The California Republicans Who Helped Enable Wednesday's Attack on the Capitol

California is a blue state run by Democrats. But we have elected officials who have either ignored or enabled President Trump through the years — including on Wednesday, when a pro-Trump mob violently took over the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, in the name of baseless claims about election fraud.

“So much of what drove so many of these people to come to Washington and to perpetrate this assault is tied to the conspiracy theories that are online, the lies that the president tells about the election,” said Marisa Lagos, KQED politics correspondent and co-host of the Political Breakdown podcast.

“When you combine the support or just the kind of sweeping under the rug of some of these actions, you end up really fueling the fire,” she said.

Even after the process resumed, seven out of ten House Republicans from California voted to overturn Arizona’s and Pennsylvania’s electoral votes.

The Bay’s Devin Katayama spoke with Marisa Lagos about why this matters to Californians, even after Trump leaves office.

Below are interview highlights from our conversation with Marisa. They’ve been edited for brevity and clarity. Read the full transcript here. 

Devin Katayama: I think it’s really easy for a lot of people to say, ‘Well, this happened at the U.S. Capitol, it doesn’t really represent California. We’re a blue state.’ So what role do you think that California lawmakers played in fueling what happened at the Capitol?

Marisa Lagos: Republican lawmakers in California have either supported President Trump throughout his four years in office and really enabled him, or have largely stayed silent. And so I think that in either case, you can place some responsibility at the foot of these leaders for either enabling or ignoring the type of behavior that led to the horrific events in the Capitol on Wednesday.

DK: And why is that important to look at California lawmakers when it comes to accountability?

ML: These are our leaders. We elect them to be leaders. I know that we live in a nation where party politics rules, but at the end of the day, whether you’re a Republican or Democrat or independent shouldn’t matter when it comes to protecting our democracy, upholding its principles and particularly we talk about the fundamental right of free and fair elections, which just underpins everything we do. I think other than the First Amendment, I can’t think of a more important part of it.

Whether somebody like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy standing by the president, or it’s people like Devin Nunes who are defending him on Fox News— it all kind of adds up to the mess we really saw play out in the Capitol.

You can’t just sit by the sidelines and be an observer, particularly when you see someone like Shannon Grove, the Senate Republican leader, tweeting that Antifa is responsible, not right-wing extremists, for this assault on the Capitol, and then erasing it and saying, ‘Oh, it wasn’t complete.’ I mean, come on. You are fueling the fire.

DK: So what were congressional Republicans from California saying in the lead up to the vote to certify the results on Wednesday?

ML: We’ve seen a real kind of mix of responses. You have had Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, just really stand with Trump.

You did see Tom McClintock, very conservative member from the greater Sacramento area, speak out against it. He was the only GOP member in the California delegation to actually vote against overturning the Arizona results. The thing that I’ve seen as a member of the media most over the past four years is often just ducking the question.

DK: Ducking the question has kind of been a thing that politicians have done in the past. But what you’re saying is in this moment, ducking the question and not saying either how you feel or what you stand for is actually harmful, and actually has led also to what happened on Wednesday. 

ML: Yes, silence is complicity. When you have a president who is just blowing up the norms of our nation, the democratic constitutional norms, when you have somebody you know who is questioning the vote we all took as members of this democracy, I just don’t think you get credit because in the final hours of his presidency you broke with him — especially when you stayed silent this whole time.

There’s so much fear among the Republican establishment about alienating Trump’s base that it seemed like they were willing to just kind of roll over. And I think that that’s true for many Republicans in California as well.

DK: In a way, the silence has just transferred to condemning violence as the new line.

ML: Let’s be clear: The state GOP and others within it are toeing this crazy conspiracy line, either claiming that Antifa infiltrated these patriots and is responsible for the violence, or kind of a step down from that where we see this kind of ‘whataboutism’ — “what about the Black Lives Matter activist who destroyed property this summer or were violent?’ Even that to me speaks to this kind of fear of the base and this willingness to kind of go along with a narrative that is convenient for them  politically because you’re trying to have it both ways.

I’ve seen nothing from any of these representatives talking about what Trump did say when he told the crowd that he loves them. It is, I think, the ultimate in political trying to kind of have your cake and eat it, too.

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