek demonstration in Philadelphia, organized when she and others learned of a Proud Boys presence in the area, that became a “two-day dance party” that averted a tense standoff.

As Protect Democracy pushed back against Trump activists’ efforts to intimidate elections officials, Democracy Docket and other well-prepared Democratic attorneys quashed case after case — over 60 — brought by Trump lawyers to overturn election results.

The New Republic’s “Soapbox” in September dismissed planning for these efforts as “ridiculous war-gaming.” Then came months of Trump denying he had lost, alleging his reelection was stolen, pressuring state elections officials, and finally inciting violent insurrection. Yet through it all, advance planning and progressives’ cooperation helped our republic survive the greatest threat to our democracy since The War of 1812.

Cynical observers often condemn Democrats and progressive allies for doing nothing (or nothing effective) because those efforts are not visible to the casual observer. But not seeing is not the same as nothing happening. Take heart. There is more than meets the eye.

Washington Post:

Federal law enforcement officials are privately debating whether they should decline to charge some of the individuals who stormed the U.S. Capitol this month — a politically loaded proposition but one alert to the practical concern that hundreds of such cases could swamp the local courthouse.

The internal discussions are in their early stages, and no decisions have been reached about whether to forgo charging some of those who illegally entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions.

Justice Department officials have promised a relentless effort to identify and arrest those who stormed the Capitol that day, but internally there is robust back-and-forth about whether charging them all is the best course of action. That debate comes at a time when officials are keenly sensitive that the credibility of the Justice Department and the FBI are at stake in such decisions, given the apparent security and intelligence failures that preceded the riot, these people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss legal deliberations.

Absolutely not. These people knew they were breaking and entering the US Capitol during a Joint Session of Congress convened to count the electoral votes! It wasn’t breaking into the high school for spring fling! They were trying to overturn the presidential election for god’s sakes! Five people died, one of them a policeman at the hands of this mob.

All of them had agency. They could have walked away. Plenty of people in that crowd did that, even though they were Donald Trump supporters too. Anyone who wandered the halls with miscreants carrying Confederate flags and wearing Camp Auschwitz shirts and chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”, who heard the threats of violence against Speaker Pelosi and watched as the police were threatened and assaulted were accomplices. I’m sorry, they deserve to have the book thrown at them. And frankly the book really isn’t that harsh considering what they were trying to do.

They should keep the courts running 24/7 and let every single non-violent suspect go if they have to. This was an assault on our democracy and acting as though they were just letting off steam or on some sort of unauthorized tour is unacceptable.

These are not “very fine people:”

The Justice Department revealed new charges against a Texas man who allegedly participated in the Capitol attack and posted online death threats against Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a US Capitol Police officer.

Garret Miller of Texas faces five criminal charges stemming from the Capitol insurrection, including trespassing offenses and making death threats. Miller allegedly tweeted, “assassinate AOC,” according to court documents.

He also said the police officer who fatally shot a Trump supporter during the attack “deserves to die” and won’t “survive long” because it’s “huntin[g] season.”

Investigation into US Capitol riot moves into more complicated phaseProsecutors said in newly released court documents that Miller posted extensively on social media before and during the attack, saying a “civil war could start” and “next time we bring the guns.”

He was arrested on Wednesday, according to the Justice Department. Federal prosecutors are asking a judge to keep him in jail pending trial, and a detention hearing is scheduled for Monday.Clint Broden, a lawyer for Miller, told CNN Saturday that his client “certainly regrets what he did.”

“He did it in support of former President (Donald) Trump, but regrets his actions. He has the support of his family, and a lot of the comments, as viewed in context, are really sort of misguided political hyperbole. Given the political divide these days, there is a lot of hyperbole,” Broden said.

Death threats = “misguided political hyperbole

Right.