Update: U.S. House Jan. 6 panel recommends criminal charges against Trump
With its triple-barrelled set of referrals, the committee examining the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, likely will embark Monday on a path that no set of American lawmakers has ever trod, seeking punishment against a former president more dramatic, more severe and more onerous than even the ultimate constitutional penalty of impeachment.
In a set of solemn and historic roll calls, the seven Democrats and two Republicans, members of the legislative branch sitting in judgment of the one-time chief of the executive branch, almost certainly will ask the Justice Department to begin criminal prosecution of Donald Trump for insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding, and conspiracy to defraud the United States government.
By doing so, they will seek a form of historical opprobrium that has no precedent in U.S. history and was not even contemplated by the country’s founders. Their likely unanimous vote is intended to set in motion a process that would stain Mr. Trump’s historical reputation and condemn him to the darkest corner of presidential history, casting him as a figure more villainous than James Buchanan, blamed for hastening the onset of the Civil War, and Richard Nixon, the only president to resign the office that Franklin Roosevelt once called “pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.”
If the process that the committee begun with its 10th public meeting Monday follows its ultimate course, Mr. Trump could face a judicial test that could, but likely will not, lead to his imprisonment.
But in the 235th year of the American republic, Mr. Trump faces the possibility that he could be convicted not merely of judicial crimes but also condemned, in his lifetime and throughout history, for committing an even more damning crime, a felony beyond the imagination of the men who gathered in what is now known as Independence Hall in Philadelphia to draft the Constitution: seeking to destroy the time-honoured and much-imitated democratic traditions of the most powerful nation in the world.
Vice-chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., stand to depart during a break as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack holds a hearing on Oct. 13.POOL/Reuters
In summoning a mob to Washington to overturn an election that had been certified by the states and upheld by five dozen courts, Mr. Trump embarked on a course that had no antecedent. The committee examining the convulsion that followed at the Capitol is asking that the 45th president be punished in a manner that also has no antecedent. Both courses of action are freighted with great risk: the destruction of a centuries-long tradition of the peaceful transfer of executive power followed by the destruction of an equally long custom of shielding presidents from prosecution once they have left office.
In short, the shattering of glass followed by the shattering of precedent. Or: a grave political act followed by grave political consequences.
The consequences will be manifest, upending the fragile physics of American politics in a process that brings to bear two branches of the U.S. government in an effort to censure the third. In history’s long run, it could forever change the elegant equipoise of the balance of power in the U.S. capital. In politics’ short timeline, it could enrage a substantial minority of Americans who revere Mr. Trump, will see this action as political rather than judicial, and will be mobilized to return him to office in 2024. It also will provide fuel to the small but vocal strain of the Trump base that is, to use a phrase ordinarily more suited to law enforcement than to law makers, armed and dangerous.
One of the byproducts of this period of contention – not caused by Mr. Trump but simplified and amplified by his rhetoric and his actions – is the destruction of the air of comity that took hold in American politics in the 20th century only to be endangered, and then destroyed, in the 21st.
There were, to be sure, violent convulsions in Washington in the past – the 1838 duel in which one member of the House of Representatives slayed another over a bribery accusation, and the 1856 caning of the abolitionist senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts by the slavery-supporter senator Preston Brooks of South Carolina are two of the most prominent. But the era when law makers carried loaded weapons onto the floor of the two legislative chambers of the Capitol has long passed. The passionate debates of more recent decades often were followed by basketball games in the congressional gym and golf outings at Congressional Country Club.
The result – until recently – was to create the political equivalent of a small town in Washington.
In that environment, when Cokie Roberts, the daughter of Hale Boggs, the fiercely partisan Louisiana Democrat who was House majority leader, was married to a New York Times reporter in 1966, Gerald Ford, the Michigan Republican who was the House minority leader and was eight years from the presidency, was invited to the wedding.
Today, that event – with president Lyndon Johnson, a friend to both men, in attendance – would be evidence that the American capital was a closed enclave of the powerful. But for decades, Ms. Roberts, later a prominent radio and television reporter, held up the way Republicans and Democrats mingled in her parents’ home as a symbol of the decency of American democracy that was in eclipse.
Today, that period has passed, as it did when Americans moved from small towns to big cities, a passage captured by the novelist Willa Cather (1873-1947) in her classic 1935 Lucy Gayheart and that is eerily applicable to the way American politics has been transformed nine decades later:
“In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching. On the sidewalks along which everybody comes and goes, if you walk abroad at all, you must, at some time pass within inches of the man who cheated and betrayed you, or the woman you desire more than anything else in the world. Her skirt brushes against you. You say good-morning, and go on. It is a close shave. Out in the world the escapes are not so narrow.”