Where do we put our feels?

Day 2 of Impeachment 2

Yesterday, U.S. House of Representatives impeachment managers took listeners and viewers on a granular tour of what happened during the Jan. 6 insurrection.

In addition to disturbing video we’ve seen already, managers showed previously unshared security video that included elected officials and Capitol staff members running down hallways just minutes ahead of the armed mob. One segment showed Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) being rushed out of harm’s way by Eugene Goodman, whose bravery in leading the traitors away from other elected officials we’ve also already seen.

We owe Capitol Officer Eugene Goodman, a lot

Maybe it was the unguarded nature of the people in those security videos. Or maybe it was the lack of audio and viewers were left with their own imagination, but the security footage was among the most chilling of the evidence offered Wednesday.

It was an exhausting day, in which we learned:

• The day of the insurrection, with an angry mob right outside the door, quick-thinking Senate staffers thought to grab the leather-bound electoral ballot box at the heart of the former president’s lies. Doing so allowed the Senate to reassemble later that day and certify the election, according to Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif.

• Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, told the story of a Black Capitol police officer who, after the Capitol was cleared, broke down in tears over the racist names he was called by Trump’s mob. From a New York Times story, Raskin said:

  And he shouted out, I got called an N-word 15 times today. And then he recorded, I sat down with one of my buddies, another Black guy in tears, just started streaming down my face, and I said what the F, man, is this America? 

• At one point, Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, reassured the Senators: “Mike Pence is not a traitor.” It was hard not to be jolted by that.

• At the end of the proceedings, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, rose to say that words attributed to him in the manager’s report were inaccurate, and should be stricken. Much parliamentary hilarity ensued, after which Raskin stepped up and withdrew the comments, which were based on previously-published news stories. A question that’s still to be answered? What happens when a juror (Lee) suddenly presents himself as a witness in an impeachment trial?

Such public trials have a way of introducing us to people we might not otherwise have met (I’m old enough to remember getting to know John Dean during the Watergate hearings). Rep. Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat, represents the Virgin Islands’ at-large congressional district, and as such, she can only vote in committees. On the day of the insurrection, Rep. Plaskett tweeted this:

Rep. Plaskett took us down a detailed timeline of that awful day. We heard audio from police: “We’ve been flanked and we’ve lost the line. 10-33.” We watched body cam footage of an officer being attacked. In the videos, we heard chants of “Fuck you” and “We’re heeere,” and men crying out for Speaker Nancy Pelosi. We saw the zip ties, the military-grade weaponry, and we heard again the cries of Washington, D.C., police officer Daniel Hodges as he was being crushed in a door. Hodges later told NBC:

It was absolutely my pleasure to crush a white nationalist insurrection…We’ll do it as many times as it takes.

We are told over and over again that getting 67 senators (some of whom are complicit in the lie at the heart of the insurrection) to convict is next to impossible. So perhaps we should reach out to our favorite Republican senator and suggest that a nay to convict Trump is a yea to armed insurrection. Let them hear from you.