There will never be a moment when I’m not enraged by what happened on January 6th.

Tonight’s hearing was especially infuriating. There have to be consequences for Donald Trump. It’s imperative if our democracy is to continue. It’s necessary if we’re to remain a free nation.

The January 6 Committee hearing tonight provided a moment-by-moment accounting of the 187 minutes between when the Capitol insurrection began to when Donald Trump released a video on Twitter finally urging the rioters to stand down.

Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) noted that previous hearings showed how Trump “commanded a mob — a mob he knew was heavily armed and angry and he made targets out of his own Vice President and the lawmakers gathered to do the people’s work.”

I’m generally not a fan of messaging bills because they’re constructed not to actually change public policy but instead to emphasize the views of incumbents to their constituents before an election.

But that wasn’t the case yesterday with the House vote to codify the right for gay couples to marry. While it may have started out as a messaging exercise, it quickly became much more powerful than that.

The January 6 Committee has made some interesting editorial choices in the video testimony they feature. 

One video segment at yesterday’s hearing featured Ivanka Trump denying that she said she wanted to attend the Ellipse rally speech with her father to try to “calm him down” which was juxtaposed with her former chief-of-staff affirming exactly that.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) dropped a pretty big bombshell at the end of today’s January 6 Committee hearing:

After our last hearing, President Trump tried to call a witness in our investigation, a witness you have not seen in these hearings. That person declined to answer or respond to President Trump’s call and instead alerted their lawyer to the call. Their lawyer alerted us, and this committee has supplied that information to the Department of Justice.

As bad as we thought the January 6 insurrection was, we learned today that it was much, much worse.

Trump not only summoned the mob, as we learned in the first half of today’s hearing, but he planned ahead of time to unleash them on the Capitol to disrupt the counting of electoral votes.

The January 6 Committee turned its focus to the violent domestic extremist groups that stormed the Capitol and the role former President Donald Trump has in assembling the mob that disrupted the electoral count.

The committee once again employed the incredibly effective strategy of using the words of Trump’s inner circle — and even his family — to undermine Trump’s false claims that the election was somehow stolen.