Opinion | Five years after Jan. 6, we the people decide our future

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Do you remember where you were on Jan. 6, 2021? I do.

I had just been sworn in to my first term in the Minnesota House and was busy preparing my first pieces of voting rights policy. As a national voting rights lawyer, I watched in horror as a mob of President Donald Trump loyalists attacked the U.S. Capitol and Congress, injured 140 police officers and, for the first time in American history, interrupted the certification of a presidential election.

In the immediate aftermath, there were signs of Americans coming together to defend democracy. In Minnesota, the House overwhelmingly passed HR 1, by a vote of 111-8, “condemning violence and violent rhetoric directed at our U.S. Capitol and state capitols” and affirming support for democracy, rule of law and Minnesota’s election results. A majority of Republicans joined all DFLers in support.

But that was then, and this is now. We all learned the truth that Jan. 6 was part of a larger criminal plot involving the White House to overturn the 2020 election. However, somewhere along the line, the truth of it got lost. Five years later, I’m not confident that if the same vote were held in the Minnesota House, we’d get even a handful of my Republican colleagues voting in support.

Jan. 6 was a national tragedy. This fifth anniversary serves as a warning about what happens when we, the people, lose track of the truth and our power.

Jan. 6 exposed how fragile our freedoms and representative democracy are. In its aftermath, our judicial and political institutions failed to hold Trump and his co-conspirators accountable, and any legal accountability delivered by judges and juries was undone by Trump’s Day-One pardon of nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 insurrectionists. And when our attention mattered most, the American people largely seemed to move on.

The last five years laid bare the failure of our institutions to withstand the attacks of a president willing to do anything to stay and get back into power. In the years since, well-funded interests have exploited this fragility for their own anti-democratic ends. We see daily examples of the power of the people eroded while Trump, MAGA and billionaires manipulate our democracy and rig the economy for their personal gains. Trump continues to chip away at democracy to buttress his power, attempting to commandeer state elections, access private voter data and end vote-by-mail; demanding Republican-gerrymandered maps, and attempting to unconstitutionally alter who is a U.S. citizen.

The enormous, festering wounds of Jan. 6 have largely been papered over by horse-race politics, failed appeals to institutional norms and a cowardly refusal to look the truth of it in the eyes. Meanwhile, universities, the media and law firms quickly cut deals to shield themselves from Trump’s wrath while Wall Street courts Trump and his family in service of profit and greed.

It’s time to be brutally honest about what is happening and choose what we, the people, will do about it. Institutions will not save American democracy; only the people will.

If we do nothing, there will be press reporting, but will it be censored by corporate owners to avoid the public bullying of the president and his allies?

There will be a government, but will it be “of the people, by the people, for the people” or something else entirely?

These aren’t questions so much as they are decisions that only we, the people, can make.

So, what will democracy look like five years from now? The truth is, we don’t know. The last year of marching, voting and standing up for each other offers signs of hope. We won’t save democracy from the sidelines; it will take us all standing together to make this work. Time to get to work.