Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Confirm They’re Cowards With No Souls on First Day of 1/6 Hearing

On Tuesday, more than six months after Donald Trump sent a violent mob to overturn the results of the 2020 election, four police officers delivered searing testimony detailing their experiences defending the Capitol as it was under attack. District of Columbia Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone told lawmakers he was beaten unconscious and suffered a heart attack after being shocked with his own Taser multiple times. “I was dragged from the line of officers and into the crowd,” he said. “I was electrocuted again and again and again.”

Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn said rioters told him, “This is our house” and taunted him with racist abuse, yelling “This n-gger voted for Joe Biden!” and “Boo! Fucking n-gger!”

Sergeant Aquilino A. Gonell testified that the mob threatened to kill the police, describing the attack as scarier than anything he‘d seen on duty in Iraq, and adding that he believed he was going to die that day.

Officer Daniel Hodges called the rioters terrorists, said someone tried to gouge his eye out, and testified that he was told by a rioter, “You will die on your knees.”

In short, it was a harrowing way to kick off the House Select Committee’s investigation into the January 6 attack, and anyone who listened to the words the officers had to say would have no doubt been moved, if they weren’t already, to do whatever they could to hold the people responsible for the events that day accountable. Which is why Republicans, save for the two actually willing to tell the truth about Trump and the GOP’s culpability, were nowhere to be seen.

After months of refusing to investigate the insurrection, killing an attempt to form a bipartisan commission to probe the riot, and swearing the attack wasn’t actually that bad, shameless, cowardly Republicans spent the day trying to discredit the proceedings as the officers literally testified about nearly being beaten to death. Rep. Elise Stefanik, who replaced Liz Cheney as the third-ranking House Republican, suggested the failed coup that left five people dead was Nancy Pelosi’s fault. Jim Jordan decried the investigation as a partisan “charade.” And the two highest-ranking Republicans in Congress, who also happen to be the most full of shit, claimed they were simply too busy to spend a moment of their days to hear testimony from the people who saved their lives.

As Cheney, who’s been made a pariah in her party for daring to say out loud that Trump incited the mob that came to the Capitol that day, said in her prepared remarks, “If those responsible are not held accountable, and if Congress does not act responsibly, this will remain a cancer on our Constitutional Republic, undermining the peaceful transfer of power at the heart of our democratic system. We will face the threat of more violence in the months to come, and another January 6th every four years.” Which is apparently just fine with the GOP.