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Unsanitized: Special Edition, Jan. 7, 2021

 

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. (Andrew Harnik/AP Photo)

What It Means to Never Forget

The Republican Party is an Insurrection Party, and the insurrectionists
should be tarred with that for the rest of their lives

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.

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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."

Yesterday 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.

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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.

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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.

We Can't Do This Without You

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.

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