Don’t Erase What Happened at the Capitol

On the evening of February 5, as Representative Andy Kim of New Jersey retraced the steps he’d taken nearly one month earlier, hours after the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, he saw little remaining evidence of destruction. The shattered glass where Ashli Babbitt was shot outside the Speaker’s Lobby? Repaired. The statues defaced by cigarette butts? Fixed. The broken windows? Boarded up. The benches reduced to shards? Removed.

But when he walked by the Columbus Doors at the main entrance to the Capitol, leading into the Rotunda—the same doors through which the caskets of American presidents pass to lie in state—he came across one lingering sign of the mob: A single pane of glass in one of the doors was still shattered, riddled with cracks that looked like a mess of stars and an upside-down six.

“I personally think