Republicans Are Getting the January 6 Commission they Deserve
Republicans have spent the last several days whining about Nancy Pelosi rejecting the nominations of Jim Banks and Jim Jordan to the House select committee investigating the January 6 capitol riot. Kevin McCarthy threw a fit and pulled all of his nominations in response. But if House Republicans are looking for someone to blame for how the select committee is shaping up, they should look to their fellow partisans in the upper chamber.
Republicans had the chance to create a genuinely bipartisan commission to investigate January 6. McCarthy’s negotiators managed to get one of the best imaginable agreements for Republicans who, it’s worth remembering, control approximately jack all in Washington at the moment.
Instead, Senate Republicans chose to filibuster the bipartisan commission. It was predictable that their actions would end up empowering Pelosi. And now Republicans are going to get the commission they deserve; having shown themselves utterly uninterested in the truth, they’ve all but guaranteed they won’t get it.
Republicans will spend the next several months preemptively casting doubt on the findings of the committee and casting it as a partisan witch-hunt. But that can’t change the fact that they have shown virtually no interest in finding the truth of why a band of Trump-supporting thugs stormed our capital building; many with murderous intent.
And that ought to be far more damning than whatever partisan skulduggery the Democrats do with the committee.