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Rep. Bowman under investigation for pulling fire alarm as McCarthy compares it to Jan. 6
(www.nbcnews.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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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.
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.
Fair
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.