Bennie Thompson

It saddens me to admit it, but the evidence is too overwhelming to dismiss: Democrats are significantly more cunning than Republicans. I say “Democrats,” but that is an imprecise, even a misleading, designation. Party affiliation is not now, if it ever was, a really accurate predictor of ideological coloration. What I mean are those people, most of whom happen to belong to the Democratic Party, who have been bitten by the bug of extremism, who are fired by revolutionary fervor, who regard every opponent, every contrary opinion, as a “by-any-means-necessary” fire alarm. It is an attitude that has stirred their creativity, also their vindictiveness. Hercules had to undertake twelve supposedly impossible labors. Donald Trump is fast catching up.

The best comedies always begin on a note of solemnity. Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid opens with an unwed mother driven to abandon her newborn. Buster Keaton’s The General opens with news arriving in Marietta, Georgia, that the South has fired on Fort Sumner and the Civil War is on. Thus did Congressman Bennie Thompson open Thursday's January 6 Pageant with a solemn story about the "conspiracy to thwart the will of the people," in which an insurrection "put two and a half centuries of constitutional democracy at risk." He was followed by the even more solemn Liz Cheney, who promised a thrilling line-up of testimony that will prove beyond the shadow of a sunspot that Donald Trump planned the whole thing. Well, maybe so.

January 6 is normally a rather uneventful day in American politics. It’s usually a day when Congress convenes to quietly certify the slate of presidential electors sent to them by all 50 states, and finalize the winner of that year’s presidential election. On January 6, 2021, this formality was interrupted by a group of rioters who ransacked the Capitol in an attempt to delay the certification of now-president Joe Biden’s victory on November 3, 2020. Before January 6, numerous Republicans in the House and Senate made clear that they would object to the certification over concerns about voter irregularities in the 2020 election and demanded a debate in Congress on election integrity.