Terry Bracy: Maybe the Capitol rioters did us a favor

Maybe they did us a favor, that poisonous brew of white supremacists, anarchists and thugs — men and women who looked more like vandals than Americans petitioning for the people.

Some went for the prospect of chaos and violence; others were sadly tricked into battle by the greatest con man since Jim Jones. One difference: Jones drank the Kool-Aid and joined in the mass suicide he inspired, while Trump pledged to lead his troops, and immediately retreated to his bullet-proof limousine and sped to the White House where he watched on TV the fun he had wrought.

I watched, too, sadly, as they took bats and flagpoles to national treasures that in my career I had the privilege of passing almost daily, so habitually that I rarely stopped to gaze. All of this carnage done to reclaim the presidency for a candidate who lost by 7 million votes. What if the election had been close? How far would this new Republican Party have taken it then?

The reluctant gratitude I feel toward this mob revolt does not stem from the realization that our democracy held. We expected that. Rather, I am thankful for the warning: that our precious republic can be put in such eminent peril by an incompetent and corrupt President of questionable sanity.

We hear that America is more divided now than at any time since the Civil War. Yet many commentators were not around in the Vietnam years when I sometimes gazed down from my office window on the Hill to see machine gun emplacements guarding the Capitol building.

Others don’t recall the impending danger marchers for racial justice felt as they faced beatings and bullets. Thousands of bodies paved the road from Birmingham to Washington on the way to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts — people who sought not to bring down America but to be full citizens of a great nation.

The Trump mob had that Sheriff-Bull-Connor look again, battling to turn back the clock to a time when the unchallenged white male ran the show. Is that what MAGA really means?

Government can end wars and address justice issues, but the new leaders sent in to fix this mess are asked first to do something new and unique — fight for truth. How do they accomplish that? Outlaw lying? How do they plan to wrench nearly half the electorate away from Trump’s “alternative truth.”

“A lie can travel around the world while the truth is putting on its boots,” goes the adage. President Trump’s whoppers tabulated by serious fact-checkers are in excess of 20,000 since taking office, and we find that what is constantly repeated is often believed. Solutions to this problem are above my paygrade.

I do have two suggestions.

First, I have little doubt that by any definition the world has witnessed blatant sedition. It is crucial that our justice system rise to the occasion and immediately punish all involved, top to bottom, with harsh sentences. Congress must impeach and convict Trump, and it must expel the key actors from the House and Senate. Failure to do so will bring more of it.

Second, the American campaign system has become the single greatest impediment to effective government in America. Something has to be done, a sweeping change whose goals are to limit the amount of time, if not money, that candidates can spend on campaign activities and a specific period of time when members must work on the jobs they were elected to do. Today, we are in the era of the permanent campaign and the two-day congress. Neither is producing the solutions that the nation needs.

Finally, let’s collectively welcome President-elect Biden.

As George H.W. Bush wrote to Bill Clinton after experiencing defeat in their bitterly contested 1992 election: “You will be our president when you read this note. I am rooting hard for you.”

Four years of molten toxicity is quite enough. Let’s root hard for each other.