Franklin Graham urges prayers ahead of possible Trump indictment: 'Politically motivated'

Challenging an election is legal, and is not on its face, insurrection. As I previously posted, as late as January 4th, Pence was still planning some type of challenge to the results, which was neither a riot nor an insurrection. He certainly didn’t believe it was illegal at that time (or he did and was lying to save face with Trump and his supporters).

Many of the people on January 6th also had no intention to do physical harm. In fact, the majority of those convicted have been convicted of misdemeanors, largely “Knowingly Entering or Remaining in any Restricted Building or Grounds Without Lawful Authority.” That’s a particularly interesting difference with Wisconsin — in that case, for some reason, the police didn’t even try to clear the building, and it remained occupied for over 2 weeks. The U.S. Capitol was cleared in 4 hours, and the deaths directly attributable to the riot were all of protestors, not of police. No one knows what would have happened if the police had tried to clear the Wisconsin Capitol, because it never was tried. Would there have been assaults and deaths? No one can answer that, but knowing how crowds that are worked up behave, it strains credulity to think that nothing would have happened and everyone would have peacefully exited. But there were no charges for remaining in the building after hours.

I’m still unclear as to why the Capitol building was completely off limits to the public. I’m assuming it was because of lingering Covid issues, but I haven’t seen a clear explanation. I’ve been to the Capitol a number of times, including sitting in the galleries where I watched Senate and House proceedings. It’s not completely unrestricted access, but at least on the times I went it didn’t require any kind of pre-approval (like the White House does). You go through security, and you walk in. No one should have attempted to break in, of course, but many of the buildings used for government proceedings in the U.S. are supposed to be accessible by the public (again, not totally unrestricted access).

Yes, violence on the part of some of the protestors was a main difference to Wisconsin, and that is certainly inexcusable. However, the actions of those who committed violence do not make peaceful protests by others “part of a violent act,” and yet they are considered part of the “insurrection.” And 600 or so convictions/pleas for essentially trespassing out of the more than 900 that have been charged would show that most did not intend violence. That would also certainly include most of those on the mall and those outside the Capitol who never entered.

Sure, there was some outrage for Wisconsin at the time, but it has not only been forgotten, that event is now described as “Beautiful trouble.”