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Increased Security Around The Capitol – What It Means
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi conducted a surreal news conference today. While defending the continued presence of nearly 10,000 Army National Guard troops in the nation’s capitol, she called for more funding to help protect Members of Congress “from the enemy within.”
What?
That brought back McCarthyite statements and tactics from the 1950’s (and a certain 1994 movie). Then again, McCarthyism (Joseph, not the “Kevin” variety) has been on full display by Democrats for several weeks now. But since American history is no longer taught in schools, it seems, few of any know the sordid tale of the late US Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), and his “Army-McCarthy” hearings. It was a dark episode in modern American history, but a turning point.
But those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And now, we seem to have several new Joseph McCarthy’s reaching for the mantle. This time, they’re Democrats.
You think I’m exaggerating. Have you checked out “cancel culture” lately, and compared it to the Hollywood “blacklists” of the 1950s? There is practically no difference, except cancel culture can hit anyone. And has.
Stealing a page from her former colleague Rahm Emmanuel’s playbook, Speaker Pelosi is not letting a crisis – the January 6th Capitol breach – go to waste. It would appear that the gawd-awful, East German Stasi-style fencing and concertina wire are soon to become a permanent feature in an increasingly military-occupied Washington, DC.
I guess my days of giving after-hours Capitol tours are pretty much over until the city is liberated by another “free and fair” election. Yeah, I know.
Pelosi’s news conference brought back bad memories of my first days as Secretary of Senate in June, 1995. It had only been about 2 months since the Murrah Building terrorist attack in my hometown of Oklahoma City. Washington was all agog over how to prevent Hertz rental trucks full of ammonium nitrate from driving down streets adjacent to where Members of Congress might be found.
You might be surprised to know what the Capitol Police had in mind then. They wanted to close off several streets around the Capitol, including Constitution and Independence Avenues (the main avenues that border the Capitol to the north and south, respectively). They were partially successful, but their goal was to create a separate, walled city around the entire Capitol complex (several US Senators were in favor of that, by the way). I was specifically briefed on the closing of Delaware Avenue, which paralleled the Russell Senate Office building. I opposed it, but I had no say – the decision had been made. I strongly opposed separating Capitol complex offices from people (at the time, we had 4.5 million visitors annually to the Capitol – it reached around 6-8 million. Or, did, pre-pandemic).
One of my ‘accomplishments’ was contributing to a study on the need for a new $125 million Capitol Visitors Center to help improve Capitol security and facilitate the visitor experience at this very important working office building. I strongly advocated for it, but the congressional media at the time shrugged their shoulders, and several Members of Congress said we could not afford it. It took two Capitol police officers to be murdered by a deranged killer just two years after I left office to spur action. Some $800+ million later, we have a superb Capitol Visitors Center. Or should I call it a National Guard armory?
Except now, we’re on the verge of making it impossible for Americans to visit the seat of their government. Yes, their government. Let that sink in. Lincoln’s famous words, that we are a government “of the people, for the people, and by the people” are beginning to ring hollow.
These are perilous times. Nancy Pelosi apparently thinks a couple of her colleagues – both women, by the way, including 5’5″ Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who wants to conceal-carry around the Capitol (as she did at her restaurant in Rifle, CO, which I hope to visit in April) and the admittedly kooky Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) are enemies of the Republic. Maybe others, but she’s not saying. Why punish all 440+ Members of Congress (voting and non-voting delegates)? We’ve had plenty of kooks serve in Congress and survived the experience. If anything, news reporters may have a bigger history of violence in the Capitol than members of Congress, or even lobbyists.
So, yes, let’s improve Capitol security. Clearly mistakes were made that allowed a bunch of clowns and violent actors to overwhelm Capitol Police on January 6th. But let us not over-react, and remember who we are. There is vastly improved technology (drones, anyone?), and there are at least 6 different law enforcement agencies in an around Washington, DC, not including neighboring local law enforcement. We are America. Land of the free. Home of the brave. Where we, the people, govern.
I thought walls weren’t supposed to work?
Do not let your Member of Congress, House or Senate, turn our Capitol into their personal enclave, nor permanently establish martial law in your Capitol city. You are not the problem. They may be.
Published in General
I am asking the same question – I’ve notice other things in my area (military upticks – we are surrounded by bases) and the press on Fox this morning say they are in the dark? Is there something we don’t know?
So they want to turn the US Capitol into this?
I visited that very building in 1995. It had less security than the US Capitol does today. And it wasn’t even close.
