Insurrection, siege, riot, protest, tour.
People across the political spectrum differ on how to label what happened at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — the day a sharply divided Congress set out to certify electoral votes that would install Democrat Joe Biden as president.
For several hours that day, the peaceful transfer of power hung in the balance as Capitol police officers fended off fiercely loyal supporters of former Pres. Donald J. Trump who believed their candidate had actually won the 2020 election.
In a rally earlier that day, Trump drove that point home to a large crowd of followers who had gathered at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C.:
“All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media. That’s what they’ve done and what they’re doing. We will never give up, we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved,” a transcript of Trump’s full speech detailed.
Fearing for their lives, members of Congress went into hiding after the mob broke windows and made their way inside the Capitol. Only after hours of delay did Capitol police receive National Guard and other law enforcement backup to re-establish control of the nation’s power center.
Much to their credit, Congress reconvened at 8 p.m. to finish their task.
“It was just a terrible day for our country,” said Devin Wiser, who spent the past decade in DC before taking a job as executive director of government relations for Weber State University’s Walker Institute in November 2020.
During his time in the nation’s capital, Wiser earned a law degree from George Mason University and worked on Capitol Hill in a variety of posts, the most recent as chief of staff for former Republican Congressman Rob Bishop. His thoughts that winter day immediately went to friends and colleagues still working in the Capitol complex.
“I was concerned for their well-being,” Wiser said. He also reflected on his early days as an intern when he gave many Capitol tours — “and they certainly did not look like that.”
However, Wiser hesitates to use the word insurrection.
“People call it an insurrection, but I think we need to be careful how we characterize it. It certainly was a riot,” Wiser said.
Insurrection refers to a revolt against civil authority or an established government. Whether Jan. 6 fits that mold remains to be seen as a House panel of seven Democrats and two Republicans investigate the attack.
But on Aug. 4, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson drew a line in the sand as she sentenced Michigan resident Karl Dresch on a misdemeanor charge for his participation in the riot.
“You called yourself and everyone else patriots, but that’s not patriotism,” Jackson told Dresch. “Patriotism is loyalty to country, loyalty to the Constitution, not loyalty to a head of state. That is the tyranny we rejected on July 4.”
Utah House Rep. Stephen Handy, a moderate Republican from Layton, voiced strong feelings about the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
“I do believe it was a fomented, promoted insurrection by Donald J. Trump,” Handy said.
“When you deal with a mob, there is such a thing as mob mentality — and it takes over and you can’t control it.”
Chase Thomas, the executive director of the nonprofit Alliance for a Better Utah, said he watched that day’s event in disbelief and horror.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was as bad as a foreign power invading our country and burning down the Capitol building. It’s also not as simple as what one side is trying to say — a group of tourists or a group of citizens coming down to visit the capitol,” Thomas said. “They were chanting for the death of political leaders, attempting to forestall a very critical piece of our democratic system to prevent the democratic election of our president.”
What we know so far
On Aug. 6, CBS News reported the following:
- Six defendants have been sentenced, one on felony charges, five for misdemeanors
- More than 570 people have been arrested, 71 of them women
- Over 170 have been charged with assaulting or impeding a law enforcement officer, of which more than 50 were charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.
- Rioters travelled from 46 states outside of Washington, D.C., and ranged in age from 18 to 80.
- At least 82 had connections to QAnon, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and Texas Freedom Force.
Lives lost
A Jan. 11 New York Times account listed five deaths plus four apparent suicides
- Brian Sicknick, part of the Capitol Police team, succumbed to injuries sustained during the riot after being hospitalized
- Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran and avid Trump supporter, was shot by a Capitol police officer inside the Capitol and died that day
- Kevin Greeson died of a heart attack while standing among Trump supporters on the West side of the Capitol
- Trump supporter Rosanne Boyland died in a crush of fellow rioters as they fought to break through a police line
- Pennsylvania resident Benjamin Phillips, who founded pro-Trump website Trumparoo, died in Washington, D.C. after suffering a stroke
- Four police officers who responded to the riot later died of apparent suicide
Disconnect and anger
Leah Murray, Academic Director for Weber’s Walker Institute, credits a theory called “Democratic Distemper” for the Jan. 6 rampage. Put simply, when people are satisfied, voter turnout and civic engagement decline, Murray said. But as people grow more and more unhappy, they rise up, take action and vote.
“We had the highest turnout in over a century in our last election,” Murray said. “When people are unhappy, they take that energy out. Sometimes to the streets, to protests, to the ballot box … and sometimes it gets violent.”
But she believes the ease with which people can reach out and touch someone online supplied the speed for Trump devotees to connect and coalesce on Jan. 6.
“With the Capitol insurrection, there were so many people from different places in the country,” Murray said. “How’d they all find each other? Social media came of age politically.”
