WASHINGTON – Guns. Masks. Conspiracy theories. Contentious issues brewing for months, and even years, between political parties and lawmakers now seem to be at a boiling point on Capitol Hill.
Tensions in Congress have been high in the past, but the rhetoric of the last few months is not business as usual.
Julian Zelizer, a professor of political history at Princeton University, told USA TODAY the current climate is “definitely one of the bad moments in American history.”
Compared to the periods before the Civil War, in the 19th century, and in the 1960s, Zelizer said, today is “at least like those, and in some ways it’s worse.” Though members may not be “literally attacking each other physically as they did in the 19th century, sometimes it feels like they’re getting awfully close.”
Now, points of contention have seemed to reach a crescendo – and amplified by the Capitol riot.
Here are a few of the issues that have lawmakers more angry with one another now than in recent history:
QAnon and conspiracy theories
The 117th Congress brought in a new class of lawmakers, including some linked to right-wing fringe movements, including the QAnon conspiracy movement, which baselessly claims a “deep-state” cabal of pedophiles tried to bring down Trump, among others.
Reps. Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia are two of the freshman lawmakers most known for espousing QAnon beliefs.
Greene has been a particular cracking point on Capitol Hill over the tolerance of conspiracy theories and the rhetoric that often accompanies them.
More:Republicans remain mostly quiet on Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose remarks have put GOP in a bind
The Democratic-led House last month voted mostly along party lines to remove Greene from her two committees for a litany of incendiary, conspiratorial and menacing social media posts before she was elected, which included questioning whether the 9/11 terrorist attacks ever happened, stalking and taunting a teen survivor of the deadly Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, and suggesting that space lasers were causing deadly wildfires in California.
The floor debate over Greene, in a chamber already riven by division and mistrust, turned raw as House members took turns arguing not just about Greene’s particular conduct but what it said about House members who demanded – or objected to – her punishment.
On top of QAnon and other right-wing extreme beliefs, 147 congressional Republicans pushed false claims that Trump won the presidential election and voted to not accept election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of 10 GOP lawmakers who voted to impeach Trump on an article of inciting the Jan. 6 riot on the Capitol, said his fellow Republicans need to take stock of their party.
“We’ve got to quit being a party of personality and get back to a party of principles first,” Kinzinger said on CNN. It means “going back to the American people and to the Republican Party and reminding folks of where we came from, which we’ve lost.”
Zelizer said the Republican Party has become “pretty radicalized,” a distinction that poses a challenge to this Congress.
The “world of information that Congress inhabits now is so disconnected often from facts,” he said.
The current polarization began before 2016, in the Obama era, but Trump “aggravated everything,” Zelizer said. “And he kind of played into these sources of dysfunction and elevated them.”
Guns and the Capitol
The attack on the Capitol led to changes in security protocols and heightened tensions among lawmakers, especially those who objected to President Joe Biden’s Electoral College win.
It was also later revealed some House members were armed during the Capitol attack, such as Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., who claimed he “was armed, so we would have been able to protect ourselves.”
Read More: How lawmaker culture war is more than business as usual