Kind of depends on where you live. I live 5 miles from the Pentagon, and have seen no appreciable difference in military activity – hourly military helicopters to and from the Pentagon have been a thing for many years. I’ve also avoided the District of Columbia, which I think it is fair to say is under some military occupation (at least around the Capitol). No one I know who works in the complex is working on site if they can possibly avoid it.
I don’t think they can make the Capitol safe enough for these essential politicians. I suggest that we lease St Helena from the British and move them there. It’s 1,200 miles from the nearest land mass so they should feel secure. If it was good enough for Napoleon it should be suffice for our sacred 535. With luck, Trump in 2025 will build back the border fence. This will allow Nancy and Chucky to stay there permanently.
Actually, along with the president and his cabinet, they really do belong here.
The wall is intended to keep the bad people from terrorizing those of us on the outside, isn’t it?
We can call it The Forbidden City.
Makes sense. They want to collapse the border protection down to their armed compound.
I am guessing the Dems are expecting some push back from Bidens first 100 days of Corporate Fascism. Pack SCOTUS, 2 new states, and 40 million new citizens is bound to make someone unhappy.
We’re in the FL Panhandle, surrounded by bases, so used to the sky maneuvers, the morning and afternoon take offs and booms. The last week the “booms” have taken place mid-morning and have been ground shaking, bigger than bunker busters. Planes taking off late at night also – I’m sure they are just doing their thing, but the people on Fox (Dana Perino etc.) have asked why so many troops until March – the press has not been given any info since Jan. 6th.
This feeds conspiracy – the last thing we need. It’s giving people a very creepy feeling. The MAGA rallies all year have been peaceful – and upbeat. They rounded up all the idiots that were involved in the disaster on Jan. 6th. So what is Congress worried about? Can’t they just beef up the Capitol Police presence?
Yes, there are many options. The Capitol Police already have north of 2,000 members; not sure how many are on duty at any given time, but the much larger DC Metropolitan Police are also available, as is the US Park Police and other federal law enforcement agencies on fairly short notice. I’m increasingly of the view, absent “actionable intelligence” that a threat is imminent or clearly evident (and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-AR, a member of the Sen. Intelligence Committee, says there is none), that there is no need for either National Guard troops or the hastily assembled fencing and concertina wire.
There is definitely a need for it, which is to whip up hysteria against people like us.
Wow! If that is true, it doesn’t fare well going forward – the Democrats control all three branches to some extent, what more do they want? So far, we’re seeing no bi-partisan behavior, no objections other than on talk shows, just sweeping progressive policies blanketing all sectors.
The wall / fencing just makes explicit what many of us have assumed for a long time: the legislators don’t want to hear from the people.
As noted in comment 11 above, such action feeds “conspiracy” theories that make violence more, not less, likely.
Why shouldn’t citizens conclude that legislators are building themselves a fortress from which they intend to rule unmolested by opinions and grievances from the plebes?
If it’s true? They’ve done it in the past. Why would it be any different this time?
They tried to smear all the right with the Oklahama City bombing, and with the JFK assassination. It’s to make us into pariahs.
Just because Stalin was in complete control doesn’t mean he didn’t need to solidify control. Why would these people be any different ?
The militarization of DC is troubling.
I will take a Devil’s advocate position on it. The Capitol riot demonstrated the extraordinary vulnerability of the Capitol building. Lindsay Graham gave a good talk on the issue, and mentioned this.
The rhetoric about sedition and insurrection and coup is just silly. Even terrorism seems a stretch. It was a brief riot, and that was bad. But those people clearly weren’t serious.
Because if there had been a group of, say, 100 guys who were really dedicated to a true insurrection, I don’t see how the security could have stopped them. Imagine if the rioters had used guns and bombs.
It is possible that they might have been stopped, as the Capitol police might have unloaded with their own weapons. It could have been a bloodbath, and it’s not clear that the police and security folks at the Capitol could have stopped a serious slaughter of Senators and Representatives.
It didn’t happen, thankfully, which gives the lie to the hysterical rhetoric. But it could have happened, and Congress has reason to be worried.
Well, Lincoln wasn’t very sincere about it either, as he suspended the Writ and jailed the Maryland legislature.
Agreed. It was a publicity stunt, not an attempted coup. The only officer killed was attacked with a fire extinguisher — meaning the assailant did not bring a weapon. No one firebombed the building like so many businesses and government buildings around the country were torched in 2020.
If Capitol security merits adjustment, it can be updated to include the same measures that corporations use to limit entry. The danger was not that non-violent people were allowed inside the building by unprepared crowd control officers, but rather that Congressional offices could not be quickly and easily locked down.
