The Right Stuff: True intention of Jan. 6 crowd not what’s being said

By Earl Heal

February 14, 2022 | Posted in Local Opinion Columnists While the House Select Committee investigates and the news media pontificates on what 100,000 adults at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, had in their minds, let us logically evaluate the facts and compare them to opinions that many are espousing.

President Joe Biden promptly labeled the gathering an insurrection and some have applied that term to the entire crowd in an official House assembly. The media has widely employed a term, “Threat to democracy.”

The Insurrection Act of 1807 was enacted for suppression of civil disorder, insurrection or rebellion and has been invoked 27 times. It provides statutory exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, which limits federal military use for law enforcement. It requires the president to proclaim an order to the insurgents to disperse before invocation. Causes have included a slave rebellion, Civil War, suppression of the Ku Klux Klan, labor disputes, enforcement of desegregation in Alabama and Mississippi and five times for race riots in the 1960s. Alabama’s Democratic governor George Wallace – even when his actions defied the law – was not cast as an “insurrectionist.”[...read more]