PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — On Jan. 6, 2021, Pennsylvania U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon was in her Washington, D.C., office preparing to defend the state’s electoral college votes.
“Those votes had been certified by our state, and the same ballots that had elected President [Joe] Biden for our state were the same ballots that our colleagues in Congress had been sworn into Congress on just three days before,” she recalled.
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But before she got a chance to do so, the Capitol complex was evacuated and locked down. Scanlon was quickly inundated with messages.
“From family and friends and staff,” she remembered. “I was getting lockdown tips from a friend who is a schoolteacher.”
It was only after she was able to leave her office that she recognized the gravity of what had happened.
“My colleagues and I, the staff at the Capitol, the law enforcement officers there, we had just lived through a coup,” Scanlon said on the one-year anniversary of the insurrection, alongside other government officials at the National Constitution Center. “Some are trying to call it an attempted coup, but let’s be clear: Just because it didn’t succeed doesn’t make it any less dangerous.”
Scanlon said it’s important to remember this anniversary because the “big lie that the election was stolen” is still being circulated.
“Anti-democratic forces continue to press lies and undermine future elections,” and if nothing is done, she said, “it’s obvious that these agents of chaos will keep using lies to enact more damaging voting restrictions and prevent Americans from participating in our democracy.”
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