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Showing posts from January, 2022

'It's only gotten worse': The long shadow of the night that broke the House

The violent attack on the Capitol cost lives, threatened the transition of presidential power and forever changed the way Congress does its work. One year later, we at POLITICO are looking back at those changes and how Washington is moving forward. Rep. Cheri Bustos still remembers her husband’s warning after she and her colleagues were trapped in the House chamber by violent rioters. “‘It is not going to get better out there,’” the Illinois Democrat recalled her county sheriff spouse telling her. The following year proved him right, Bustos added: “It’s only gotten worse.” Bustos is one of several retiring Democrats who told POLITICO that the insurrection, and the months of personal vitriol in the House that followed, propelled their decision not to seek reelection next November. It started before the attack on the Capitol; some cross-aisle relationships began souring far earlier in Donald Trump’s term, while others started to fray amid the 2009 rise of the conservative Tea Party. ...
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Increased threats, overburdened officers: Capitol contends with preventing a Jan. 6 repeat

The violent attack on the Capitol cost lives, threatened the transition of presidential power and forever changed the way Congress does its work. One year later, we at POLITICO are looking back at those changes and how Washington is moving forward. Could it happen again? That’s the question facing policymakers and law enforcement leaders who've spent the last year assessing the failures in their response to Jan. 6, 2021. As they cope with the searing trauma in their own ranks, they’ve tried to patch flaws in Capitol security exposed by the attack — inspired by former President Donald Trump — that wounded more than 150 police officers and left four rioters dead. Another officer died of a stroke after responding to the riot, and several more died by suicide in the ensuing weeks. But the political blight that contributed to the attack has only worsened, inside and outside the Capitol. So while leaders feel readier today than they did on Jan. 5, no one is rushing to declare the thr...
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