The House of Representatives’ January 6 Committee1 has issued its report. I’m not going to go into its conclusions. What Donald Trump did on January 6, and what he did not do that he should have done, was appalling, but then I knew that on January 6. As I have said before,2 the only question after January 6 was: what was the best way to make sure then-President, now former President, Trump went away and never came back again. But that is not the question for this post.
Rather, the “what-if” question for this post is this: What if the Capitol had had better security on January 6? What if there had been enough police officers, and national guard personnel, etc., so that the protestors, aka rioters (aka insurrectionists or whatever you want to call them), had not been able to break into the U.S. Capitol building that day? In one way, things would have been the same. Then-President Trump would have still tried to convince Mike Pence to put off the counting of the electoral votes (or whatever other cockamamie scheme then-President Trump was pushing). Some idiot Republicans would have objected to the counting of the electoral votes.3 And Vice President Pence would have told them all to, in effect, “pound sand.”
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1 I think a bipartisan commission would have been better; something like the 9/11 commission, with an equal number of members from each party. Instead, House Speaker Pelosi always wanted a committee with more Democrats than Republicans. (Also, Speaker Pelosi refused to even appoint some of the Republicans that the House Republican leader suggested. I leave it to others whether that helped or hurt the credibility of the January 6 committee.)
2 Also, here.
3 There may have been a few more Republicans objecting. After the Capitol invasion, some decided not to object.
4 On January 6, my initial reaction was that they should wait until the next day to proceed, that there was no need to do it that night. I was wrong. It needed to be done right away.
5 I am not sure whose “fault” it is that there wasn’t enough security. But it doesn’t matter. Mistakes happen. In any case, not having enough security doesn’t justify breaking into the Capitol, threatening people, trashing offices, and everything else that happened that day.
6 This is another example of the role of contingency in politics, history, and life.
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