Don't give it to them: the moment demands justice

For many Americans, it's just now starting to seriously sink in that on January 6th Donald Trump's allies killed five people in an attempt to violently overthrow the government of the United States and replace it with an strongman oligarchic dictatorship.

Their violence was so severe that additional dozens were hospitalized and the Vice President, members of Congress and their staffers spent hours hiding in terror. One policeman was murdered, a second committed suicide, and dozens of others were viciously beaten. The traitors brought into our Capitol building the battle flag of the insurrection of 1861, smeared feces on carpets and walls, stole classified documents, and trashed government offices.

They rampaged from office to office, smashed windows and doors, all the while chanting "Hang Mike Pence" and "Where's Nancy?" as a sturdy gallows awaited just outside the building.

And it was entirely the effort of elected officials and partisan enthusiasts of a single political party: Republicans. (Yes, some Fox News propagandists say there were "Democrat infiltrators" in the crowd; it's a lie, and there's no evidence to support the charge.)

It was Republicans. And now they're wanting "mercy," "compassion" and "understanding."

That's the Republican Party whose members, for 50 years, relentlessly promoted and waged a brutal "War On Drugs" that Richard Nixon's former Domestic Policy Chief explicitly said was designed to criminalize being antiwar or Black and left thousands to rot in prison for years.

They're members of the same Republican Party that waged a "no mercy" campaign of imprisoning refugees and tearing their children away from them, having "lost" over 600 of those children after keeping many of them in cages for months.

This is the same "no exceptions" Republican Party that delights in the death penalty, having executed more people in the last few months than the last 56 years combined.

It's the same "no compassion" Republican Party that says people who've fallen on hard times shouldn't get government-funded housing, food stamps or extended unemployment benefits; the Republican Party that's worked for decades to gut Social Security and eliminate Medicare/Medicaid, even during a pandemic.

These are boosters of a Republican Party that's spent the last 40 years glorifying guns so enthusiastically that America stands alone in the world as the international home of school shootings. When first graders were gunned down at Sandy Hook, this is the Republican Party that refused to even discuss taking weapons of war off our streets.

This is the same Republican "total war" Party that cheered on George W. Bush as he illegally kidnapped thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis and sent them to be tortured and murdered in "black sites," people who never had any access to any court, with many of them - clearly innocent - dying from our violence or imprisoned in Guantánamo without charges.

These Republicans gave literally trillions of your tax dollars to their billionaire donors, but now say it's "too expensive" to help out struggling working class Americans during a pandemic. Help for the needy? "Screw them" is the GOP mantra when it comes to working people in crisis.

Trump was helped in his effort to overthrow the US Government by almost 150 Republican members of the House of Representatives and a dozen Republican members of the Senate, as well as one of the top Republican figures in the Department of Justice. Several of those Republican members of Congress continue to justify their seditious complicity in the January 6th act of treason.

Hundreds of members, active and retired, of the US military, police and sheriff's departments, and elected officials from multiple states participated in this nearly-successful effort to kidnap and murder the Vice President of the United States and the Speaker of the US House of Representatives to install Donald Trump as dictator for life and end the American Experiment.

And now, the Washington Post reports that the Biden administration is debating letting some of the conspirators and traitors who stormed the US Capitol and killed five people get way with their murderous crime.

Perhaps, the Justice Department is apparently thinking, there should be bleeding heart exceptions for these Republicans who were just swept up in the moment. They need compassion and understanding.

And, unlike the Republican administration's 2020 actions federalizing police in Portland and Seattle and then charging small-time vandals with major, decades-long felonies, it's just too much work to track them down and prosecute all the people who tried to turn America into a dictatorship.

After all, the Post notes, these are "lesser offenders" and "most of those arrested so far have no criminal records."

Not to mention, the Post article adds, "There is also a question over whether charging all of the rioters could swamp the federal court system."

This is, frankly, bullshit.

There's clear American precedent for dealing with murderous traitors.

In 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in a successful coup that put pro-slavery Vice President Andrew Johnson, himself the owner of several enslaved humans, in charge of the federal government.

Our government searched for and arrested the people who'd participated in the conspiracy for that coup, which set the stage for withdrawing Union soldiers from the South and the establishment of 100 years of white supremacist Jim Crow laws nationwide.

Four of the participants, Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt and David Herold, were hanged.

Samuel Arnold, Dr. Samuel Mudd and Michael O'Laughlen received life sentences of "hard labor," and Edman Spangler received a six-year prison sentence. John Wilkes Booth, the man who fulfilled the conspiracy's goal, was shot to death while hiding like a coward in a burning barn.

America has historically dealt harshly with those who would assassinate elected officials or work to overthrow our republic. Republican operative and Trump lawyer Roy Cohn enthusiastically sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair for collaborating with the Soviet Union.

America has dealt with insurrections before. George Washington led a military charge against insurrectionist "protesters" and Abraham Lincoln fought a bloody war against them.

These Republican traitors must be treated with the same compassion they'd offer refugee children in cages, protesters who've smashed windows, or Black teenagers caught with a gram of cocaine.

Their collaborators in Congress, by and large, have not yet even apologized, much less display any evidence of contrition. To the contrary, they continue to promote the Big Lie of "voter fraud" that Trump used as a rallying cry to whip up the crowd.

As Mayor Rudy Giuliani will tell you about his "broken windows" policy, if you don't catch criminals, prosecute them, and incarcerate them for as long as legally possible, they'll simply come back later and perpetrate more crimes.

It's time for justice.

-Thom

Originally posted on thomhartmann.medium.com