University of Virginia issued the following announcement on Jan. 6
On the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine was scheduled to be a panelist for the first in a series of “Democracy Dialogues,” to be hosted that evening by University of Virginia Center of Politics Director Larry Sabato.
By that afternoon, however, Kaine quickly became unavailable; he was barricaded in a “safe space” in the U.S. Capitol, without a phone and away from the chaos unfolding in the same building. He eventually returned to the Senate floor to see through the certification of President-elect Joe Biden, the move Donald Trump supporters infamously rioted against via violent siege.
Thursday marked one year since that insurrection, and Sabato was again moderating an online event from the Rotunda.
This time, Kaine was available, offering unique insight as one of Sabato’s many high-profile guests – from journalists to elected leaders and beyond – for “The Shock of January 6: First Annual Conference on America’s First Attempted Coup Since 1865.”
“I was extremely angry on Jan. 6 – that was my dominant emotion,” said Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia. “I had an emotion of relief that I had told my staff to stay home. … But my other emotion, not a surprising one, was anger, but it was an anger unlike any I’ve ever felt in my life. And it took me months to figure out why. What was the source of this anger? And why was it different than all other angers?
“And I eventually realized this was the reason it was different. I’m a white male born in 1958. Nobody had ever tried to disenfranchise me before. I was a civil rights lawyer in the capital of the Confederacy, I did voting rights work. It really mattered to me, but I was fighting to protect the voting rights of others.
“For about four or five hours on Jan. 6, 2021, I felt for a brief period of time what it was like to be disenfranchised. The attackers were trying to overturn the expressed will of 80 million people who had voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
“And it was like, ‘Wow, this is what it feels like.’”
Sabato said during his opening remarks Thursday that “it’s still hard to believe the insurrection happened. Yet if our republic is to survive, our democracy is to survive, then it is something we must never forget.”
While Kaine had a front-row seat to the attack on democracy, it was simultaneously playing out on live television. Jonathan Karl of ABC News and CNN’s Jim Acosta covered the shocking scenes that still linger symbolically today.
Original source can be found here.
