‘Our vanguard has broken through the barricades,’ former state Rep. Rick Saccone wrote on the day our democracy nearly burned to the ground.

By John L. Micek, Pennsylvania Capital-Star

Good Thursday Morning, Fellow Seekers.The madness and treason that’s consumed the Party of Trump now has a face: And it belongs to former Pennsylvania state Rep. Rick Saccone. On Wednesday, on a day that thugs and domestic terrorists bent on overthrowing the results of a lawful election, stormed the United States Capitol with laughable ease, Saccone, an Allegheny County Republican, who once swore an oath to uphold the law and the constitution, tried to justify the unjustifiable. “We are storming the Capitol,” Saccone, also a former Congressional candidate who once aspired to serve in the building he proposed to sack, brayed in a now-deleted post. “Our vanguard has broken through the barricades. We will save this nation. Are you with me?” In a now-deleted video, preserved by Sen. Lindsey Williams, D-Allegheny, Saccone boasts that he and others are “trying to run out all the evil people that are in there, and all the RINOs (Republicans in name only) who have betrayed our president. We’re going to run them out of their offices. We’re calling on Vice President [Mike] Pence to support our president. Look at all these people here … hundreds of thousands. The fake news media won’t tell you how many people are here. But I’m telling you that there are hundreds of thousands of people here to support our president and save our nation.” We know how that ended: With Capitol Police, their guns drawn, guarding the doors to the U.S. House chamber, as people hid behind desks and chairs, as people tried to break it down. With an angry mob swarming, seemingly unchallenged, through the halls of the Capitol and across its east and west fronts. And with four people dead.  It was a coup. It was insurrection. And it was all based on a lie, incited and perpetrated by President Donald Trump, and propagated by loyal flunkies across every level of government, that the results of a free and fair election — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — was somehow riddled with widespread fraud. It reached its hideous conclusion Wednesday, as Trump exhorted his followers to march on the Capitol. So thus did Saccone, and his fellow pro-Trump extremists, descend on the Capitol on Wednesday to try to up-end the quadrennial counting of electoral votes already riven by controversy, thanks to the cynical and careerist fever dreams of Trump loyalists in the U.S. House and Senate who decided they’d object to the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

As the Capital-Star has reported previously, eight of Pennsylvania’s nine Republican U.S. House lawmakers went into Wednesday’s count planning to object to the certification of the results. And they were doing it, as U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, R-10th District, outlined in a Tweet, at the behest of home state Republican pols, who were at least honest enough to admit that they couldn’t short-circuit Biden’s Keystone State victory on their own.  “When Members of our PA General Assembly have concerns, it’s my DUTY to have concerns, too,” Perry wrote on Wednesday. “The PA Senate has asked Congress to DELAY cert of EC to allow for due process in pursuit of election integrity in a key case before SCOTUS — I’m obliged to concur.” Which, of course, is just nonsense. Perry was under no such obligation — other than sheer partisanship and a misguided loyalty to a tinpot tyrant — to do any such thing. Read the full story