District 34 U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela said U.S. Capitol Police leadership should have been prepared for the violent, pro-Trump mob that broke through barricades and stormed the Capitol building in Washington D.C. on Wednesday, though he stressed the failure is not a reflection on individual police officers themselves.
These Capitol police, individual officers, they’re like family,” Vela said Thursday. “When I go through the checkpoint I know those guys. When I go into the garage, I know those guys. The union chief, he loves San Manuel jalapeno cheese sausage, so I always bring it to him. … The bottom line is these guys were totally outmanned. The Capitol leadership, they weren’t ready for it. They should have seen it coming. They didn’t.”
What’s not being reported is the number of injuries sustained by officers, who were attacked with pipes, chemical irritants and other weapons, he said. The D.C. Police Department wasn’t able to respond without a request from Capitol Police, and the federal response was delayed because the person responsible for invoking it — the president— took no action after having incited the mob himself at an earlier rally.
Late Thursday, Vela announced via Twitter that he was co-sponsoring a resolution to draw up Articles of Impeachment for Trump’s instigation of the Capitol riot and would also support removal of the president from office via the 25th Amendment. With Trump’s time in office ending in two weeks, however, a House vote to impeach would be mostly symbolic since the Senate is unlikely to take up the articles.
“I support the effort to get (Vice President Mike) Pence to invoke the 25th and the resolution to impeach Trump just because he directed a treasonous insurrection,” Vela said. “He’s been impeached by the voters.”
Vela said he was on his way to the Capitol on Wednesday from his residence five minutes away to wait for the vote certifying the presidential election results when he received an alert on his phone for those in the Cannon House Office Building, where Vela’s office is located, to lock down. He called his chief of staff, who contacted Capital Police for instructions. Vela was told to park in the plaza across the street from the Supreme Court, where he sometimes parks in nice weather when a vote is scheduled, though on Wednesday it didn’t seem safe, he said.
“That sounded like a particularly bad idea,” Vela said.
He returned home await the vote call from House leadership (which would be delayed because of Sen. Ted Cruz’s objection to the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral win) and saw on television that the mob had already reached in plaza where Capitol Police had just told him to park. The certification vote in the House didn’t start 9 p.m., after the rioters had been expelled and members of Congress had returned to finish their business. The House adjourned shortly before 4 a.m. and Vela said he finally got to sleep about 9 a.m.
He said he was still trying to process the incident but was trying to focus on the positive.
“I thought it was encouraging and for me … it gave me some degree of patriotic comfort when Republicans like Mitt Romney and Adam Kinzinger throughout the week were objecting to the idea that the electoral count should be resisted,” Vela said.
He described Cruz’s objections to the certification process “totally shameful,” but noted that a number of Republicans who had originally planned to raise similar objects backed off after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol.
“Something about that made me feel good about the process moving forward,” Vela said.
The good news that got overshadowed by the riot is that Democrats took back control of the Senate with wins by Democratic candidates in two Georgia Senate races, he said. If Republicans had maintained control, Biden would have had considerably difficulty moving forward with his agenda, Vela said.
“State and local funding for example,” he said. “My guess is we’re going to go back probably by the end of February and get that state and local funding we’re been fighting for since last year. It’s a really, really big deal. … Now we’re going to have the wind at our backs. I think we’re also probably going to see a pretty good infrastructure package here in the next six months. It’s making me feel a lot better about being in Congress this term. Now I know we’re going to be able to accomplish some things.”
