It was another January 6 today, another presidential Electoral College vote confirmation day.
It was routine, drawing attention only because Vice President Kamala Harris, the losing candidate, simply did her ceremonial job in overseeing the scheduled Congressional confirmation that the strange, anti-populist practice of Electoral College ballots had elected Donald Trump.
There were no mobs, no violence, no breaking into the Capitol, no assaults, no public yelling to hang the vice president, no attempts to overturn the government to keep Joe Biden in office past January 20. It will not be necessary for losers in this race to seek to retell today’s humdrum document stamping as a “day of love” by hordes of supporters made unhappy by the vote; it will not require months and years of investigations and prosecutions in pursuit of baseless claims of never-shown election fraud.
Instead, it is a day for Donald Trump to preen. The day’s sad joke is the vote confirmation comes as confirmation from the New York courts that the same Donald Trump is a convicted felon, no matter how he tries to appeal and shake it. Of course, those criminal acts were not part of January 6, which has slipped from legal accountability altogether
This day’s sad underpinning is that this same Trump who eschews ethics and Constitutional guidelines is about to take an oath to support the nation’s laws, and that among his promised first acts will be the pardon of hundreds or more January 6 rioters who the court system says did break into the Capitol four years ago.
Call it whatever you want: We watched it all ourselves, and re-labeling won’t change what was a violent day in search of illegal insurrection. Whitewashing it now for political rebalancing by the new victors doesn’t change what happened. Unfortunately, rewriting history, even recent history, is also routine.
