What is so important about January 6?  Three years ago we almost lost our democracy.  Here are personal experiences shared by Representatives Annie Kuster (D-NH) and Jason Crow (D-Colo) to  The Hill : They were there to witness the certification of the 2020 election. By the early afternoon, there were reports that armed members of Trump's so-called Stop the Steal rally were swarming the Capitol. At 2:09PM they were told that the protective perimeter had collapsed. They were trapped. By 2:30PM, with gas masks ready, they were rushed away from the House, and could hear the mob pounding on the doors of the chamber, with gunshots reverberating. They called their loved ones, not knowing if they would make it out. At 2:42PM a Capitol Police directed us to evacuate, and they were escorted across the third-floor hallway and ducked into an elevator. 140 of the security staff got injured. 30 seconds later, the mob reached this spot searching for members of Congress to thwart of will of the v

On 6 January 2001 then president Donald Trump clearly attempted to overthrow our Democracy.  The effort was inept, but still criminal.  In hindsight, after   all 10 living former Department of Defense secretaries published in the  Sunday, 3January2021, issue of the Washington Post a public letter , declaring that the U.S. presidential election was over, Trump should have realized that without the Department of Defense, there was no hope for a successful coup. The letter – signed by Dick Cheney, James Mattis, Mark Esper, Leon Panetta, Donald Rumsfeld, William Cohen, Chuck Hagel, Robert Gates, William Perry and Ashton Carter – amounts to a remarkable show of force against Trump’s subversion efforts just days before Congress is set to count Electoral College votes . Watch William Cohen explain on CNN their motivation for this extraordinary action. Okay, that was one Republican effort to destroy our Democracy, although I would argue that the culprit was Donald Trump, not the entire party.