Martina Brady/ Staff Writer
After protestors stormed into Capitol Hill this week, the Steven J. Green School of International & Public Affairs (SIPA) hosted a panel yesterday called “Democracy Under Siege,” addressing the issues which led to the riots at the Capitol.
The panel, moderated by SIPA professor David Kremer, started off with a few opening remarks centered on the rioters.
“Seeing [the Capitol] desecrated the way it was on Wednesday by rioters, vandals, domestic terrorists, whatever word you want to use to describe them, incited by the President of the United States [is] one of the saddest days I can remember,” said Kremer.
Panelists from FIU and Georgetown University shared their interpretations of Wednesday’s events.
“What we saw was an attack on American institutions, processes and values,” said Nicole Bibbins Sedaca, deputy director of the Masters of Science in Foreign Service at Georgetown.
The three panelists agreed that the rise in political polarization was responsible for rise in political violence.
“There’s no doubt this was definitely an attack on American democratic institutions,” said Brian Fonseca, director at Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy at SIPA. “I do think, however, that this is not isolated from the fact that we’ve been seeing decades of increased polarization across the broader American electorate.”
Bibbins Sedaca argued that President Donald Trump was responsible for distrust in the election, as he encouraged rioters to “walk down to the Capitol,” adding “you will never take back our country with weakness,” said Trump.
“What the President did was to go beyond what a normal candidate would do and to question the institutions,” she said. “And that’s something that we have seen throughout his entire presidency, which is this systematic undermining of institutions.”
Howard Wasserman, associate dean at FIU College of Law, explained the legal and constitutional issues for President Trump.
According to Wasserman, Trump’s comments are not prosecutable.
“If you look at the transcript of what… the President said, it was pretty outrageous,” said Wasserman. “But I don’t think [it was] anything that crossed the line to urging people to commit imminent immediate unlawful conduct.”
However, Wasserman estimated that President Trump could be impeached within a matter of days. Alternatively, he added, Congress can invoke the 25th Amendment to transfer power to Vice President Mike Pence.
Fonseca explained that protestors’ ability to access the Capitol indicated a security failure.
“When you see individuals with their feet kicked up on the desk of our public officials and you know Confederate flags [are] being waved in the halls of Congress, I think that is absolutely indicative of a failure of security,” Fonseca said.
According to Fonseca, the military hesitated to deploy the National Guard, considering public response.
“Some of the reports that I’ve seen at the Pentagon were that there was an optics issue that they were really concerned about in terms of massive deployments of the National Guard,” said Fonseca. “Some [suggested] that it was in rebuttal to previous images of the National Guard being overwhelming.”
In response, Wasserman highlighted the disparity of how law enforcement responded to Black Lives Matter protests.
“If they truly were guided by the idea of the optics, of having this massive show of force
surrounding the Capitol… they didn’t seem to have the same concern, with respect to say,” said Wasserman. “It was an inconsistency in optics.”
All three panelists expressed that the democratic process has been undermined following the events which transpired at the Capitol.
“What we’ve seen is this growing part of polarization… that is detrimental to our system,” said Sedaca. “Going forward, our biggest challenge is going to be to differentiate between rebuilding and reaffirming our system and processes, from allowing the partisan conversation to continue to move forward, hopefully in a much more civil way.”
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