The United States Capitol Police force is Congress's private security force.  It is not subject to any of the constraints that govern all other police forces in America.  It is not required to turn over evidence.  Also, as we learned with the case of the officer who murdered Ashli Babbitt, it can conduct its reviews under cover of darkness, hide people's identities, and clear itself of wrongdoing, all without having to answer to the public.  In this regard, as is the case with so many things Congress has voted for itself, it is profoundly un-American.  But here's some fun news:  The Capitol Police blew all their capital on pretending January 6 was an insurrection, and they are going broke.

According to a story in Politico, the super-secretive Capitol Police, who have 2,200 police officers just to protect the fewer than 550 elected officials in Congress, soon won't have enough money to pay those officers their salaries:

High-stakes talks on Hill security funding looked grim Monday with the Capitol Police close to running out of money for salaries after the Senate's top Democratic appropriator offered a $3.7 billion plan — nearly double the size of a House-passed bill the GOP has spurned as too big.

Appropriations Chair Patrick Leahy released his own massive proposal to cover the financial fallout from the Jan. 6 Capitol attack after Republicans countered Friday with a $632.9 million bill that scraps hundreds of millions of dollars for Democratic priorities to secure the Capitol complex. Leahy's offer, which doesn't attempt to bridge a widening partisan divide, would also patch the Capitol Police and National Guard budget shortfall amid growing urgency to assist both forces as they run short of cash and resources for salaries and training.

The police officers are working stiffs, so I don't wish them ill.  I completely disrespect them for closing ranks and keeping silent about what happened on January 6, but I understand why they did: mortgages.

Not all of them have mortgages.  For me, that word is shorthand for the fact that government and corporate employees, even when they see heinous wrongdoing going on in the places that employ them, say nothing.

If it's a battle between principles and making mortgage payments, keeping work-based health insurance, and putting money in the kids' college funds, principles will go out the window every single time.  Again, I get it.  Keeping a toehold in the middle class is an expensive and nerve-wracking process, and one can never stop scrambling to stay there.  If it were I in their shoes, I can't say that I'd make a different decision.

What's so ironic here is that the Capitol Police, after having sold their souls for their jobs (and, again, I get it), now stand on the brink of losing their jobs.  We know they're never going to cross that brink.  That's because congressional Democrats need to buy their silence.

For congressional Democrats, January 6 is the most powerful weapon in their arsenal.  They've elevated it into something that they claim is bigger than the Civil War, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11 put together.

The people rotting in D.C. prisons are poor shlubs whose lives the Democrats destroyed in 2020 with their COVID madness — no more mortgages for those poor people, hence their willingness to put it all on the line.  The same people were then driven to despair watching unconstitutional voting changes pave the way for massive election fraud.  So they acted — and the Democrats have weaponized them as grim examples of what happens to anyone who dares cross the Democrats.  Their plight is the modern equivalent of the rotting heads of traitors with which medieval British rulers decorated London Bridge.

Given January 6's usefulness, the Democrats don't dare allow the Capitol Police to become as desperate as the January 6 protesters.  While the protesters could do nothing more than walk through Congress and gawk, the Capitol Police can talk.  They can explain exactly what happened on that day and tell what's on the 14,000 hours of video that the FBI and other Democrat operatives refuse to release.

So, while one can enjoy the thought of Democrats in Congress panicking at the thought of losing both their physical security and the Capitol Police's continued silence about January 6, the reality is that Democrats will find the money for the police if it's the last thing they do.  And, shamefully, the Republicans will help them.

I won't pad out this post with more discussion, but I do want to say that almost every congressional Republican has been shamefully silent about the desperate, broken Americans unconstitutionally locked away in D.C.  We are led by the most craven of poltroons.  Worse, expect these cowards to pay lip service to the brave Cubans (and the Cubans are brave) even as they turn their backs on their own citizens.  Feh!

Image: A United States Capitol Police officer in 2010 by David Maiolo.  CC BY-SA 3.0.

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