Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is preparing to lead a delegation to tour dc prisons To investigate the conditions of alleged rioters awaiting trial. She has signed up to watch thousands of hours of US Capitol police security videos and wants to focus on the events leading up to the deaths of two women who were staunch supporters of former President Donald Trump.
In contrast, senators have largely moved on from that horrific attack, and are deferring the Justice Department’s investigation. He doesn’t understand why his housemates keep fighting over this.
“I think they need to watch a little less cable TV,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) told CNN,
For more than two years running, every day the House is in session can feel like it’s January 7—the day after each side began blaming the other for what went wrong. First came the Democratic investigation, with allegations that some Republicans helped the insurgents. This has now given way to cross-checking.
It is completely different from the Senate. Only eight Senate Republicans voted against certifying President Biden’s victory, and just five supported Trump’s 2024 campaign. Two-thirds of House Republicans objected to Biden’s victory and more than 30 are supporting Trump.
“We have a lot of them here. I mean, we have people — a lot of people who are openly using their platform to promote insurgents, to promote the idea that Jan. 6 That didn’t happen, that it was a friendly thing,” said Rep. Pramila Jaipal (D-Wash.), who was in the House gallery during the attack and heard the police gunshot that killed a rioter.
Jaipal said, “This is the house of the people.” “And in some ways, we are closer to both the good and the terrible than the Senate,” he said in an interview on Thursday.
House Republicans, upon hearing such words, still feel as though Democrats unfairly accused them of aiding and abetting the rioters.
Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) said, “What they did to me was inexcusable in my estimation, because of the significant risk to me, my staff and my family.” 6 The committee suggested that he may have made surveillance visits the day before the attack. “I mean, we got 200 death threats in just a few days.”
The House has always been a more boisterous place than the Senate. But the pandemic began to intensify polarization in the House, where Democrats issued mask rules and allowed a one-way voting system that allowed members to vote without attending Capitol sessions in person.
As is often the case, members of the House were treated like second-class citizens compared to senators during the January 6 attack. And some MPs argue that their experiences that day left such strong feelings – suspicion and mistrust – that the House is far more dysfunctional than usual.
By 2:15 a.m. on January 6, as rioters began forcing their way into the building, the Senate was immediately locked down and completely evacuated within 15 minutes. Almost no one saw the rioters.
The House was a more chaotic scene, which stopped considering the GOP challenge to Biden’s victory resumed. When the House finally adjourned the debate, rioters tried to break into the chamber, forcing Capitol Police through the back door in a gun-toting standoff.
Most of the members were evacuated after a few minutes, but Some MLAs were trapped in the gallery upstairs, where they heard the gunshot that stopped and killed Ashley Babbitt, a Trump supporter, as she tried to jump through a broken window to get closer to the House floor.
The senators gathered in a secure location in one of their office buildings and held heated discussions about what to do, mostly in bipartisan fashion. They agreed to speed up the process by allowing debate on two slates of electoral votes, not six, so that Biden could be officially declared the winner that night.
By 4 p.m., staff arrived with hundreds of boxed lunches – chicken or beef – and bottled water.
House members, once they had all recovered, gathered in one of their office buildings and clashed among themselves over pandemic rules as some Republicans refused to wear masks; The gathering is believed to have turned into a virus superspreader.
The Senate resumed just after 8 p.m. that night. Vice President Mike Pence led several unifying speeches that prompted standing ovations. Senators debated and voted on Arizona and Pennsylvania until 12:30 a.m. on January 7, overwhelmingly defying Trump’s wishes.
The House, after some disjointed unifying speeches, returned to intense, furious debate. Just before 2 a.m., a brawl ensues in the middle aisle. A dozen MLAs and senior employees Almost turned into a fight. The House concluded its votes after 3 p.m.
Five months later, two Senate committees, in a bipartisan agreement, Released more than 100 page report On the failures and security breakdowns that allowed the Capitol to be besieged – the last official word coming from the upper chamber on the insurrection.
Two weeks after that report, House Democrats announced the formation of the January 6 select committee. But McCarthy declined to name a Republican to the panel after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) rejected some of his initial choices in July 2021.
For the next 18 months, many House Republicans resented the panel’s work and vowed to investigate the investigation. Now, Loudermilk is leading an investigation into Capitol security through a subcommittee of the House Administration Committee, which oversees Capitol Police and other internal operations. He believes the January 6 committee intentionally overlooked the security loophole in order to focus on Trump.
But part of Loudermilk’s inquiry has involved reviewing the select committee’s inquiry last year, and he recently going through the transcripts of the Georgians which he paraded around Congressional office buildings, a scene that was shown last year during a nationally televised hearing.
Loudermilk said transcripts of those interviews cleared him of allegations of wrongdoing. His video was released after nearly three dozen House Democrats lobbied in the days following the 2021 attack to allege unnamed Republicans directed rioters through reconnaissance rounds.
No evidence has surfaced to support those allegations, other than the relatively benign Loudermilk video, and it seeks to investigate whether anyone was falsely accused of rape by the committee.
“These are the kinds of things we have to look at,” he said in an interview on Wednesday.
Although Democrats braced for these kinds of GOP actions, no one expected the recent selective decision by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy Give access to 41,000 hours of security video to Fox News personality Tucker Carlson — who asked California Republicans to release the videos in early January to win the speaker’s vote. To date, no other media outlet has been granted access to those videos, while MPs are now signing up to have a glimpse.
“It’s really outrageous. And it shows a degree of callousness that’s surprising even in this environment,” Rep. Daniel Kildee (D-Mich.) said.
kildee, member of “Gallery Group,” He said he was one of many who had had a “really bad personal experience that day”.
Whether some Republicans aided the MAGA rioters prior to the attack no longer matters to Democrats.
“These are huge platforms that are being used to promote anti-democracy rebels,” Jaipal said. She now labels these Republicans as “rebel-supporters”.
On Thursday, Greene said he spoke to McCarthy and his advisers about releasing the security video last year, during a time when the far-right legislator became a thorn in the side of the leadership, a boisterous pro-McCarthy aide. Were. She said that “release the tape” became her personal mantra in the last year.
wants to see the video of him shooting the green babbit and Another protester being crushed by a crowd of rioters, One death was later believed to be the result of an amphetamine overdose. She wants to expose the alleged misbehavior of a prisoner accused of committing a crime Some of the most violent acts of 6th January, Including spraying chemical stimulants on police and attacking them during violent clashes at the doors of the Capitol.
“I’m interested in a two-tier justice system,” she said Thursday.
For some in the House, every day remains January 7.