Thousands of pro-Trump protesters have stormed the U.S. Capitol, pushing past police and forcing Congress into a recess amid the Electoral College vote certification on Wednesday.
Members of Congress were seen evacuating the building with gas masks and reports were received of “Officers in distress”.
Base on updates, the police is gravely outnumbered and up to press time, the National Guard has not been deployed.
The Capitol has been placed on lockdown, and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has ordered a curfew beginning at 6 p.m. ET.
Groups of protesters were able to push past and topple barricades surrounding the perimeter of the Capitol shortly before 1 p.m. ET, according to the Washington Post, before pushing past police and entering the Capitol.
Video footage taken at the scene also shows protesters breaking glass on doors and clashing with police. Some protestors were armed with weapons.
This follows Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday delivering a forceful rebuke of President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread election fraud, warning his fellow Republicans of the damage their efforts to try to overturn the election won by President-elect Joe Biden could do to democracy.
“The Constitution gives us here in Congress a limited role. We cannot simply declare ourselves the national board of elections on steroids,” McConnell said on the Senate floor. “The voters, the courts and the states have all spoken. They’ve all spoken. If we overrule them, it would damage our Republic forever.”
McConnell opened the Senate’s debate of an objection to Arizona’s election results that was formally lodged by a group of House and Senate Republicans, the first of at least three objections expected during Wednesday’s ceremonial counting of the Electoral College votes.
Both chambers will debate and then vote on each objection before returning to the joint session to continue the electoral tally.
The push is destined to fail, with Democrats and a significant number of Republicans planning to vote down all of the objections in both the House and the Senate, criticizing the effort both as a hopeless attempt to reverse the election outcome and as a threat to democracy that would subvert the will of the voters.
The joint session got underway at 1 p.m. ET Wednesday and is poised to be a messy and contentious affair that will last late into evening and possibly into Thursday before Congress finally affirms Biden’s win over Trump, 306 electoral votes to 232.
Some Senate Republicans are expected to join their House counterparts to object to results in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania, and the House objectors are also seeking to force debate over votes in Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin. Debate will last up to two hours per objection, followed by votes in each chamber.
While there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, Trump and his campaign have been pushing baseless and false conspiracy theories that the election was rigged against him. The President and his allies lost dozens of lawsuits across the country both claiming fraud and challenging the constitutionality of state election laws altered due to the Covid-19 pandemic.