Pelosi calls the GOP’S bluff
WASHINGTON — It’s past time to recognize the disqualifying extremism of the Trump-era Republican Party. Politics as usual is now impossible. Pretending that today’s GOP is the same Grand Old Party of even a decade ago is dysfunctional and misleading.
That’s the message House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-calif., sent Wednesday when she rejected two of Republican House Minority Leader Kevin Mccarthy’s five appointees to the select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.
Pelosi freely admitted her decision to turn back minority-party appointees to a committee — in this case, Reps. Jim Banks, R-ind., and Jim Jordan, R-ohio — is “unprecedented.” But she noted, so were the attacks .
Naturally, Mccarthy vowed to pull back his other nominees, claiming that the panel had lost “all legitimacy and credibility” and that Republicans would “pursue our own investigation of the facts.”
We can look forward with excitement as to how Mccarthy and his colleagues choose to define “facts.” In the Trump era, facts have not been a strong suit of the GOP.
Indeed, Banks and Jordan should be seen as having disqualified themselves. From the start, Banks rejected the idea that the attack aimed at overturning the results of a free election was worth investigating.
He issued a whataboutism-on-steroids statement Monday declaring the committee should also study “the hundreds of violent political riots last summer when many more innocent Americans and law-enforcement officers were attacked.”
Why stop there? Banks’s goal was clearly to dilute and undercut the committee’s core purpose, so why not also propose investigating why Giannis Antetokounmpo is such a great basketball player?
As for Jordan, he, like Banks, supported Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud. He is a famous political bombthrower and derided the committee as “Impeachment Round 3.”
You can’t say Pelosi and the Democrats didn’t try to have a fair investigation. But their plan to create a bipartisan, independent commission was shot down by Republicans, many of whom are plainly uneasy with a balanced inquiry. God forbid it delve into Trump’s role in the violent insurrection and possibly also into the behavior of Republican members of Congress.
By rejecting the duo, Pelosi drew a line under a central reality of our politics: It is not possible to proceed normally when Republicans answer to a leader and his loyal base for whom reality is an inconvenience, fairly counted elections are a hindrance and outright lies are an accepted currency of politics.
As last week’s CBS News-yougov poll demonstrated, Trump Republicans live in a world of their own about Jan. 6.
The survey found that while 67% of Americans overall said the attack was an attempt to overturn the election, only 32% of Trump voters said this. Among all Americans, 56% called the events an insurrection; only 20% of Trump voters did. And while only 29% of all polled saw the attack as an act of “patriotism,” fully 51% of Trump voters cast it that way.
Will Republicans denounce any findings offered by a select committee with only Pelosi appointees — including GOP Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming? Sure. Mccarthy and his allies would have done that anyway. A panel without disrupters can systematically pursue the truth. Old-fashioned it may be, but let’s judge its conclusions on the basis of their accuracy and fidelity to the known facts.
If Mccarthy cares about fairness, he should let the other three Republicans Pelosi welcomed — Reps. Rodney Davis of Illinois, Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota and Troy E. Nehls of Texas — to serve and add two more. Or the three can ignore him and volunteer to join.
It’s sad that matters have come to this: Instead of joining across party lines to get to the bottom of the attack, lawmakers are treating an insurrection as a partisan matter. Pelosi did not cause this. Trump and his enablers did.
To the surprise of many, Pelosi abandoned convention. With one dramatic act, she called out the extremists and exposed our political dysfunction. Whatever short-run grief she might take for doing so will be worth it for the lesson she has offered.