Biden to say question of ‘democracy’ will be ‘what the 2024 election is all about’ in Jan 6 anniversary remarks

President Joe Biden will use remarks on the third anniversary of the January 6 attack on the Capitol to say that the issue of American democracy will be “what the 2024 election is all about,” according to excerpts released by his re-election campaign.

Mr Biden, who will speak from the Valley Forge historical site where George Washington and the Continental Army were encamped during the winter of 1777 and 1778, will tell attendees that they are there “to answer the most important of questions: Is democracy still America’s sacred cause?”

““This isn’t rhetorical, academic, or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time,” he will say.

The president’s speech comes nearly three years to the day that a riotous mob of former president Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the US Capitol in hopes of preventing Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election.

Mr Biden will recall how Republicans in the House and Senate — and their allies on the Fox News Channel — had “publicly and privately condemned the attack,” and point out that in the intervening years, many of those same people have chosen instead to embrace the disgraced ex-president’s revisionist history, in which the attack was a peaceful protest and those who’ve been arrested for committing crimes that day are political prisoners.

“As time has gone on — politics, fear, money – have all intervened. And those MAGA voices who know the truth about Trump and January 6th have abandoned the truth and abandoned our democracy,” he will say.

“They’ve made their choice. Now the rest of us – Democrats, Independents, mainstream Republicans – we have to make our choice”.

The president’s appearance at Valley Forge comes as the Department of Justice marked the three-year anniversary of the January 6 attack by noting that there have been 1,265 arrests made of pro-Trump rioters, including 452 who’ve been charged with assaulting or otherwise obstructing police officers that day.

Of those arrested, 332 have been charged with obstruction of an official proceeding. There have been 718 defendants who’ve pleaded guilty, with 171 being found guilty after trials.

According to sources familiar with planning for Friday’s event, the choice of Valley Forge for the president’s speech — his first major campaign event of the year — was intentional because of the site’s connection with George Washington, the Revolutionary War commander who became the country’s first president.

Mr Biden will note that many the rioters who stormed the Capitol in support of Mr Trump passed by the iconic portrait of Washington resigning his commission as a general in the Continental Army at the end of the American Revolution, setting a precedent of civilian control over the military that persists in the US today.

He will remind attendees that the painter, John Turnbull, once called that moment “one of the highest moral lessons ever given to the world” and recall how Washington “could have held onto that power as long as he wanted”.

“But that wasn’t the America he and the American troops of Valley Forge had fought for,” Mr Biden will say. “In America, our leaders don’t hold on to power relentlessly. Our leaders return power to the people – willingly.”

Source link