(AP) — President Joe Biden on Thursday marked the first anniversary of the U.S. Capitol insurrection, the violent attack by Trump supporters that has fundamentally changed the Congress and raised global concerns about the future of American democracy.
Biden arrived early at the Capitol saying: “I’m praying that we’ll never have another day like we had a year ago today.”
The president and congressional Democrats started the morning in Statuary Hall, one of several spots where rioters swarmed a year ago and interrupted the electoral count. Biden is set to draw a contrast between the truth of what happened and the false narratives that have sprung up about the Capitol assault, including the continued refusal by many Republicans to affirm that Biden won the 2020 election. He plans to highlight the ongoing threat facing the nation’s democracy by those who used or condoned the use of force to try to subvert the will of the people.
“And so at this moment we must decide what kind of nation we are going to be,” Biden will say, according to excerpts of his remarks released early Thursday. “Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm? Are we going to be a nation where we allow partisan election officials to overturn the legally expressed will of the people? Are we going to be a nation that lives not by the light of the truth but in the shadow of lies? We cannot allow ourselves to be that kind of nation. The way forward is to recognize the truth and to live by it.”Biden planned to outline “the singular responsibility” then-President Donald Trump bears for the violence of that day, when he egged on his protesters and waited hours before calling for calm. He also planned to warn that Jan. 6 is part of an enduring challenge to the nation’s system of government.
A series of remembrance events during the day will be widely attended by Democrats, in person and virtually, but almost every Republican on Capitol Hill will be absent. The division is a stark reminder of the rupture between the two parties, worsening since hundreds of Trump’s supporters violently pushed past police, used their fists and flagpoles to break through the windows of the Capitol and interrupted the certification of Biden’s victory.
While congressional Republicans almost universally condemned the attack in the days afterward, most have stayed loyal to the former president.
Rep. Liz Cheney, chair of the House committee investigating the attack and one of the few GOP lawmakers attending the Capitol ceremonies, warned that “the threat continues.” Trump, she said, “continues to make the same claims that he knows caused violence on January 6.”
“Unfortunately, too many in my own party are embracing the former president, are looking the other way or minimizing the danger,” she told NBC’s “Today.” “That’s how democracies die. We simply cannot let that happen.”Others, including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, were absent, with a contingent of colleagues attending the funeral for former Sen. Johnny Isakson in Georgia.
In a bid to inform the public, Democrats investigating the insurrection plan to spend the coming months telling the American people exactly what happened last Jan. 6. But leaders will spend the anniversary appealing to broader patriotic instincts.
