In the days immediately after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, Republican leader Kevin McCarthy of California was correct.
Back then, McCarthy said that several extremely conservative congressmen had used incendiary rhetoric that could heighten the risk of violence and that they needed to cool it. He was clearly thinking of the horror experienced when the rage of a political extremist nearly led to the death of the second-ranking Republican in the House, Steve Scalise of Louisiana, in a 2017 shooting. His concern was valid, and the self-control he advocated then would be welcome on both sides of the political aisle. Both sides have transgressed those standards.
McCarthy named Republican names. Alabama’s Mo Brooks had infamously urged the crowd to march to the Capitol and “start taking down names and kicking a**,” even as Brooks himself had prepared for violence by wearing a bulletproof vest. It’s easy for someone to talk tough when he has protection others lack. As it was, Brooks learned no lessons: Later last year, he essentially excused rather than condemned someone who made a bomb threat against the Capitol, saying the man was expressing “anger directed at dictatorial socialism.”
Matt Gaetz of Florida used inflammatory rhetoric to attack then-third-ranking House Republican Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Lauren Boebert of Colorado tweeted personal information about lawmakers’ whereabouts as the riot continued after tweeting earlier that day that Jan. 6 would be “1776” all over again. Barry Moore of Alabama made a factually correct but irrelevant and provocative observation that “it was a Black police officer who shot the white female veteran” Ashli Babbitt, who died on the scene.
And Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, with a history of bigoted and bizarre remarks, also said the day before the riot that “this is our 1776 moment,” and even 12 days later, she was still suggesting that then-President Trump call for “Marshall [sic] law” to stay in office.
Consider that more than 140 law enforcement officers were injured, at least 17 of them quite seriously, during the riot, even as rioters yelled for Vice President Mike Pence’s execution and came within 60 seconds of overtaking Pence and his family. This was not just a slightly overexcited group of gawkers; this was a serious incursion, and McCarthy was right to want verbal restraint in its aftermath.
It isn’t only Republican congressmen who in recent years have been guilty of dangerous pot-stirring. In 2018, radical California Democrat Maxine Waters said Trump staffers and Cabinet members should not be welcome in public places: “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out, and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” She said these appalling things after two top Trump aides had been viciously harassed at restaurants in what became a long-running series of Republicans being subjected to threatening behavior.
Like Brooks, Waters never learned to rein things in, calling for street protesters to get “more confrontational” if police involved in the infamous killing of George Floyd weren’t convicted of murder in 2021.
The examples could continue, including several from the so-called “Squad” of left-wing Democratic congresswomen, but the point is clear: Political feelings these days are volatile, and there are crazies out there who don’t need many verbal cues before they begin acting in dangerous ways.
If hotheads such as Waters, Brooks, Boebert, Gaetz, and Greene refuse to stop their combustible demagoguery, they should be censured by their peers and evicted by their constituents.
