Since the advent of television, certain historical events are permanently fixed in one’s memory, like the McCarthy hearings, the JFK assassination, John Dean’s Watergate testimony, the first Moon landing, 9/11, and Jan. 6, 2021. The fourth hearing of the Jan. 6 Committee this week joined that pantheon of witnessed history.
Under the skillful questioning of Rep. Adam Schiff, three panelists provided vivid and frightening personal accounts of Donald Trump’s mob-boss cajoling and intimidation of state election officials in his desperate quest to overturn the election and keep himself in the White House (and safe from prosecution).
Russell Bowers, president of the Arizona State Senate and former Trump supporter, described his refusal to submit to the demands of Trump and Rudy Guiliani to hold an illegal legislative session to replace the state’s electors with Trump hacks. Brad Raffensberger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, likewise rejected similar coercion on him to “find” enough votes to tilt the state to Trump (as recorded in Trump’s infamous phone call from the White House).
Most shocking of all, Shayes Moss, an African-American election worker in Atlanta, Georgia, described in terrifying detail the personal harassment and death threats directed at her, her mother, and grandmother by thugs incited by Trump and his vile associates — a warm-up for the insurrection on Jan. 6.
As Schiff and other committee members warned, the intimidation of rank and file public officials by the president of the United States is a flagrant threat to democracy, which seems to be the main goal of today’s so-called Republicans and their media cheerleaders at Fox.
This and the other Jan. 6 Committee hearings — available to be streamed on C-SPAN3 — provide a crash course in democracy and the meaning of moral courage. They should be required viewing for today’s generation of high school and college students if this cancer on America’s constitutional government is to be overcome.
Rutherford H. Platt
Barbara Kirchner
Florence