Karl Rove Challenges GOP in Blistering Jan. 6 Op-Ed: ‘What If the Other Side Had Done It?’

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Karl Rove penned a blistering op-ed in which he asked his fellow Republicans how they would have reacted if liberals stormed the Capitol when Donald Trump was being certified as the winner of the 2016 election.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the former adviser to George W. Bush noted that he often criticizes Democrats, but pivoted by saying that “on the anniversary of Jan. 6, I’m addressing squarely those Republicans who for a year have excused the actions of the rioters who stormed the Capitol, disrupted Congress as it received the Electoral College’s results, and violently attempted to overturn the election.”

Rove denounced “apologists” who have downplayed the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when scores of Trump supporters violently disrupted the certification of Joe Biden as the next president.

“We’re told that these harmless, ordinary Americans are being persecuted as political prisoners,” he said, and explained that he had seen liberals assemble to protest both inaugurations of his former boss.

“But last year there were several thousand protesters willing to use force to disrupt Congress in its constitutional duty to receive and certify the electoral vote.”

Rove recounted how some rioters physically assaulted some law enforcement officers and caused general mayhem. “They smashed doors and windows, illegally entered the Capitol, ransacked offices, and searched for leaders of Congress and made dire threats about what would happen if they found them,” he said.

Rove then asked his fellow Republicans how they would react had Democrats done the same in an effort to thwart Trump’s certification as president in 2017:

So, on this anniversary, here’s a simple thought experiment: What if the other side had done it? What if in early January 2017, Democrats similarly attired and armed had stormed the Capitol and attempted to keep Congress from receiving the Electoral College results for the 2016 presidential election?

What if Democrats claimed that Donald Trump’s razor-thin victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin resulted from extensive voter fraud and should be rejected, despite having failed to establish in a single court that extensive fraud had actually occurred?

What if some of these Democrats breached the Capitol defenses and threatened violence against the Republican speaker, Paul Ryan, and Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell?

What if they insisted that in his role as Senate president then-Vice President Joe Biden had sole authority to seat Hillary Clinton’s electors from any contested states and thereby hand her the presidency?

If this happened, would some of my fellow Republicans have accepted it as merely a protest? Would they have called patriots those charged with violent acts against our country, its laws and Constitution? Would they have accepted such extralegal means to change the outcome of a presidential election?

No they would not. I’m certain of that.

Rove added that had Democrats done what he described, “Republicans would have criticized them mercilessly and been right to do so. Republicans would have torched any high official who encouraged violence or stood mute while it was waged and been right to do so. Republicans would have demanded an investigation to find who was responsible for the violence and been right to do so.”

He concluded by saying, “There can be no soft-pedaling what happened and no absolution for those who planned, encouraged and aided the attempt to overthrow our democracy. Love of country demands nothing less. That’s true patriotism.”