Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Bay Area Democrats recount horror of Wednesday’s riot, support call to remove President Donald Trump from office

The Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said Congress would consider impeaching the president again.

Twenty-four hours after they fled into barricaded rooms, under attack and fearing for their lives as violent Trump supporters stormed into the U.S. Capitol, a growing chorus of Bay Area Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were calling on Vice President Mike Pence Thursday to use the 25th Amendment to remove President Donald Trump from office.

“A threshold was crossed of such magnitude that there is no way that this president should be allowed to make any decision,” Pelosi, a San Francisco Democrat, said during a news conference Thursday. Trump, she said, was “a very dangerous person who should not continue in office.”

But those lawmakers said the feelings of terror during Wednesday’s harrowing insurrection and breach of the House Chamber and several offices, were still painfully fresh in their minds on Thursday. East Bay Rep. Mark DeSaulnier said he was among the last members of Congress to reach the safe room where many of his colleagues were taken after the House chamber was evacuated. He had been participating in a vote to certify Joe Biden as the next president from a separate room, just off the chamber, as a COVID-19 precaution after he fell seriously ill with pneumonia and spent three weeks in an intensive care unit last year.

That room would become his hiding place after a voice came over the building’s loudspeaker with a warning: “Lock your doors, shut your lights off and be quiet,” said DeSaulnier, who is still in Washington D.C. Then, he said, “We could hear the confrontations in the hallway right outside the house chamber.”

The lawmaker said he worried he and the staffers “might be taken” by the rioters. His fears might have been well-founded. Photos from the scene showed one rioter inside the Capitol was carrying a bundle of zip ties.

The congressman said the room had afforded him what is normally a postcard view down the National Mall toward the Washington Monument. But that bucolic view turned into a horror show Wednesday afternoon.

“I could watch the television — hear president Trump, what he was saying, riling them up — then watch them come up toward us,” DeSaulnier said of the frothing crowd of Trump loyalists.

He watched as the demonstrators pushed through barricades and clashed with overmatched police near temporary bleachers set up for President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration later this month.

“You just can’t believe that all of this is happening,” DeSaulnier said. “And that it’s happening to a building that, to my way of thinking, is sacred.”

The Constitution allows the vice president, with the support of at least half the Cabinet, to remove the president from office. If Pence failed to act, Pelosi said, she was prepared to move forward with impeaching Trump again. It was immediately unclear Thursday afternoon whether Pence would take any steps to remove the president, but DeSaulnier hopes he will.

“It just makes me so angry, and so determined that the people who did this need to be brought to justice, including the person who incited this,” he said of Trump. “He tried to overthrow the country, he tried to overthrow the United States government… You can’t just let this go.”

Pelosi said she felt particular sorrow for young staffers caught up in the melee.

“The trauma, the fright of what it was for them to be locked into rooms with terrorists banging on the doors, hiding under desk and under tables,” she said, “they didn’t sign up for that, we didn’t sign them up for that.”

The assault on the Capitol rattled even veteran lawmakers.

“I think we’re all traumatized,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo, a Palo Alto Democrat. “If I had a bad nightmare, it wouldn’t have captured what we experienced yesterday.”

Eshoo was en route to the House gallery from her office building when police came running toward her shouting “go back, go back,” she recalled in an interview Thursday from D.C.

The congresswoman made her way with a couple of staffers to a windowless interior room in another office building, where she spent five hours holed up with Rep. Mike Thompson of Napa “watching in horror as the mob breached the Capitol.”

With nothing but a live stream of the chaos around her, a few bottles of water, her voting card and spotty cell service, Eshoo scrambled to reassure hysterical family members that she was alright.

Eshoo said she agrees the president needs to be removed but doesn’t hold out a lot of hope that Pence will act to boot Trump.

“If I could impeach him right now I would,” said the congresswoman, adding that although she was scheduled to fly home Thursday evening she was prepared to return to Washington if necessary.

Eshoo also blasted the Capitol Hill police, calling their lackluster response a “failure across the board,” and describing the barricades outside the Capitol complex “like doggy doors… it was like, ‘Welcome, I’m taking you on a tour.'”

Lawmakers, she said, had gotten a detailed memo about street barricades and procedures, but when she arrived and looked across the Capitol Hill plaza, “I thought, where is everyone?”

“I had a very eerie feeling…  I just kept pushing that bad feeling away,” she recalled.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren of San Jose, who also supports removing Trump from office, said she wants to help organize a review of security at the Capitol.

“We can’t allow terrorists to come in and invade the Capitol of the United States,” Lofgren said. “We’ve got to prevent that from happening again.”

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Wednesday’s mob violence brought up painful memories for Rep. Jackie Speier, a San Mateo Democrat who was shot during a 1978 fact-finding mission into the human rights abuses being carried out by cult leader Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana.

“More than 40 years ago, as I lay bleeding from five gunshot wounds on an air strip in the Guyanese jungle not knowing if I would live or die, I swore that if I did survive I would dedicate my life to public service,” Speier, who was en route back to the Bay Area Thursday and unavailable for an interview, wrote in a late Wednesday statement. “I thought of that moment today, when the U.S. Capitol was stormed by a mob of Trump rioters emboldened by the President fomenting a coup d’état.”

“The president must be immediately removed under the 25th Amendment,” Speier said. “His words and deeds have encouraged a violent insurrection and he presents a direct and deadly threat to our democracy and the rule of law.”

Fremont Democrat Ro Khanna also supports efforts to remove Trump from office through impeachment or by invoking the 25th Amendment, and plans to stay in Washington through the inauguration. But he also said he hoped Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other top Republicans would go to the White House and directly tell Trump he must resign and let Vice President Mike Pence assume the office.

“I have faith and trust that (Pence) would preside over the government responsibly for 14 days,” Khanna said.

It’s unclear how likely such a confrontation is, but it would echo a similar meeting ahead of Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 in which GOP Congressional leadership told the president he would not have the votes to survive impeachment.

Khanna was walking to the House floor from a Congressional office building across the street, using an underground tunnel to avoid the crowds, when he learned the mob had breached the Capitol.

“You can’t go to the Capitol,” Khanna recalled someone telling him. “The Capitol is being overrun — go back.”