One of the most chilling, disgraceful episodes of the events of last Wednesday came in the ‘undisclosed, secure location’ members of Congress were taken to after they were evacuated from the House and Senate Chambers. This is by definition, a relatively small space crowded with large numbers of people. It’s designed for terror attacks, not COVID mitigation. While there, numerous Republican members still refused to don masks. Indeed, especially seniors from the Democratic caucus, repeatedly begged them to put on masks. They refused and in cases even mocked the requests. Now two members, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D), 55, and Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D), 75 and a cancer survivor, have both tested positive for COVID. They received positive test results on Monday, five days after the insurrection, which is the average time to become symptomatic for COVID.

Here’s video. The blonde women in this scene is Rep. Marjorie Greene, the new Qanon-supporting member from Georgia.

We can’t know for certain that these members were infected during the siege. But it seems highly, highly likely. It’s also quite likely we’ll see more infections in the coming days.

Thanks to Tom Brokaw, we’ve been more than a little oversaturated in the veneration of the World War II generation. But the dwindling surviving members of that cohort have endured one helluva roller coaster from fighting fascism abroad to what happened on Wednesday.

TPM Reader WK checks in:

First, thanks, as ever, for yr excellent coverage and insight.

Also wanted to comment briefly on the current state of things.

My husband and I have just returned from one of our frequent visits with his 93 yo mother and her 95 yo sister who live in a retirement community in our Pennsylvania town.

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It is the last full week of the Trump presidency and if last week was any indication of how long this week will feel, we should be prepared for another interminable one.

A month ago I made a point that I and others have been making in various ways and in various contexts for years, but with renewed urgency. After Trump Democrats must exercise great discipline not to operate within or engage with the bad faith arguments of Republicans who remain unwilling to come to grips with or take accountability for what they’ve done to the country. Today we see, predictably, the same pattern: it has taken Republicans only three or four days to resolve that they are the primary victims of the events of the last week. We’ve skipped ahead from the “stolen election” lie to claims Republicans are the new Jews being trained off to concentration camps because their months-old pet social network Parler became too radioactive for the hosting service it ran on.

One thought I keep returning to: if there were a functioning federal government we’d be seeing regular press conferences updating the public on on-going arrests, health status of the injured, progress of the investigation. As far as I can tell there hasn’t been a single one. Nothing from DOJ, FBI, Capitol Police, the Pentagon. Normally you might expect such information to be channeled through press conferences at the White House. But, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s not clear or perhaps too clear which side the White House is on.

The US is in the midst of the gravest crisis of executive authority in its almost 250 year history. We may later learn that some of these reports are incomplete or even erroneous. But based on reliable reporting, the Vice President is considering or at least “not ruling out” removing the President from office, pursuant to the 25th Amendment. The Speaker of the House has conferred with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about protecting the country’s nuclear arsenal from the President. (Just as importantly she announced this publicly, with the tacit silence of the country’s top general.) The House is moving rapidly toward impeaching the President and while it still seems unlikely it is now by no means impossible that the Senate will vote to remove him from office. Over just the first days of January President Trump has committed a number of acts which are reasonably viewed as statutory felonies – solicitation of election fraud, obstruction of justice, incitement to riot, et al.
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“Of all things, don’t throw me in the briar patch,” Brer Rabbit implores Brer Wolf, but Brer Wolf, wanting to do away with his nemesis, tosses him in the briar patch, from which Brer Rabbit, who was born and bred in the briar patch, emerges, laughing at the fox.  The fox is Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats; Trump is the rabbit; and the briar patch is impeachment. Read More

TPM Reader SS responds to my puzzling over the festooned, over-the-top, costumed insurrection:

Thanks for all your commentary and coverage on TPM, I’m a longtime reader (etc etc) — you guys do just vital, crucial work.

On your question today: “One of the elements of the Trump era I struggle with the most is how to explain to future generations that the threat to democracy arrived in a such a tawdry, low brow, gaudy and comical way. You can’t separate the genuine threat to democracy from the reality TV theatrics. The Capitol Police officer taking a fire extinguisher to the head and the horned fur cap are part of the same surreal tableau.”

This is all the aesthetics of dogwhistle politics. I’ve written about this in academic circles, but basically (as Josh has noted many times), dogwhistling relies on deniability “we’re not really racist, we’re not really fascist, we’re just reasonable people making reasonable political claims in time-honored ways.” There has to be some mechanism of concealment, or there’s no deniability.

If you haven’t seen Don Jr.’s pre-riot video from backstage, you REALLY must watch it. (Getting your Laura Branigan fix is just icing.)

Speaker of the House talks to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff about keeping the nuclear codes from a deranged president. Nancy Pelosi’s actual words:

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