New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill even claimed on Tuesday that she saw members of Congress “who had groups coming through the Capitol that I saw on January 5 for reconnaissance for the next day.” (She did not identify the lawmakers in question or provide further details, but said she would push for further investigations.)īasic legislative comity is so thoroughly broken down that a half-dozen Republican lawmakers refused to wear face masks while members were sheltering in place during the attack, despite the ongoing pandemic and despite the presence of elderly Democratic lawmakers in the room with them. New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said she felt unsafe in an evacuation place for lawmakers during the attack “because there were QAnon and white-supremacist sympathizers and, frankly, white-supremacist members of Congress in that extraction point who I know and who I have felt would disclose my location and would create opportunities to allow me to be hurt, kidnapped, et cetera.” Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley’s chief of staff provided The Boston Globe with a chilling detail: While bunkered in their offices during the melee, they were surprised to discover that the panic buttons installed in Pressley’s office had been mysteriously “torn out” at an unspecified point before the riot. Cawthorn, who was carrying a firearm in the Capitol during the riot, has now tried to backtrack on some false claims of election fraud, without taking responsibility for his role in spreading them. “Call your congressman and feel free-you can lightly threaten them and say, ‘You know what, if you don’t start supporting election integrity, I’m coming after you, Madison Cawthorn is coming after you, everybody’s coming after you,’” he told a Turning Point USA audience in December. North Carolina’s Madison Cawthorn, another newcomer to Capitol Hill, also appeared to encourage conservatives to intimidate their elected officials over Trump’s voter-fraud lies. Lauren Boebert, a freshman representative from Colorado, wrote on Twitter that January 6 “was 1776.” Boebert later drew criticism for live-tweeting from inside the House chamber during the attack, including a tweet noting that Speaker Nancy Pelosi “has been removed from the chambers.” Pelosi was a key target of the rioters’ attack, leading others to criticize Boebert for giving away information that could make the House speaker easier to locate. Other Republican lawmakers expressed solidarity with the protesters before they turned violent. “We four schemed up of putting maximum pressure on Congress while they were voting,” Alexander claimed in a December livestream with supporters, “so that who we couldn’t lobby, we could change the hearts and the minds of Republicans who were in that body hearing our loud roar from outside.” Ali Alexander, a right-wing activist who helped lead the planning for the January 6 rallies, attributed their creation to Brooks, Gosar, and Arizona Representative Andy Biggs, who leads the far-right House Freedom Caucus. “You get to go back home once we conquer the Hill Donald Trump is returned to being president,” Gosar told attendees at one “Stop the Steal” rally. Multiple House Republicans appeared at pro-Trump rallies shortly before the riots took place, including Alabama’s Mo Brooks and Arizona’s Paul Gosar. And when it comes to sitting lawmakers who organized or sanctioned third-party violence against each other or against Congress itself, there is no clear precedent anywhere in American history. Duels of honor have not been a feature of American culture for more than a century, despite the fleeting wishes of Georgia Senator Zell Miller during the 2004 presidential election. Lawmakers no longer assault one another in and around the Capitol. Nearly every American high school student learns about Preston Brooks, the Southern representative who bludgeoned Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor in the prelude to the Civil War.īut after the war was won and the rebellion put down, these brawls rapidly became a relic of an antique era. In her book The Field of Blood, which delves into lawmakers’ unruly behavior in the early republic, historian Joanne Freeman wrote that she had uncovered “more than seventy violent incidents between congressmen in the House and Senate chambers or on nearby streets and dueling grounds, most of them long forgotten,” between 18. Congress hasn’t been immune to violence among its members over the past 200 years.
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