Another sign of a GOP still in thrall to Trump
The Senate vote on the commission into the attack on the US Capitol underlines Donald Trump’s hold on the Republican Party and shows that democracy in the US is under stress, writes Dan Balz.
Nearly five months after a pro-Trump mob of rioters stormed the US Capitol, Senate Republicans have delivered another blow to the country, blocking the creation of an independent commission to investigate the attack. It was a partisan act and another reflection of democracy under stress.
Led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, all but a handful of Republican senators joined to scuttle the creation of a commission that would have been given the authority and resources to probe more fully what happened and why on that terrible day in January.
Republicans had their reasons, or so they said, for doing what they did. But the most important reason was their fear that Democrats would use the independent commission’s work against Republican candidates in next year’s elections by keeping alive former president Donald Trump’s role in the January 6 attack and his misdeeds ahead of it.
Many Republican elected officials want Trump to go away. They want the upcoming midterm elections to be fought in an atmosphere free of the former president, and focused on President Joe Biden. That’s why Wyoming Senator Liz Cheney has been such an irritant to GOP leaders, because she refuses to turn away from what Trump’s actions produced and, she fears, could provoke again.
Her colleagues are afraid to be more affirmative and aggressive in challenging the former president. They fear Trump and they fear his followers, who now dominate the GOP rank-andfile, and so they voted to protect the former president by obstructing the commission, hoping that would protect themselves next year.
The vote again showed the hold that Trump has on his party.
Republicans are counting on normal patterns of midterm elections – a backlash against a new president, lower overall voter turnout, and greater energy among members of the party out of power – to restore their majorities in the House and the Senate. They don’t want Trump to be a front-andcentre issue. They don’t want American voters to be reminded why they decided to fire Trump after a single term.
Why not keep the issue of Trump’s role in the events of January 6 alive as part of a deeper investigation? Why not keep it alive at least long enough for a commission with independence, sufficient resources and subpoena power to take testimony, develop a fact-based timeline, and produce recommendations about Capitol security and the protection of democracy itself? What do they really fear would be revealed?
McConnell’s explanation is that congressional committees are already doing the necessary work, and that there are no new facts to be discovered.
McConnell also said he doubted that such a commission could promote healing in the country, which is the same argument some Republicans used to vote against impeaching and convicting Trump last year.
Healing is not the expressed purpose of an independent commission – but blocking the commission will not lead to healing.
The commission was to be patterned in many ways on the commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks of 2001. The two leaders of that panel, former New Jersey governor Tom Kean, a Republican, and former Indiana representative Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, had called for the creation of a commission to investigate the attack on the Capitol just as the Senate was voting to acquit Trump last February in his second impeachment trial.
Kean and Hamilton knew that the odds were long. They knew that, in a time of partisanship and distrust, Congress might struggle to come together to agree to create a commission.
Nonetheless, they believed it was essential for an independent commission to establish the facts of what happened. As Kean said at the time, the attack was ‘‘a wound to democracy itself’’.
Kean said yesterday: ‘‘What’s coming out of this is the idea that Congress is incapable now of setting up truly bipartisan, independent investigation. And that has deep implications.’’
He said many of the same arguments used against the January 6 commission were used against creation of the 9/11 commission, including fear of political weaponising, and assertions that congressional committees had already done their work and there was nothing of note left to learn.
Kean recalled that, in the case of the 9/11 commission, families of the victims helped to break the logjam of opposition in Congress.
But in this case, pleas by the family of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who suffered two strokes and died of natural causes after defending the Capitol against the attackers, did not affect enough Republicans to win the day.
Kean said he was saddened by the vote. ‘‘The American people need to know the facts on this one. We should not allow this to pass without a full and public and fair and bipartisan investigation . . . In a democracy. you never go wrong by finding out the truth.’’
Hamilton said he was ‘‘extremely disappointed’’ by the vote.
All such commissions carried risks, he said, but with strong and fair-minded leadership, such bodies could do something that Congress was not equipped to do.
He said he hoped there would be new efforts to work around the vote to block the commission. ‘‘You can’t sweep these things under the rug.’’
Hamilton said the Senate vote ‘‘says that democracy is under stress, not functioning as well as it should. It’s being tested, and this is a very good test of whether it can function’’.
‘‘It raises an alarm bell for us that our country, our government, our Congress is not functioning the way it should.’’