No. of Recommendations: 13
That's because it was merely a riot at that point. The scenario we're walking down is one wherein the #2 guy in the government is to be hunted down, captured and killed.
Not necessarily, and not even likely. This scenario involves Pence and his team getting caught up in the mob, who takes their anger (rage? disappointment?) out on him. Or put enough of a scare into him that he decides that he's not going to stick to his guns.
In our USA Up All Night B-movie scenario that we're outlining, even in the worst, worst case Biden's certification would have been slowed down by maybe all of...
...wait for it...
a couple of hours. Max.
Unless they were successful in stopping the certification for more than a couple of hours. Delaying the certification creates additional opportunities to get Congress to not certify it at all. Once the vote is certified, the cause was lost; before it was certified, there were still chances to stop it. The mob was never going to be able to stop the vote by itself, any more than the mob of a less than a thousand Parisians that stormed the Bastille was itself going to be able to overthrow the monarchy. The point of an insurrectionary act is not always to seize power in a single stroke, but to move towards that goal.
Okay. So were there mobs of Proud Boys ready to start erecting guillotines in and around Washington, D.C.?
No. And neither were there mobs of Parisians erecting guillotines in and around Paris on July 14, 1789 (would have been anachronistic anyway - it didn't come into use in France until much later in the Revolution, really not until the Terror). The storming of the Bastille was just an angry mob seizing a barely-utilized government building from a small garrison of invalide veterans, barely supplemented with a few regular-duty soldiers. The mob wasn't trying to depose the king with that act, or establish a power base for a replacement. They were just expressing rebellion against the government. The building had no tactical value and the king and all the government ministers were dozens of miles away in Versailles at the time. But it was an act of insurrection nonetheless. It's intensely meaningful and historically significant because the rest of the country took up that revolt, but not because the storming of the Bastille itself had any tangible impact on the exercise of French government functions.
The storming of the Bastille succeeded as an insurrectionary event, while the storming of the Capitol failed, because the rest of the country seized on it as a symbol and made it the flashpoint of the French Revolution. Not because the Bastille was more important to the functioning of the French government than the Capitol building.
As for this....
Hardly speaks to the left-wing narrative of A HUGE BIG NATIONAL PLOT TO INSTALL DONALD TRUMP AS EL PRESIDENTE AND OVERTHROW THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.
...the big national plot was the effort to create "alternate" slates of electors, sow enough confusion in the Congress that the elected Republicans refuse to certify Biden's win, and therefore overthrow the transition of power to the person who won the election. Not the mob storming the Bast....the Capitol Building. Autogolpes don't involve overthrowing the government - they involve holding power that has been legitimately transferred to another.
