The Inmates Are In Charge
While legal culpability for January 6 still remains to be determined, the moral responsibility for the degradation of our politics over the past year could not be clearer
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
A quick reminder that there will be no Zoom Chat tomorrow. I’m leaving town tomorrow morning to see Dead and Company perform three nights in Cancun, Mexico. This is my first real vacation in two years, so suffice to say, I’m rather excited to go. I’ll see you when I get back!
Today is the one-year anniversary of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol — an event that continues to loom over the nation’s politics. Marking the occasion, this morning, President Biden gave as forceful a speech as I’ve ever heard him deliver. Calling Trump “undemocratic” and “un-American,” he dissected the former president’s Big Lie about the 2020 election and put the responsibility for the events of January 6 squarely on his shoulders.
“The former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He’s done so because he values power over principle, because he sees his own interest as more important than his country’s interest and America’s interest, and because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our Constitution. He can’t accept he lost.”
It’s not often you hear a current president attack a previous president in this manner. Still, when said former president is undermining democracy and putting the country at risk … it’s as good a time as any to violate a long-standing norm.
While the moral responsibility for January 6 clearly lies with Trump, it is the question of legal culpability that continues to roil the nation’s politics. Yesterday Attorney General Merrick Garland gave a speech committing to “holding all Jan. 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under the law — whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy.”
Garland’s remarks were an obvious effort to deflect increasingly strident criticism from Democrats over his failure to charge former President Donald Trump with a crime for what took place one year ago today. For example, on MSNBC, Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona said of the attorney general, “I think Merrick Garland has been extremely weak, and I think a lot more of the organizers of January 6 should be arrested by now." Last month, former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, said Garland would “go down in infamy as one of the worst attorney generals in this country’s history” if he fails to prosecute Trump.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I find this rhetoric incredibly unwise. Politicians should not be pushing the Department of Justice to hand down criminal charges against anyone. Period. Democrats didn’t like it when Republicans put political pressure on DOJ — and they shouldn’t be doing the same thing themselves.
Ironically, these comments risk politicizing any potential indictments of Trump and his associates by giving the appearance that Garland surrendered to political pressure. Garland and other officials at DOJ need to do their job and follow the facts and the law, not the understandable desire for someone to be held accountable for what happened on January 6.
Of course, many people are being held responsible for January 6. DOJ’s investigation of the Capitol insurrection has already led to more than 700 arrests, but these are almost exclusively low-level individuals — not the supposed ringleaders. The problem for those pushing for higher-ups to be held legally accountable is that it’s far from clear that other crimes were committed.
We know, for example, that a rally was held on the National Mall on January 6 and that participants then walked to the Capitol and stormed the building. But organizing a rally — no matter how toxic — is not a criminal offense. Unless it can be shown that the day’s speakers incited the crowd to riot it’s hard to see how any of them, or the rally organizers, could be charged with a crime. In addition, no evidence has yet emerged that the violence at the Capitol was coordinated. In fact, it continues to appear that the insurrectionists acted spontaneously.
There is, of course, one other legal issue that has Democrats up in arms: Trump’s culpability for trying to steal the 2020 election. On that front, I find it difficult to see how the former president didn’t commit a crime. He clearly tried to interfere in Congress’s efforts to certify the 2020 election. There is a phone recording of him calling the Georgia Secretary of State and pressuring him to switch enough votes so that Trump would be declared the state's winner. I realize that I got my law degree from watching episodes of “Law & Order” but it’s pretty hard to see how Trump isn’t in legal jeopardy for these actions. But ultimately, the call here is Garland’s and as a small “d” democrat I prefer that he makes a charging decision based on what the law says, not the politics of the situation.
