Two points for anyone who hasn’t read the article:
He pulled the fire alarm to delay the vote so that legislators had time to read what they were voting on - Republicans wanted to ram through a vote without waiting the agreed 72h to allow anyone to read the bill.
And:
Legislators are immune from prosecution of any crime less than a felony while they’re in session, so pulling the fire alarm doesn’t matter anyway. No one can touch this dude for this, the worst they can do is make angry noises on TV.
Legislators are immune from prosecution of any crime less than a felony while they’re in session, so pulling the fire alarm doesn’t matter anyway. No one can touch this dude for this, the worst they can do is make angry noises on TV.
Technically speaking, if this was indeed an attempt to delay or stop a vote on the bill, it could be a felony. Obstruction of an official proceeding – the same charge many Jan 6 defendants got.
A third very important point:
It very well could not be a lie. People in a rush confronted with a locked door; a door they believe to not supposed to be locked… are freaking dumb. He could easily have been flustered for running late and in a moment of panic hit the fire alarm. (There’s a reason many places remove fire pulls. They almost never get pulled in a real emergency. Without some kind of prior alarm going off. The vast majority it’s a false alarm. Either a prank, a prick or a dumbass.)
It was, IMO, incredibly dumb to use the same form factor for emergency egress pull stations as emergency fire alarm stations.
For those who don’t know, doors whose lock fail-to-secured need to have a way to let people out. For electronic doors- anything with a reader or whatever- there’ll be a pull station of the same basic design.
The only difference is the text that’s something lane “emergency door release” and it being blue or green with white text instead of red with white text.
Personally they should have gone with a big red button type; it’s different, but it’s still obvious and easy to use. Well maybe not red button, you understand,
It depends on the system. I install access control stuff. We use unpowered pneumatic timer buttons to open the doors in an emergency (they have to keep the door open for a certain number of seconds when pushed once), and they are indeed big and red with white text on them, shaped like a mushroom you can just slap with your hand. Often the fire alarm is also tied into the access control, so if the fire alarm is going off, the door will be open anyway. There’s a relay from the fire alarm that triggers a special input on the access control panel.
Then why did he lie and say it was unintentional and he didn’t know it would cause an alarm? If he’d just admitted it and given his reasons I could’ve respected that.
“But I want to be very clear, this was not me, in any way, trying to delay any vote. It was the exact opposite – I was trying urgently to get to a vote, which I ultimately did and joined my colleagues in a bipartisan effort to keep our government open,” he added."
Plausible deniability. If it was claimed to be an accident there’s no one who can honestly do anything .
I support the given reason for delaying the vote, but that denial was not plausible.
If the representative did intentionally pull the alarm, especially to delay the vote, by all means give him some reasonable consequences for that. More than a few votes get rushed through, but you can always just vote no on bills there has been inadequate time to have read. No need to disrupt congress and make a potentially dangerous situation.
Huge eye roll on the childish comparison to Jan 6th though. Not even close and McCarthy knows it. Grow up.
you can always just vote no on bills
It’s really not that simple. That would be a Republican wet dream to be able to market the Dems that shut down the government with a no vote on spending bill.
How so? Democrats already voted no on the shitty Republican fantasy spending bill just the other day. All they have to say is “They wanted us to vote on this bill without being able to even read it.” and I don’t think the Republican argument would hold up outside of the people who would be mad no matter what.
You’re not going to investigate Santos? Weren’t there members that did not answer a valid subpoena? But, you want to investigate this guy?
This is what-about-ism. Sure, Santos should be investigated, but this guy as well, EVEN IF SANTOS IS NOT.
Oh, boy. Here comes the shitstorm. What an idiotic thing to do. Guarantee this is going to start a whole campaign to get him arrested or resign as well.
I think he should lose committee spots or something, actual consequences not something like a censure vote.
We do not want a pattern of fake fire alarms established in that building.
Simple solution.
Remove the pull stations.
The usually cause more problems than they help adress- and there’s enough security in the capital complex that i would be shocked if they ever get pulled as any thing more than “oh we’re evacuating anyhow and I always wanted to pull them.”
If pulling the alarm is illegal then why shouldn’t he be arrested?
If he did do it on purpose to disrupt the vote then why shouldn’t he be expelled or punished?
It’s an incredibly stupid thing to do and definitely sets the Dems back a bit.
It wasn’t to disrupt the vote. It was an arguably bad attempt to delay the vote so they could read it before voting. This is like getting angry and a starving kid stealing a loaf of bread. Is it illegal? Sure. Is it wrong? Absolutely debatable.
And technically they can’t get arrested without getting impeached or expelled. Which you mentioned both consequences, but they need to be in that order. And it’d look really silly and likely not lead to expulsion without the Republicans looking bad. So they’ll just let their extremists whine loudly about it and submit bill ands the like that will go nowhere, but keeps it in the news so they can talk about it in sound bites.
