Jan. 6: Should a bipartisan commission investigate?
“Hey, remember that Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol?” said Bess Levin in Vanity Fair. Republicans would prefer that you didn’t. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy this week reversed himself and called on the GOP caucus to reject a proposed bill, brokered by McCarthy’s own negotiators, for a 9/11-style, bipartisan commission to investigate the attempted insurrection. The bill was expected to pass the House anyway and head to the Senate, where Minority Leader Mitch McConnell quickly declared his opposition. To be fair, some Republicans said, a commission should also probe left-wing “political violence” such as the rioting in Portland. If that excuse sounds transparently absurd, consider the efforts of House Republicans last week to rewrite history about the deadly assault—which left five dead and 138 Capitol police officers injured. Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona described the rioters as “peaceful patriots,” while Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia likened the violent insurrection to a “normal tourist visit.” Do tourists break down doors and windows, drag officers down steps and bash them with flagpoles and bats, and prowl the Capitol hallways shouting “Where’s Nancy?” and “Hang Mike Pence”? The GOP is now trying to memory-hole “one of the darkest days in modern American history,” said Chris Cillizza in CNN.com. It all speaks to “just how low the party has stooped in its worship of the former president.”
GOP leaders may not be principled, but they “are playing it smart,” said Harry Enten in CNN.com. They’re poised to recapture the House and perhaps the Senate in next year’s midterms if they can just turn out “their 2020 base and a little more.” To join Democrats in an investigation of Jan. 6 would endanger that prospect by incensing Trump and the 70 percent of Republican voters who agree with him that the election was stolen. Democrats want a commission to damage the GOP and protect their own hold on power, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Their goal is to buttress their narrative that Jan. 6 “was a planned attempted coup.”
With no chance of a “fair-minded inquiry,” why should Republicans play ball?
That’s rather rich, given that Republicans staged 10 congressional investigations into the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, said Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. But now McCarthy thinks we don’t need even one probe into how a defeated U.S. president enlisted a violent mob to try to “cancel an election because he lost.” Congressional Republicans have good reason to fear a thorough investigation, said Greg Sargent in WashingtonPost.com. The “ugly truth” is that many were “all in with Trump’s effort to overturn the election.” McCarthy also does not want to testify about his mid-riot phone call to Trump pleading with the then-president to call off his supporters. Trump reportedly told him, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”
The GOP is minimizing Jan. 6 for two disgraceful reasons, said Fred Hiatt in The Washington Post: to preserve the Big Lie of the stolen 2020 election and “to give cover for actions that in 2024 could turn the Big Lie into the Big Steal.” That’s why Republican state legislatures are proposing and passing bills designed not only to suppress the Democratic vote but also to let those legislators override election officials, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. These laws will enable state legislatures to refuse to certify Democratic victories. In 2020, “Trump’s rolling coup attempt didn’t succeed,” but it revealed how to rig the system for next time.