It’s also important to keep in mind that a former president of the United States has never been charged with a crime in the nation’s history. If that were to occur, it would be a momentous prosecutorial decision. I can’t imagine that any Attorney General would want to proceed unless they were fully confident that they had all their proverbial legal ducks in a row. Losing such a case could validate Trump’s actions, so if Garland acts, he will need to be sure that he has an airtight case. So while I understand that desire for Garland to move forward, patience is most certainly in order. I, for one, hope that the former president is held legally accountable for his actions, but if DOJ doesn’t believe it can prove that he committed a crime, I’d prefer that he not be charged.
The Inmates Are In Charge
A year later, the significance of January 6 is less about what happened that day and far more about the transformation — or perhaps I should say degradation — of the Republican Party.
The events of that day could have been an infection point for Republicans and an opportunity to cast off the stain of Trumpism once and for all. At the time, a handful of influential Republicans were willing to blame Trump for the day’s violence, including longtime ally Sen. Lindsay Graham and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. But as has been the case for the past five years, courage in the Republican caucus is a fleeting thing. All but 7 Senate Republicans refused to hold Trump accountable during his second impeachment. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who voted against impeachment, delivered a blistering attack on the former president’s actions on January 6 … and then two months later said that if Trump were the GOP presidential nominee in 2024, he’d support him. For McConnell and his Republican cohorts, it’s always politics before morality, ethics, and the country's best interests.
One by one, even the mildest critics of Trump’s behavior have turned tail and gone back to being sycophants of the former president. As a result, Trumpism has strengthened its grip over the GOP in the past year. Republicans sat out Congress’s investigation of January 6, and in between muted criticisms of the rioters have far more vociferously accused Democrats of politicizing the day’s events. Some have even defended the rioters as freedom-loving patriots. So the armed extremists who fought with police, invaded the Capitol and tried to hunt down lawmakers like Vice President Mike Pence are, for all intents and purposes, now in charge.
Their radicalism and fervent belief in Trump’s Big Lie are the driving ideology of the Republican Party. Today, two-thirds of Republicans believe that Joe Biden is president because of voter fraud, not because he won more votes than Trump. A democracy in which one political party will not accept defeat cannot effectively function as a democracy.
I’m sure that many elected Republicans see their embrace of Trump and Trumpism as yet another short-term tactical move. It will help them take back control of Congress in 2022 and keep rank-and-file Republicans on board, or so they tell themselves. It is, as always, a means to a political end. It’s the same political calculus that Republicans have made for 50 years — winking and nodding at the extremists in their midst, all the while believing that they can keep the barbarians outside the walls. They did it with birtherism a decade ago, more recently with Trump’s presidential crimes, and now with this Big Lie. It’s the same cycle of fecklessness, repeated year after year by Republicans who can only see the next election in front of them.
But if January 6 showed us anything, those walls can easily be breached — both literally and metaphorically. A year ago, Republicans had their chance to say goodbye to Trumpism and chose not to take it. A year later, we are still living with the consequences of their cowardly decision.
What’s Going On
Read congressional reporter Matt Fuller looking back on how January 6 changed him.
Seth Masket has a reasonably pessimistic view about the Democrats’ chances of holding the House of Representatives next November.
Musical Interlude
Here’s Soul Asylum performing “Sexual Healing.”
Here’s James Brown performing “Prisoner of Love.”
And finally, here’s my favorite cut from Sly Stone’s “There’s A Riot Goin’ On.”
"no evidence has yet emerged that the violence at the Capitol was coordinated. In fact, it continues to appear that the insurrectionists acted spontaneously." That's not my impression, based on what Marcy Wheeler has been writing at emptywheel this past year. Not that she has conclusive evidence of coordination, but she does offer plenty of clues. For instance, just this morning she wrote about "the coordinated assault from the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, America Firsters, and Alex Jones on the East door." Link here: https://www.emptywheel.net/2022/01/06/january-6-is-unknowable/
Stay safe on your vacation! Please don't get careless. I know that America isn't the beacon of light that it used to be, but Mexico is a government that is partially run by drug cartels. N95 or KN95 when indoors among strangers. And thank you for your appraisal of Garland. You showed me a side of the argument that I hadn't considered.