Who is to blame for the success of the attack on Congress?

You can't oppose an invading Army with a committee.

Chris Hayes of MSNBC raised the most pertinent question I’ve heard yet about the attack on the Capitol last Wednesday:  why hasn’t there been a press conference?

Within hours of every other major disaster in this country, there has been a press conference by local officials like the mayor and the chief of police.  In the wake of hurricanes and tornadoes and fires, after mass shootings and acts of domestic terrorism like the one that killed 11 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh or the murder of 23 at the El Paso Walmart, a press conference has been held and questions were answered about how many died, how many were injured, who committed the crime or who the suspects were.

But after the biggest act of domestic terror of them all, carried out on a national stage in Washington D.C. – the attack on the nation’s Capitol that left five dead -- there has been total radio silence.  It’s been five days, and no one has stepped before a microphone to answer questions.  No one.

You know why?  Because no one is in charge.  No one is responsible.  It wasn’t merely a failure of leadership that made the insurrection at the Capitol possible.  There was at once no one in charge, and too many in charge.  That’s why the response to the Wednesday attack was such a clusterfuck.  With no one in charge, everyone panicked.

They made plenty of calls, all right.  Congressional aides and a few Congresspeople have described frantic calls made from “secure rooms” where Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and others huddled together.  One report mentioned that they were madly going through their “gold plated rolodexes” of the power elite in Washington, trying to find someone to help.

They called the governor of Maryland, and the governor of Virginia.  They called the Mayor of Washington D.C.  They called the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Army.  They called the Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security, because the acting Secretary was overseas on a trip.  (There is no confirmed Secretary of Homeland Security. Donald Trump has not appointed one.)  They called the commander of the D.C. National Guard.  They called the Agent in Charge of the Washington D.C. office of the FBI.  They called the Chief of Police of the Capitol Police.  They called the Chief of Police of the Metropolitan D.C. Police. 

They called all of these people because no one could figure out the chain of command.  The reason no one could figure it out was because there was no chain of command.  There was in its place, a chain of confusion.  The Secretary of the Army apparently told Nancy Pelosi and others who called the Pentagon frantically that he couldn’t call up the D.C. National Guard because he didn’t have the authority.  The office of the Secretary of Defense at first claimed not to have the authority, because the President of the United States is the one who has the authority to federalize the National Guard.  They weren’t passing the buck.  They were following the buck.  They were going where the buck is supposed to go.  In the end, the “right” person to call was the commander of the invading Army:  Donald Trump.

It turned out that in time of crisis, no one was in charge of defending the United States Capitol. The Sergeants at Arms were right there in the secure rooms with the leadership of the House and the Senate, and in that single fact, we begin to get at the nub of the problem.  The United States Capitol is one building, but for purposes of defense, it’s treated like it’s two places.  Each house of Congress has its own “man in charge,” so to speak, in the person of the Sergeant at Arms.  Each Sergeant at Arms reports to his or her employer on either side of the Capitol in the House and Senate.  The Chief of the Capitol police doesn’t report to one person.  He reports to two:  the Majority Leader of the Senate and the Speaker of the House. 

So when all hell broke loose on Wednesday, the Capitol was in effect undefended because no one was in command of its defense.  It was like an Army commanded by a committee:  every decision took a meeting between the two sides to get decided, and when they were under attack, there was no time for meetings, and apparently, no one even to call the meeting.  So they all called everyone at once, and as we know, for hours while Trump’s lunatic Army rampaged through their headquarters looting and stealing everything from top secret laptops to the Speaker’s podium, no one responded.  When reinforcements finally arrived in the form of an FBI tactical strike force and a unit from the D.C. National Guard that had been on standby a few blocks away throughout the afternoon, they were just in time to witness the perpetrators of the attack on the Capitol walking out the doors.

You have heard the process of writing and passing the laws that govern this country as “making the sausage.”  Well, if they keep making the sausage the way they did it last Wednesday, the next time the Trumpian loons come calling, they’ll bring matches and fire up the grill and barbeque the lot of them.