Republicans are usually the party in which police officers can find a safe bosom to snuggle into whenever they face even minor scrutiny. They are America’s party of refuge for cops—or at least hey were until exactly 700 days ago, when violent zealots for a defeated president ransacked the U.S. Capitol in his defense, injuring dozens of cops. One, Brian Sicknick, died a day after the attack, although it may be impossible to directly tie his death to what happened to him on Jan. 6th. That didn’t matter much when Sicknick’s mother and brothers went back to the Capitol yesterday to accept a congressional gold medal on his behalf; they were not with the shits when the top Republicans, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Mike McCarthy, stuck out their hands in fake empathy.
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This morning, Sicknick’s family went on CNN to talk about why they refused the politicians’ handshakes, and it boiled down to this: Republicans hadn’t done much to dissuade the mob that attacked their relative and even less to bring its leader, ex-president Donald Trump to heel. Sicknick’s blood, they said, was on their proverbial hands.
From CNN
“Just sitting in the senators’ offices and looking at the pictures of their families behind them and thinking, ‘You know, what do they do when they go home? What do they say to their children and their grandchildren when they go home? You know, what kind of country is this going to be? Do they really want them to live in a country of their making?’” Gladys Sicknick said.
We may get an answer to that question soon enough, since McCarthy is set to become the next Speaker of the House in January.
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