'Moral cowardice': Ruben Gallego blasts Kari Lake's rhetoric on Jan. 6 in Senate race

When the mob of rioters started pounding on the doors of the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. Ruben Gallego’s herding instincts kicked in.

Gallego, D-Ariz., had learned in the Marine Corps that when a big group suddenly needs to move, the first thing to do is assess the situation. Preparing for an evacuation, he went to the back of the House floor to take stock of the group. That’s when he saw the face that, three years later, remains his most vivid memory of that day: a young girl, 12 or 13 years old, fearful as the mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump closed in on the House chamber.

“The fright in her eyes … will always stick with me,” said Gallego, an Iraq War veteran.

Photos of Gallego that day, standing on a chair on the House floor to direct traffic, his tie askew, circulated widely on social media in the wake of the attack.

His colleague, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., a former social worker, helped calm a panicked staffer. The lawmakers and their staff were whisked away to a secure location where they huddled for hours, while the pro-Trump rioters ransacked offices and roamed the vacated halls.

For an instant, it seemed the attack would shock lawmakers into a rare moment of bipartisan consensus. In the weeks that followed, some House Republicans backed a resolution censuring Trump, and the former president’s approval ratings plunged.

That bipartisanship was short-lived.

2024 presidential and Senate races: Arizona again to play outsized role

In the three years since the attack, Democrats have continued to argue the Capitol breach is proof of threats to U.S. democracy. President Joe Biden on Friday marked the anniversary with a speech near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, teeing off a campaign argument that Trump is "willing to sacrifice our democracy to put himself in power."

But most Republicans have adopted a different posture, advancing conspiracy theories that downplay the role of Trump or his supporters in the violence that day or, more often, avoiding the topic altogether.

Those dynamics are on full display in the highly watched race for Sinema’s seat, a potentially majority-making race that could pit Kari Lake, the former TV news anchor who is the front-runner for the GOP nomination, against Gallego, who has represented Arizona in Congress since 2015. As the calendar turned to 2024, Sinema still had not announced an official reelection campaign.

Lake, a Trump ally whose Senate candidacy he has endorsed, has long trafficked in conspiracy theories about the Capitol riot. While running for Arizona governor in 2021 and 2022, she claimed that the Capitol Police invited rioters in, and that participants in the violent attack were being held in jail without charges. (In fact, more than 100 police officers were injured during the attack, and, according to a PolitiFact review, every person detained had been charged in complaints or indictments with criminal offenses.)

Despite urging from national Republicans to “look to the future” rather than the past, Lake has in recent months defended by name one person prosecuted for violence against police officers and cheered the release of another January 6 participant from prison. She has promoted a mosaic of conspiracy theories, such as the attack was fomented not by Trump supporters, but by federal agents, or that top U.S. officials deliberately withheld intelligence that day.

Lake’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Though on Friday, during Biden's speech marking the Jan. 6 anniversary, she wrote on social media, "We will not be lectured about 'threats to democracy' by a deeply corrupt man who has weaponized the justice system against the American people and his political opponents."

In an interview with The Arizona Republic, Gallego was unsparing in his condemnation of Lake’s stance.

“The fact (is) that Kari Lake is lying and saying that this was a staged protest or riot, knowing that hundreds of police officers were hurt. … I saw them bloodied, I saw them with the remnants of the dust of tear gas on their outfits,” Gallego said. “It takes a certain level of moral cowardice to deny what occurred there.”

“She’s doing it either A, because she believes it, which is scary, or B, because she wants to attract the support of those January 6-ers.”

Sinema, the incumbent, had delivered a floor speech defending the integrity of Arizona's election before rioters infiltrated the chamber.

Rather than reflect on the attack on the Capitol, Sinema cited her legislative response to it.

She was among the bipartisan group of lawmakers that crafted a 2023 law intended to ensure electoral counts in Congress are in line with state-level results to prevent presidential candidates from overturning a U.S. election result.

“We saw on January 6th how partisan vitriol can lead to a violent insurrection. Following the horrific attacks on our democracy, I worked with colleagues of all political backgrounds to restore trust in our system and ensure an insurrection never happens again," Sinema said in a written statement.

"By focusing on our shared values of protecting the peaceful transition of power — instead of villainizing each other over our differences — we negotiated, wrote, and passed into law our Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Improvement Act law that protects our democracy, prevents another insurrection, and stands the test of time.”

Asked about Sinema’s response to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, Gallego noted Democrat-led efforts to pass legislation protecting voting rights. Republicans scuttled that effort by invoking the legislative filibuster that Sinema, who was then a Democrat, was unwilling to set aside.

“January 6 was the physical attempt at stopping the transfer of power. I think there has been a political attempt at that," Gallego said.

The Democrats’ proposed legislation would have enacted a sweeping set of reforms intended to block state-level efforts to tighten voter registration or restrict certain types of voting.

A judge recently dismantled an Arizona law signed by former Republican Gov. Doug Ducey that required voters to prove their citizenship. Sinema has said that she supported the Democratic package but opposed suspending the filibuster, a Senate rule, to enact it. That move prompted political blowback and a formal censure by Arizona’s Democratic Party.

By December 2022, with many Democrats calling for her to face a primary challenger, Sinema quit the party and became an independent, a label she had often cited in her breakthrough 2018 election to the Senate.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema: Why I'm registering as an independent

In a comment, Sinema's office noted that the electoral count reform act was passed "through regular order" with the filibuster in place.

Approaching next year's presidential election, polling suggests that the sentiment that fueled the Jan. 6 attack remains alive and well. A strong majority of Republicans believe that Biden's 2020 election win was not legitimate. And loyalty to Trump and the January 6 participants appears to have climbed since the attack.

Gallego believes that his party is taking the right approach “on the policy side” to stave off threats to U.S. democracy, which he described as “creeping fascism.” Asked what was missing in the Democrats’ approach, he pointed to the question of messaging, warning his party: “don't shy away from being the defenders of democracy.”

Laura Gersony is a national politics reporter for The Arizona Republic and azcentral.com. Contact her at 480-372-0389, or by email at lgersony@gannett.com. Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @lauragersony.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake draws fire from Ruben Gallego in Arizona Senate race