Brick by brick

Greetings from RAINY Lexington!  You read that correctly, it's RAINING here!  So happy to finally get rain, and I mean that for the farmers in the region and the homeowners who like to have a lawn surrounding their homes!

Speaking of homes, the title of this post could be used to infer the logical way that one would build a home--brick by brick.  But I have something else in mind for that phrase.

Regardless of your political leanings, it's fair to say that most people who've paid some attention to the House Select Committee investigating the events of and leading up to January 6, 2021 have constructed a compelling narrative about those events and various people's involvement in them.  But it's also crystal clear that the intent of this well-structured series of presentations was to fully illustrate that former President Trump was at the center of all of these activities.

Full disclosure--I was never a supporter of the former President, but recognized his and his campaign's absolute right to contest the results of the 2020 Presidential election through the proper channels, namely the courts.  His attorneys filed a total of 62 lawsuits in state and federal courts, and 61 of them were unsuccessful.  The lone successful effort involved a Pennsylvania judge ruling that voters should not be permitted an opportunity to "cure," or otherwise fix their ballots if these voters failed to provide proper identification three days after the election.

That didn't work, so the evidence laid out by the Committee indicates that a number of other approaches were considered to overturn the results of the election, and none of these were established or legal methods.  

The Electoral College did its work and the results of their votes also did not change the outcome of the election, so all that remained was to disrupt the ceremony at which the Electoral College's results are read aloud in a joint session of Congress and certified by the sitting Vice-President.

You know enough of the rest.

While this has been a well-orchestrated series of presentations, featuring spoken narrative, video clips and live witnesses, nothing that this Committee does is binding, as they have no authority to charge individuals with crimes, only to refer matters to the Department of Justice to be addressed.  Thus far these referrals have largely centered around individuals' failure to comply with Committee subpoenas.

The question that most observers have is "why is the Department of Justice taking so long to act?"

It seems that they ARE acting, although not in a terribly public way.  There's a grand jury that has heard from multiple witnesses and many individuals have been prosecuted for their direct involvement in the storming of and invasion into the Capitol on 1/6.  But Attorney General and former federal judge Merrick Garland has stated more than once that 1) no one is above the law and 2) he and his team will follow the facts where they lead and act accordingly.

Those of us who want this to end in a satisfactory way have to hope that the facts that have surfaced are leading these investigations in the right direction.