I strongly encourage everyone to go read an entire newspaper account of yesterday’s events. Social media is not a news outlet. (And if you need proof of that, just look at how far we got into yesterday before they were willing to suspend Trump’s accounts...)
First-hand accounts of yesterday's hours-long terror in the Capitol from members of my local Congressional delegation in California. Lots under the cut, since the Bay Area News Group is fairly stingy with their paywall and I think it should all be read. The one that stands out the most to me is of course the amazing South Bay congresswoman Jackie Speier, who was shot at Jonestown as a young congressional aide in 1978.
The Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said Congress would consider impeaching the president again.
www.mercurynews.com
East Bay Rep. DeSaulnier said he was among the last members of Congress to reach the safe room where many of his colleagues were taken after the House chamber was evacuated. He had been participating in a vote to certify Joe Biden as the next president from a separate room, just off the chamber, as a COVID-19 precaution because he fell seriously ill with pneumonia and spent three weeks in an intensive care unit last year.
That room would become his refuge and hiding place after a voice came over the building’s loudspeaker with a warning: “Lock your doors, shut your lights off and be quiet,” said DeSaulnier, who is still in Washington D.C. Then, he said, “We could hear the confrontations in the hallway right outside the house chamber.”
The lawmaker said he worried that he and the staffers “might be taken” by the rioters. His fears might have been well-founded. Photos from the scene showed one rioter inside the Capitol was carrying a bundle of zip ties.
Wednesday’s mob violence brought up painful memories for Speier, a San Mateo Democrat who was shot and left for dead during a 1978 fact-finding mission into the human rights abuses being carried out by Jones, a charismatic cult leader whose many devotees left everything behind in the Bay Area to follow him to Jonestown, Guyana.
“More than 40 years ago, as I lay bleeding from five gunshot wounds on an air strip in the Guyanese jungle not knowing if I would live or die, I swore that if I did survive I would dedicate my life to public service,” Speier, who was en route back to the Bay Area on Thursday and unavailable for an interview, wrote in a late Wednesday statement. “I thought of that moment today, when the U.S. Capitol was stormed by a mob of Trump rioters emboldened by the President fomenting a coup d’état.”
“The president must be immediately removed under the 25th Amendment,” Speier said. “His words and deeds have encouraged a violent insurrection and he presents a direct and deadly threat to our democracy and the rule of law.”
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