On January 6, 2021, the American people witnessed a violent insurrection on live television. Tonight, we learned beyond a shadow of a doubt that the insurrection was planned, promoted, and pushed by Donald Trump and his cronies in an attempt to steal the election and ignore the will of the American people. The bipartisan committee laid out evidence gathered by non-partisan career investigators revealing the vast scope of the criminal conspiracy to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 election. It was a wide-ranging and premeditated plot that began weeks before the deadly attack on the Capitol by a racist mob.

Tonight, and going forward, it is vitally important that we recognize that this is an ongoing threat. It may have been a desperate attempt by a losing candidate to hold onto power after he was voted out of office by the American people. But it was a desperate attempt that could have worked and might succeed in the future if we don’t fix the weaknesses in the system that Donald Trump and his cronies tried to exploit. To this day the former president is working to punish those officials who refused to ignore the will of the people by overturning the election results. The former president and his acolytes continue to work to elect candidates who attempted to overturn the 2020 election and have promised to do so in future elections.

Everyone involved in the criminal conspiracy to steal the election must be held accountable – from those in the violent racist mob that stormed the Capitol and brutally beat police officers to those who lit the fire, including Members of Congress and former President Trump himself. Without accountability the campaign to sabotage future elections will continue unabated.

The orderly transition of power has been a pillar of our democracy, but we learned on January 6th that it is not guaranteed. We must take concrete steps to make certain that in our country voters will continue to choose the leaders of this nation.

We must enact safeguards to ensure that nothing like the criminal conspiracy that led to January 6^일 can ever happen again. Passing the Protecting Our Democracy Act and the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act and reforming the Electoral Count Act are the logical places to begin building bulwarks to safeguard the vote of every American. The nation cannot afford to wait.