Mary-Charlotte Domandi:
So January 6th, it’s so many different things: the anniversary of New Mexico statehood; the 12th day of Christmas, also known as ephipany; the day that the election was to be certified; and a day of violence and chaos in Washington. Describe this day for us, walk us through what happened at the beginning of the day and how it unfolded.
Teresa Leger Fernandez:
So at the beginning of the day, you know, I started my day off knowing it was going to be a long day cause we knew we were going to have these, what we’ve been calling attacks on our democracy, because it was an attempt by about 115, maybe somewhere along those lines, Republicans to basically try to overturn an election in favor of president Trump. So they were trying to say 160 million votes don’t count, we get to say that these were wrong and I’m going to object and hold up the certification. I mean, that is pure and simple an undemocratic attack on our democracy. Shameful, awful in so many ways. Cause there was, I think that the number is 90 judges had already said, there’s nothing there. Everybody. Right? So it’s all about lies. It’s the foundation of lies, and it’s a foundation of misinformation. And at its core is a bunch of Congresspeople who swore an oath to the constitution. And instead they cared more about an authoritarian megalomaniac person who does not care about this country, but only cares about himself. And those Congresspeople—I was already like disgusted and disappointed with them because it was clear that they were not putting country, they were not putting constitution, they were not putting democracy first. They were putting allegiance to a single individual for which you know, is angry enough already. But it was pretty exciting. It was New Mexico’s birthday. I got to sing Las Mañanitas, I sang New Mexico Las Mañanitas, sang the whole thing, Las Mañanitas in front of my office. It was in addition to being ephiany, it was my father Ray Leger who’s been such an inspiration even in his, you know, from above and my race. So that was all kind of neat.
And Oh my God, Georgia, man, Georgia—we have a chance to enact legislation now. Right? It is huge. We were all trying to not get too attached to winning Georgia. But now that we’ve won Georgia, it’s like, let’s put our agenda back on. Right. We would have still had it on. But we were gonna have to be more strategic. So Oh my God, we won. And then it happens, right. You’re already upset with these things and you know, we have the democratic caucus has called, this is what we’re going to expect, this is how it was going to be good about respecting COVID, yeah, we have to respect COVID because it can kill us. Right. And it can kill people we love. And so we are not going to be in the things and you know, we’re going to cycle in and out of the gallery, you know, all of the things we are going to do to keep each other safe and then we have this happen. And it is scary.
It makes you mad, makes you mad because they did not take care of us. Because clearly they did not care. Trump did not care. The federal agencies did not care. Was it deliberate? It feels deliberate. The capital is being stormed. You could hear the flash bangs. You could hear the gunfire, you could see it. And you’re just getting madder and matter, and at the same time that the reality is you’re a bit scared. It’s like, what’s going to happen. What’s going to happen. And we were like, I am going to stay here for as long as I need to because we have a constitutional duty. And so you have this determination resolve at the same time that you don’t know what’s happening. And it is scary. You know, we’re supposed to be in the safest place, and it was made unsafe.
MCD:
You and your staff were in your office and basically kind of holed up in there?
TLF:
Yeah. Basically at the time we were told, don’t say where you are, cause we didn’t know how far they would go in trying to hunt us down. Cause that’s what they said, “We are hunting people down.” We were away from the windows and there wasn’t a lot of staff cause we had already told people not to all come to the office. We had a skeleton staff and I had my son there. You know, my son was my bodyguard. Dario was there. And he stuck with us the whole time, you know, at 4:30—
MCD:
4:30 in the morning?
TLF:
Yeah. So, you know, we’re getting to sleep at 5, 5:30 in the morning. And so you’re, you know, today you’re exhausted. Everything you planned to do today is like out the window because you just don’t have the mental capacity. My mentality is great. It’s just, you’re there is exhaustion. So, and you upset like a handful of legislators, mostly senators pulled back from their insanity, they recognized that their words had caused this. They recognized that their attacks on the legitimacy of the election, which was nothing but an attack, you know, were lies. As one person put it, I’m paraphrasing, the hatred for the institution and government was not strong enough to overcome our love, our desire to govern, and our love for this institution in the end overcame their allegiance to a single man. You know, democracy prevailed.
MCD:
There was such a feeling of sort of too little too late when these wonderful pronouncements were made by people who up until really the 11th hour had been supporting this anti-democratic action.