The perimeter fence and National Guard are false political theater which Republicans must end soon. If they don’t, the practice will be cemented like the TSA. The longer Republicans tolerate this lie, the more bureaucracy, personnel, regulations and restrictions that Democrats will entrench under guise of security.
When I look back on the days of McCarthyism and the HUAC (although I was only six or seven at the time, I’ve studied the period quite a bit), the entire period now seems a bit quaint; especially the famous picture of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall leading the Hollywood stars into the hearings:
https://qz.com/919067/how-it-looked-when-the-hollywood-elite-took-on-washington-70-years-ago/
Of course, these days, Hollywood is solidly behind wingnuts like Nancy Pelosi as she calls for machine gun nests to be posted around our nation’s capitol. How long will it be before she calls for the same protections to be utilized to guard her magnificent refrigerator?
This farce began with Democrats accusing mere tresspassers of sedition. If unchallenged, whatever Democrats proceed to will not be less extreme than that opening salvo.
This is not the end of their campaign. Republicans can expect worse from Democrats unless they restore DC to regularity.
And pray tell, how will they do that? The votes will never be fair again. Even if the democrats don’t outright manipulate voting machines in future elections, they will most certainly make laws to ensure that they have a decided advantage in how elections are conducted.
They will make laws that will be immune from challenge after they pack the Courts.
The republicans have been helping the democrats to oust Trump. I don’t see them being interested in crafting a plan to regain power.
They would have that same worry every day, regardless of the riot. Members of Congress frequently walk around the senate and house office buildings, on the streets between them, and as prior bombings of the Capitol have demonstrated, any dedicated someone can walk in a bomb on their back or on their person.
That just hasn’t happened. If they were truly fearful for their lives, they can and do vote from their office buildings, or find another way to vote remote. This gives the opportunity to grandstand, claim that other politicians (like Ted Cruz) were actively soliciting their murder (recently heard out of the stinking piehole known as AOC), and generally find yet more ways to separate themselves from the people they purport to represent.
What’s going unnoticed is that the rest of the country is operating without those special 535 people being coddled in their usual fashion. So they’ll make noise until they’re noticed again.
The Army-McCarthy hearings were indeed a sordid episode, but not the way you think. Your use of the word McCarthyism shows the pervasive success of the anti-anti-Communist propaganda campaign that has plagued the US since the 1920s.
McCarthy ran afoul of Army top brass and civilian bureaucrats in the defense industrial complex for correctly identifying serious security problems at Fort Monmouth, and other Signal Corps and Signals Intelligence facilities. An obnoxious jerk, which McCarthy could be, who toed the Party line would have been fine. For a good overview of the history, see M. Stanton Evans’ Blacklisted by History.
Security breaches so serious that the Army shut down the compromised units at Fort Monmouth and rebuilt them from scratch at Fort Huachuca. McCarthy was a flawed human being, but he was right more than he was wrong. Unfortunately, one of the ways he was wrong was assuming that perfumed princes in the Army would be more interested in protecting the security of the US than they were in protecting their turf. McCarthy endangered their careers, and they outfought him and ruined him.
Yes, there really were communists that had infiltrated our government at the highest levels. They never left. We had a communist leading the CIA for 8 years and probably will for at least four more. We could use someone like McCarthy again.
The OSS was riddled with Communists, and many got in on the ground floor at the CIA.
A lot of documents have gone down the memory hole, including many original documents pertinent to McCarthy. They have vanished from archives and libraries of various kinds across the country. Pertinent newspaper editions gone, with the previous and following days’ papers present. Empty folders.
Now we juxtapose:
Jeez, who does this sound like?
They don’t seem very competent, but this indictment (if true) indicates that at least some of them were serious. From the indictment:
and
Cause for genuine concern? Cause for political theatre? Cause for both?
And I’m sure that History will remember President Trump as “just like McCarthy, but worse”.
I read Stan Evans’ book, and it totally convinced me that the calumny heaped on McCarthy is utterly unjustified. “McCarthyism” is a real thing, it just shouldn’t be named after McCarthy, who was innocent of it. The subsequent whispering campaign of endless historical revisionism conducted by the very communists he tried to expose doomed his name to end up right up there with Hitler.
Just as Trump is innocent of “Trumpism”. But unless we agitate for truth about these times, the times we all lived through and know what really happened, the Facebook/Twitter/Google bowdlerization and rewriting of this history is what they will be talking about in 50 years. (Or in 5.) (Or now.)