To Kevin McCarthy: Thanks for making Jan. 6 hearings worthwhile
WASHINGTON » The hearings organized by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection are getting high marks for calling public attention to new and damning information while also offering a compelling narrative of a frightening criminal effort to destroy our democracy.
But it tells us a lot about the low expectations of the legislative branch that so much of the praise is couched in the language of pleasant surprise.
Committee members are proving themselves far more disciplined than many expected in containing self-promoting speechifying. In a semi-documentary style, neatly interspersing video with testimony, the committee has efficiently offered a coherent account, something that rarely happens when hearings are disjointed partisan talkfests.
We have witnessed a crisp debunking of the “big lie” and President Donald Trump’s knowledge that his election fraud charges were, to avoid the barnyard epithet, ridiculous. We have been riveted by how Trump pressured
Vice President Mike Pence to void the 2020 election illegally — as if Pence were a servant to a dictator unwilling to relinquish power.
Can’t more congressional hearings be like this? The answer, unfortunately, is almost certainly no.
In a perverse way, the country owes a debt to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. He made this refreshing presentation possible. In an astonishingly foolish decision, McCarthy withdrew all his appointees to the committee after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., rejected two of his five nominees. She refused to seat Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Jim Banks, R-Ind., because they actively spread disinformation about 2020 — and because Jordan was closely involved in Trump’s efforts to challenge the election.
In defending Pelosi’s decision at the time, Rep Jamie Raskin, D-Md., turned out to be prophetic. “The speaker is making clear we’re going to have a serious comprehensive investigation,” Raskin said. “This will not be just another run-of-the-mill, partisan food fight.” It wasn’t, thanks to the exclusion of Trump’s bomb-throwing apologists.
It’s often forgotten that Pelosi approved McCarthy’s other GOP picks: Reps. Rodney Davis of Illinois, Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota and Troy Nehls of Texas. None of them could be characterized as liberals, and Nehls had joined Banks and Jordan in objecting to the certification of the 2020 election.
McCarthy thought that by walking away entirely, he would be able to discredit the work of the committee as “partisan.”
Bad call. With none of his allies there to throw sand into the gears, the committee — which still included two Republicans, Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — was able to organize a seamless presentation. Cheney has played a star role, and mostly Republican witnesses are telling the story.
And without disruption, the committee has also been able to look at what role Republican members of Congress may have played in the day’s events.
But the roles of Cheney and Kinzinger point to why our politics will make a reprise of this committee’s experience difficult — and also why comparisons between the current public inquest and the Watergate hearings of 49 years ago are strained.
In a GOP dominated by supporters of Trump and Republicans afraid to tangle with him, Cheney and Kinzinger are outliers. Few in their party are willing to confront the ongoing dangers to democratic institutions by the former president, the falsehoods he propagates and the election subversion doctrines he preaches.
In the Watergate era, by contrast, Republicans were a far more complicated and diverse bunch.
“It was a totally different time,” Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, said in an interview. “It was a time when the median Republican was slightly more conservative than the median Democrat, but not enormously so.”
Yes, nostalgia is always misleading. Many Republicans defended President Richard M. Nixon to the bitter end. Most others did not turn on him until a July 24, 1974, Supreme Court ruling forced Nixon to release White House tape recordings that proved his involvement in a coverup within a few days of the Watergate break-in two years earlier. Support for Nixon evaporated, and he resigned on Aug. 8, 1974.
You might think everything the Jan. 6 committee has revealed in its opening hearings — about Trump’s mendacity, his hostility to legal restraints and his indifference, at best, to the safety of his vice president — would be enough to send Republicans stampeding away from the former president in large numbers.
But there is no stampede, and its absence speaks to why a normal congressional hearing, with full participation from members picked by the pro-Trump House GOP leaders, could never be as informative, deliberate or free from distractions as the Jan. 6 presentation has been. For those unwilling to break with Trump, the facts clearly don’t matter.
Architects of future hearings will no doubt learn from the media pizazz of the past week. But all the production values in the world won’t matter without two parties equally committed to a common quest for truth.