The Only Thing Left to Do About January 6 Is Remember

The courts may have closed the book on this sorry chapter of our history, but the dreadful reckoning remains.

The January 6 prosecutions came to a quiet, unheralded end this week after a federal judge dismissed the final seditious conspiracy case against various Oath Keeper defendants, including the group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes. Judge Amit Mehta, who oversaw numerous January 6–related cases, penned a fitting afterword to the saga.

“This is the last of the prosecutions seeking to hold accountable those responsible for the events of January 6,” he wrote in an opinion granting dismissal of the remaining cases. “That book is now closed. Today’s epilogue diminishes the gravity of that day, denigrates the work of the prosecutors and law enforcement officers who secured these convictions, and excuses criminal acts that caused a centuries-long pillar of our democracy—the peaceful transfer of presidential power—to buckle. The court cannot write a different ending.”

Everything the judge wrote was true. But that was not enough for at least one of the defendants. Edward Vallejo filed a motion on Tuesday that asked for Mehta’s “unconstitutional” remarks to be stricken from the court record. He argued that the judge’s language violated his Fifth Amendment right to the presumption of innocence. Mehta has yet to rule on his motion.

No matter how many motions are filed, however, neither Trump nor those who plotted against Congress on his behalf can reverse the historical record. Vallejo’s denialist coda gives Americans the opportunity to consider how things went wrong. There is no shortage of blame to be allocated for the incomplete efforts to hold those responsible for January 6 accountable for their crimes, though surely some deserve a larger share of it than others.

Even though it was the victim of the attack, Congress itself deserves plenty of blame. Like Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Biden administration, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer responded too slowly to the crisis that crossed their doorstep. The House did not introduce articles of impeachment against Trump until January 11 and did not vote to impeach him until January 13. There was no need for such a delay; the crime literally occurred in the halls of Congress itself. We all saw it on television. The lawmakers saw it in person.

This unconscionable delay belied the gravity of Trump’s acts and ignored the urgency of removing him. House impeachment managers did not formally refer the sole article of impeachment—incitement to insurrection—until January 25, five days after Trump left office. This languid pace gave him time to rally supporters and build a counternarrative to defend himself. It also raised novel questions about whether the Senate could impeach a former president at all, an excuse wielded by some GOP senators to justify not voting to convict him.

By the time the Democratic-led Senate got around to holding a trial on February 9, it was already too late. Here, more blame goes to the Republican senators who declined to convict Trump in that trial. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell signaled ahead of the final vote by senators that he would not vote to convict Trump, thus providing the necessary cover for many of his colleagues to do the same.

Seven Republican senators ultimately voted to convict Trump. The other 43 senators shamed themselves and betrayed their oaths of office by voting to acquit him. If Trump’s second term truly represents a permanent and irreversible decline in American democracy, as well as this country’s power and prosperity, then that vote will be seen as the moment of no return for this........

© New Republic