In the House, two Republicans, Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Paul Gosar of Arizona, were stripped of their committee assignments for social media posts that contained threats of violence against Democratic colleagues — and a third, Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado, could yet be sanctioned for suggesting one of two Muslim women in the House, Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, could be a suicide bomber. When the House on Tuesday debated Ms. Omar’s bill to create a State Department post to combat anti-Muslim bigotry, Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, accused Ms. Omar of harboring terrorist sympathies.
Insults and shout-downs have become the order of the day. Ms. Taylor Greene showed up in September at a Democratic news event to heckle the majority party, calling them baby killers. In July, liberal protesters drowned out her and other far-right House members with jeers and taunts as they tried to hold a media event denouncing the treatment of those imprisoned for the attack on the Capitol.
Indeed, the ill will on Capitol Hill cannot be separated from the Jan. 6 attack — and the fallout from it — a hasty impeachment of Mr. Trump that ended in acquittal and an attempted convening of a bipartisan commission to examine the attack that ended with a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
Norman J. Ornstein, an emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, tagged Congress as “the broken branch” back in 2006. But 2021, he said, started “with not just a broken branch but a broken Capitol.”
Senate Republicans had the chance in February to bar Mr. Trump from ever running for office by joining Democrats in convicting him of inciting an insurrection. While seven Republicans did vote to convict, the Senate needed 10 more.
Ms. Murkowski said that the revelations since those events — that some House Republicans encouraged the overturning of Mr. Biden’s victory, that Fox News personalities begged that Mr. Trump call off the riot and that the former president embraced an illegal, step-by-step effort to maintain control — further validated her votes to convict Mr. Trump and create an independent inquiry.
“On the Republican side, there was such an effort — we’ve got to get this behind us; we’ve got to get beyond it — and in fairness, we have work to do every day,” she said. “But this was not just a bad disagreement over policy. This was an insurrection. This was a threat to our very democracy.”