And it’s entirely possible, Murray added, that social media could throw democracy into a perpetual state of distemper.
Weber State, Murray and Wiser recently teamed with Unify America to help people get past partisan rancor. According to unifyamerica.org, the project launched in January 2020 “to reduce contempt, teach Americans to work together and build a diverse community to find ambitious solutions and solve our biggest problems.”
“We all have the shared identity of being human beings,” Wiser said. “But sadly more and more, we keep seeing political identity becoming our whole being, our primary identifier. And I don’t think that’s particularly healthy.”
Of course, that doesn’t mean these differences no longer exist. It just means people can hopefully stop yelling and start conversing.
“We need to figure out how to have our Venn diagram include people who think differently. And when they say something that’s different, our first response is not that they’re the antichrist or a traitor,” Murray said. “In wartime, we dehumanize … so now we’re dehumanizing people inside our country. We have to work to overcome that.”
Too hot to handle?
In late May, Senate Republicans used the filibuster to block a bipartisan commission that could fully investigate what led up to Jan. 6 — even though they’d previously voiced support for such a process.
Of Utah’s two Senators, Mike Lee voted against what he considered a “kangaroo commission,” while Mitt Romney voted in favor of at least opening debate about it.
So in late July, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi formed a panel of seven Democrats and two Republicans to carry out that task. That committee convened for the first time on July 27. Unfortunately, that panel has also become politicized and an object of mistrust.
“I think it’s perceived as being so partisan that I honestly don’t know how much of an impact it will have in real America,” Wiser said. “I think people watching from outside the beltway will sort of brush it off as more political scheming.”
Because of Speaker Pelosi’s rejection of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s suggested picks for that panel, Wiser believes people on the right will view its findings with skepticism.
“There were questions from both sides that could have been looked at from a bipartisan perspective, and I don’t think we’re going to have that, unfortunately,” Wiser said.
Handy also expressed reservations about the panel’s composition.
“I kind of keep one eye open and one eye closed on Washington. The one eye open was watching when the minority leader McCarthy had people like (Ohio Rep.) Jim Jordan on there,” Handy said. “She didn’t like it so she bounced them … I’m sure (the panel) will be painted as tainted.”
When asked if Jordan was representative of Republicans overall, Handy described the ardent Trump supporter as part of the new faction.
“Trump doesn’t represent the Republican Party that I grew up in and have tried to perpetuate and espouse,” Handy said, acknowledging that he just doesn’t “get” the Trump effect on the party. “You take a Jim Jordan who wants to be very combative … there are constituents who love that.”
Better Utah’s Thomas said he would have much preferred a bipartisan commission.
“There was an agreement to have a bipartisan commission … and then after it was agreed upon, the GOP decided to reject it,” Thomas said. “So on the one hand, this is what we got because that agreement didn’t move forward. And we have to work with what we have.”
Thomas also believes that if Pelosi had gone with McCarthy’s picks for the panel, the commission would have been tainted even further.
“The two Republicans that are on there have been consistent in their desire to examine the events of Jan. 6 and what led up to it,” Thomas said. “And I hope that the process is taken seriously and that it’s an example of a good investigation rather than a political investigation. It remains to be seen what happens with it.”
Manipulating the vote
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 18 states have enacted 30 laws that will make it harder for people to vote.
But Weber’s Murray gives more credit to the 2020 pandemic for those tighter voting laws rather than Trump’s claims of voter fraud and a stolen election.
“Covid made it impossible to run a regular election,” Murray said, noting that Utah was ahead of the curve by already using vote by mail so broadly.
She also believes partisan competition — namely which side recently lost the election — factors into the new legislation.
“Democrats tend to make laws to make it easier to vote because they need everyone to vote in order to win,” Murray said. “And Republicans make it more difficult to vote because they need fewer people to vote in order to win.”
Murray said she would much prefer a system where everyone can vote: “Make it as easy as possible.”
Wiser, her Weber counterpart, cautioned about the dangers of people losing confidence in the nation’s election process: “That’s the start of something really bad for our country.”
“Being able to have the dialogue about what methods are reasonable to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat — that’s a good thing,” Wiser said. “Legitimate efforts that seek to pursue that goal are responsible.”
Handy, who has served in the Legislature since 2011, spoke with pride about Utah’s vote by mail system and said he hopes the nation takes notice.
“It should be easy to vote,” Handy said. With vote by mail, “people can get on my website and check me out when they have time. They can email me. So it perpetuates and strengthens democracy. But we cannot put up barriers for people to register or vote.”
Better Utah’s Thomas believes the need for election security — in light of recent election interference by foreign powers and also the use of new experimental technologies such as online voting — far outweighs the need for voting laws that restrict participation in the democratic process.
“Making sure the results can be trusted … that has to be done in a legitimate and factual way rather than made-up audits or claims of voter fraud that aren’t supported by any of the facts,” Thomas said.
