The January 6 Hearings, Day 3

A distressing, infuriating and chilling story continues to unfold

Some random observations about today’s hearings.

1) Though we knew it already, it’s hard to fully process the reality that Vice President Mike Pence was in imminent danger for his life on January 6, 2021. As the New York Times reported today, “an angry mob with baseball bats and pepper spray chanting ‘hang Mike Pence’ came within 40 feet of the vice president. Mr. Pence’s Secret Service detail had to hustle him to safety and hold him for nearly five hours in the bowels of the Capitol." Also, per the Times, “a confidential witness who traveled to Washington with members of the Proud Boys far-right militia later told investigators the group would have killed Mr. Pence — and Speaker Nancy Pelosi — if they got the chance.”

The President and his henchmen proffered a preposterous justification for Pence to overturn the election, focused on recognizing as official fake slates of electors from up to seven states. All of this was based on an absurd interpretation of the 12th amendment to the United States Constitution and the Electoral Count Act of 1887, in which the Vice President allegedly had the sole authority to determine the outcome of the presidential election .

As January 6 dawned and the day unfolded, it became clear that Pence would not budge in his position that the Vice President lacked such authority. And as an incensed and violent mob descended on the Capitol, including those calling for Pence’s death, Trump tweeted that Pence “lacked the courage” to do the right thing.

It’s chilling and infuriating to consider that a man utterly lacking in conscience was in the position that Trump was. And, not incidentally, it reinforces the absolute imperative that coverage of Trump and those who would do his bidding - including all the candidates he’s endorsed for public office - aren’t just labeled “partisans” in a “polarized” polity. Instead, every one of them needs to be identified as a potential co-conspirator in the kind of violent nihilism that a second iteration of Trumpism might rain down upon us, and that the events of January 6 aptly distilled.

2) John Eastman, the former Chapman University law professor who emerged as perhaps the key legal instigator of the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, was a focus of today’s proceedings. He himself is an embodiment of the sheer lack of conscience characteristic of Trumpism, that arguments need have no basis in fact or reality, so long as they advance the interests of those making such arguments. As the committee’s presentation made clear today, at numerous points prior to January 6, Eastman acknowledged either in writing or in conversation that there was absolutely no valid basis for the notion that Pence could overturn the will of the voters on January 6. In spite of repeatedly conceding that point in private, Eastman continued to press forward, insisting that Pence do that which Eastman himself knew had no legitimate basis. And to top it off, he fulminated to the gathering mob on January 6 that the Constitution clearly gave Pence the authority to “do the right thing.” This is, to repeat, the behavior of a man without a conscience.

In addition to his former appointment at Chapman University, Eastman is also affiliated with the far right Claremont Institute, where he is listed as the founding director of their Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence. The Claremont Institute publishes the Claremont Review of Books. That publication is perhaps best known for the infamous 2016 polemic, “The Flight 93 election.”

The essay, among other things an anti-immigrant, far right screed, begins with this memorable passage: “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain.” More recently, the Claremont Review has screeched that that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term….They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.” This is just a sampling of the Claremont Institute’s output and it’s the intellectual milieu of which Eastman is a part.

3) As noted above, the hearings today focused at length on the plot to recognize phony slates of electors in up to seven states, alongside the legally recognized slates. The seven states whose fake electors were asked in January 2022 to submit for questioning by the January 6 committee were: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico. The first six, of course, were the most closely contested states that Joe Biden won. The seventh state, New Mexico, might surprise some, since Biden won it by more than ten percentage points. But New Mexico is also the state with the highest percentage of Native Americans that voted for Biden (Oklahoma and Alaska have a higher percentage of Native Americans). And we’ve heard Trump say previously in these hearings that the “Indians” are being paid to vote, one of his many demented theories for why he lost unfairly.

In any event, as a “fun” fact, here are the states that Donald Trump carried in 2016 by less than ten percentage points, which presumably would have made them appropriate states to be contested by alternate slates of Hilary electors:

Pennsylvania

Wisconsin

Michigan

Ohio

North Carolina 

Arizona

Georgia

Texas

Florida

Iowa

Ohio

4) I leave the final words to retired Judge J. Michael Luttig, the conservative jurist who has provided the select committee with a legal analysis of the claims made by the Trump team. Luttig was in serious consideration for the Supreme Court seat that Samuel Alito now fills. Here’s what he said today:

“Today, almost two years after that fateful day in January 2021 … Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. That’s not because of what happened on January 6th. It’s because to this very day the former president, his allies and supporters pledge that in the presidential election of 2024 if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate were to lose that election that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way they attempted to overturn the 2020 election but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020.”

More soon.