American democracy is "at greater risk today than it was one year ago" during the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol insurrection, according to one of the members of the House committee investigating it.
California Rep. Adam Schiff, a Burbank Democrat who also chairs the House Intelligence Committee, told KCBS Radio's Jeff Bell in an interview a day before the insurrection's first anniversary that he wasn't confident future efforts to overturn a presidential election would fail.
"We are better-prepared for a potential attack on the Capitol, but what is most at risk is not the building. It's our democracy," Schiff told Bell on Wednesday.
"And the same 'Big Lie' about the last election – that there was massive fraud when there wasn’t – that propelled people to violence on Jan. 6 is still being pushed around the country by the former president, by others," Schiff continued.
A year ago Thursday, former President Donald Trump's supporters stormed the Capitol in an effort to prevent Congress from counting electoral votes and certifying President Joe Biden's victory, all while echoing Trump’s widely disproven and widely disseminated claims the election was stolen.
Since then, a number of states have passed or proposed laws to limit ballot access. The Brennan Center for Justice published a report in December finding at least 19 states passed 34 restrictive laws, including omnibus laws in Republican-controlled Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Texas which "each contain several new restrictive provisions."
Schiff said Trump's "Big Lie" is "being used to usher in a new generation of Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise people of color" and "to strip independent elections officials of their duties."
"All of which has put our democracy at greater risk today than it was one year ago," Schiff said.
The Senate has not yet advanced the Freedom to Vote Act, nor the House-passed John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and Protecting Our Democracy Act, which Schiff said “are important to the health of our democracy.”
In the 50-50 Senate, Democrats need at least 10 Republicans to join them to move legislation to a vote because of the upper chamber’s 60-vote threshold. Republican leaders have publicly opposed the legislation, calling it federal overreach.
Schiff "was very proud to see" Attorney General Merrick Garland say "a lot of the right things" in a speech outlining the Department of Justice's plans to prosecute perpetrators who incited and carried out violence on Jan. 6, but he said efforts before and after that date – including Trump’s call to the Georgia Secretary of State last Jan. 2 asking him to "find" enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory in the state – also "need to be held accountable."
"I fear that, for four years, the Justice Department took the position that you can’t prosecute a sitting president," Schiff said. "And that now, in a desire not to look backward, they are practically taking the view that you also can’t prosecute a former president. That would make the president above the law, which I think is a dangerous idea and one the founders would’ve never subscribed to."