A year after the US Capitol attack, American democracy is in no better shape

Cracks are now forming in the defence that Donald Trump had managed to keep intact since he incited an insurrectionist mob to attack their government a year ago.

The fear that the former US leader instilled in his party kept the Republican ramparts around him standing firm, fortified by Fox News successfully pushing the down-is-up narrative about a left wing “false flag” conspiracy being behind the January 6 insurrection – even as hours of footage and more than 150 guilty pleas make clear that the mob was the beating heart of Trump’s base.

The handful of vocal Republican Trump critics in Congress – including Wyoming’s Representative Lynn Cheney, who is on the January 6 investigation committee – had not added up to anything more than a breakaway faction that has come under attack from their colleagues.

Cheney herself was removed from her position as chair of the House Republican Conference and replaced by Elise Stefanik, who tried to block Electoral College counts in Pennsylvania on the night of the insurrection attempt and echoed Trump’s stolen election lies on the House floor that night.

But recent revelations about texts sent by Republican members of Congress, Fox News personalities and even Donald Trump Jnr to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, as the assault on the Capitol took place, seem to have put the former president in a more vulnerable position.

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, the architect of political machinations including the filibusters that have stymied Democratic agendas for years, has taken notice.

In 2016, McConnell refused to allow the confirmation of former president Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland because, he asserted, the appointment was too close to the general election that was more than seven months away.

However, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg died in September 2020, less than six weeks before the last general election, McConnell cleared all roadblocks to a speedy confirmation of Trump’s pick, Amy Coney Barrett.

McConnell calculated correctly that he wouldn’t pay a political price for such naked hypocrisy. He easily won re-election. The revelations to date of the House January 6 commission have apparently made him less inclined to support the Trump world now.

“I do think we’re all watching, as you are, what is unfolding on the House side, and it will be interesting to reveal all the participants involved,” he told CNN about the ongoing investigation.

In the current state of American politics, there is no hypocrisy embarrassing enough to outweigh the imperative of retaining power, but perhaps, as McConnell’s comments demonstrate, the violence in the Capitol Building a year ago will prove to be too much for many in the Republican Party to stomach.

Don’t expect any kind of grand political reconciliation, though. If anything, the continuing January 6 commission revelations are likely to further ramp up the far-right wing of the Republican Party as they try to drown them out, with consequences for domestic and foreign policy.

Senator Ted Cruz, for example, clinched a deal to hold a vote on sanctioning the Nord Stream 2 Russia-to-Germany gas pipeline by holding hostage dozens of Biden administration nominees for ambassadorships and senior State Department positions.

For Cruz, famous in Hong Kong for denying opposition activists that he encouraged the right to special refugee status in the US, the move is less about punishing Russia than about weakening the alliance Biden has been trying to rebuild with the European Union.

Meanwhile, Republican state legislatures and governors like Florida’s Rick DeSantis and Texas’ Greg Abbott forge ahead with policies that border on insanity, like fines for companies or schools trying to enforce mask or vaccine mandates, stances that appear unwavering even as the Omicron variant begins to surge.

Many have already pushed through laws that give them more control over election procedures as a fix for the “election fraud” lies that led to the January 6 attack.

Why Capitol attack marked dawn of dark days for US democracy

Democrats are not helping their cause by trying to please every faction in the party with their massive US$2.2 trillion social spending bill that now appears dead after West Virginia Senator Joe Machin said at the weekend that he won’t support it.

They might have had more luck had they worked more closely with anti-Trump Republicans like Senator Mitt Romney.

So, as the world watches evidence trickle out about who was responsible for an unprecedented attack on American democracy, no one should be betting on its restoration.

Robert Delaney is the Post’s North America bureau chief