TLF:
Exactly. Yes and no. I mean, in the end, you want to say thank you for recognizing what you’ve been doing. I think we always want to acknowledge that. So for those who got on the floor, some Republicans had always intended and we’re in the middle of responding to the attacks with, you know, this is, we cannot substitute our decisions, for the will of the people. So some had already planned to give those speeches. What was interesting is a handful of Republicans got up and said, I think there’s been irregularity, [?] But every election and we need to stop this. So I don’t think it’s too late because you want people to have, as, as the speaker said, epiphany, but it was just too late. Thank you for coming to that. What I want to decry is the fact that so many never came to it, including Yvette Herrell from New Mexico, 121, I believe, in the house or 128, still voted to overturn a democratic election to substitute their “We know the facts better.” And really, do you know what that says? It’s like one, there’s a hypocrisy, right? You got seated. You took the oath of office on the same, we’re on the same ballot, right? I mean, if you go back and look at how I started the morning, and these were the same people who said, Oh, the election was good enough for me to win, but it was stolen. It’s like, well, if it was stolen for everybody it was stolen for you too. But no. Their hypocrisy is ridiculous. But that’s the issue is that there were only a handful who said this was so outrageous and so severe. And we are threatening on democracy and we are going to change our position. There were only a handful who did that. And they were mostly in the Senate because they have to run an entire state and they were not in Congress. And the things that they were saying on the floor after this had happened, they didn’t change their speeches. They didn’t change the speeches. They continued to attack us, to attack democracy, to attack truth. They continued to say things that was simply not true.
MCD:
I mean, for the people who are worried about election irregularities, it’ll be interesting to see if they vote in favor of the HR 1 bill, which we discussed the other day, which is all about cleaning up elections, ethics, anti-corruption, stuff like.
TLF:
Let’s be honest. This is not what they were doing. If you had those issues about, concern about election irregularities, you raised them at the proper place and that’s not what they were doing.
MCD:
So did you evacuate?
TLF:
No, there was no way we were going to evacuate because we had a job to do. There was at one moment conflicting directions about, evacuate now, you know, there’s a curfew going on. So everybody wants to evacuate. It’s like we’re, not leaving. We need to see if we will go back in. And there’s no way we’re walking out where there’s a bunch of rioters and protesters, and we’re in suits and nice dresses we’ll be attacked. So there was a clear failure of security. There were individual Capitol police who did amazing things. So we did not evacuate. I did not intend to evacuate. I was ready to be there, but I will say is the staff that we had there were amazing. You know, we had no food because we were brand new office. We had no microwave. We were scrounging for —- look, somebody sent us some cheese sticks, let’s eat the cheese sticks and here’s some chocolate.
So it was like chocolates and cheese sticks at one point in time, you know, that we’re trying to maintain for sustenance. I mean, we were there from sometime between eight and nine in the morning, because we were told to get there early, until the next morning. So almost 20 hours. Yeah. And a lot of that was in a room that you could not leave. These two amazing women ended up being barricaded in the House in a women’s reading room that’s there, right off of the statuary hall that is where all of the people who were walking with the Confederate flags and the Trump flags. We know there were guns on holsters and they were a mob. Mobs are dangerous. And these two women, one who’s not young, she has the heart of a firecracker and they are literally barricaded for five hours in an inner chamber with all of those extremists and terrorists outside. And I’m using the word terrorist because the definition of terrorist is somebody who wants to accomplish through violent means their political will.
MCD:
So you survived that day. There’s a lot of conversation about how, if those protestors or mob or terrorists, whatever you want to call them, had had considerably darker skin the outcome would have looked very different.
TLF (11:14):
Exactly. White privilege. I mean, yes. It’s white privilege. When you saw [?] screen opened by somebody, somebody who was on the official side, saying here, let me open the gate for you. Oh, let me shake your hand as you’re leaving—that would have never happened. I’m not using the word protests. My son is here with me. He was there with me then. If they were brown, if they were black, because we already know that—we don’t say if, we should say when, when they’ve been black, when they’ve been brown, when they’ve been women, they have been violently repressed, even though their protests were about peace, were about change. These protests were about overthrowing our democracy, overthrowing our electoral process. And they were treated entirely different than what we have seen. Black lives matter, immigration rights, all kinds of other stuff. Name it, pull up the scenes. It’s the fact.
MCD:
Thank you.
