- A mob breached the U.S. Capitol in an attempted insurrection, forcing the building into lockdown. Congress halted its session underway Wednesday to certify the Electoral College results and confirm Joe Biden as the president-elect.
- The House chamber was evacuated and House members were moved to a secure location.
- The certification is usually a formality, but President Donald Trump is continuing to push to overturn his loss, and some congressional Republicans, including from Pennsylvania, have said they will object to the results in Pennsylvania and other swing states Biden won.
- The mob in Washington, D.C., Wednesday included busloads of Pennsylvania Trump supporters made their way to Washington to march.
- The GOP efforts have essentially no chance of stopping Congress from signing off on Biden’s win.
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a conservative Republican, on Wednesday condemned pro-Trump insurrectionists, telling the armed mob that breached the Capitol: “You’re not doing anything to restore the greatness of America by tearing it down.”
Santorum, who represented Pennsylvania in both the U.S. House and Senate in the 1990s and early 2000s, endorsed Trump in 2016, but has called the president’s false claims surrounding the 2020 election “dangerous.”
The former presidential candidate who is now a CNN contributor said Wednesday that while he understands “a lot of people feel that the country is at stake,” he can’t understand “how people have lost faith in our country to the point where they feel they have to do things like this.”
”If you love America,” he added, “you understand the greatness of our country is the great institutions we have and you defend those institutions, you defend our Constitution, you don’t try to overturn through violence and protest things that you say you value.”
