The date Jan. 6 will always mark a sad and regrettable milestone in American history.
It's been one year since an armed mob attacked the U.S. Capitol, intent on disrupting the certification of the 2020 presidential election. The insurrection resulted in the deaths of five people, injury to 138 officers who fought hours to repel the invaders, more than 700 arrests, and millions of dollars in damage. It also revealed to the world just how poorly secured one of the most important citadels of our democracy actually was.
Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar remembers with a special horror that moment at 3:30 a.m. on Jan. 7 when she, Sen. Roy Blunt and then-Vice President Mike Pence picked their way through shattered glass as they walked with the two young women who carried a mahogany box filled with the last of the electoral ballots to be certified.
"I vowed that day this would never happen again," Klobuchar told an editorial writer this week. The incoming chair of the Senate Rules Committee, Klobuchar made it a chief responsibility to ensure that security would be upgraded and that leaders would never again be caught so unaware. Since that time, she said, the Capitol police chief and sergeant-at-arms in the House and Senate have all been replaced.
There is now a preparedness plan in place that, among other things, makes it easier for the chief to call in the National Guard. On Wednesday, Klobuchar's committee heard from the new Capitol police chief.
But that is far from all that needs to happen, as Klobuchar will be among the first to acknowledge. We must collectively rebuild, piece by piece, our trust in elections, our respect for the results, and our commitment to abide by those results. And yet, even a year later and with video evidence of the gruesome attack that showed officers beaten with flagpoles and being crushed in doorways, there remains a refusal on the part of many Republicans to acknowledge the events of that day.
David Hann, a former state legislator and recently installed chairman of the Republican Party of Minnesota, in a recent Star Tribune story referred to the attack dismissively as "a disturbance of some kind," adding that he had not "been spending a lot of time thinking about it and I don't know anybody else who has other than Democrats and I guess the media."
That is a shameful refusal to acknowledge the gravity of that day. Minnesotans should expect better from someone elevated to a position of political leadership.