What actually happened on January 6th?: Institutional stress test
The gavel
At 3:42 a.m. on January 7, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence gaveled in the final tally. The Capitol still smelled of tear gas. Broken glass had been swept but not replaced. And the constitutional process completed exactly as the Twelfth Amendment prescribed.
The republic has survived worse. The Civil War killed 620,000 people. The 1876 election required a backroom deal that abandoned Black citizens to Jim Crow. By comparison, January 6 was an afternoon. We say that not to minimize but to calibrate.
Start with the courts. Trump’s team filed over sixty lawsuits. They lost virtually all of them — before judges appointed by both parties, including Trump appointees. The judicial system processed the claims and rejected them on evidentiary grounds. Then the vice president. Pence was told he could unilaterally reject electoral votes. He refused. The constitutional officer at the center of the pressure campaign chose the Constitution over the president.
What the stress test showed
The military stayed in barracks. No governor mobilized the Guard for the rioters. No state legislature submitted alternate electors through official channels. The institutional checkpoints — judicial, legislative, executive, military — all held.
The insurrection frame treats the day as existential. Existential crises do not resolve in six hours with a gavel. The symptom readers argue trust had been declining for decades. The trend lines are real. But on the day that mattered, the institutions delivered the constitutional outcome without suspending civil liberties or delaying the inauguration by a single day.
The political persecution frame raises the pardons. Pardons are themselves a constitutional mechanism. Article II, Section 2. Andrew Johnson pardoned Confederates. Ford pardoned Nixon. Using the power badly is the system operating, not breaking.
Where we concede ground: Capitol Police were catastrophically underprepared, and officers in the tunnel did not experience the system holding.
What would change our mind: A future disputed election where courts, certification, or military neutrality fail to produce the result.
Read the full synthesis: What actually happened on January 6th?