Yes, a January 6 Commission is Needed
It has been interesting to watch the conventional wisdom on the Right rapidly take shape on the issue of the January 6 Commission. The word went forth, and the usual suspects took up their positions on the ramparts: “mumble, mumble, partisan! … mumble, mumble, staffing! … mumble, mumble, redundant!” So goes the defense of the republican position that we know all we need to know about what happened on January 6, 2021.
Meanwhile, the revisionist history as to what happened that day has already begun. Rep. Andrew Clyde recently compared the ass-clowns in buffalo headdresses to “a normal tourist visit.” Mr. Clyde’s comments make one think that he felt left out of the festivities.
After specifically tasking Rep. John Katco with negotiating a deal on the commission (Katco succeeded in turning Pelosi’s partisan commission into a genuinely bi-partisan institution), the feckless Minority “Leader” Kevin McCarthy announced his opposition to any commission.
Here are just a few questions we might want answered by a January 6 Commission:
Why did it take three hours to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol?
What was the President doing as the entire world watched his barbarian supporters ransack the seat of our government?
Why was there such an inadequate police presence in the Capitol that day?
Why were the vandals able to get from the Capitol building itself to the office buildings via the underground tunnels?
What, if any, pre-planning went into the events of January 6?
What, if anything, did the Trump team know about the pre-planned events before their speeches at the rally?
If you see these as partisan gotcha questions, then politics has overridden your commonsense.
The opposition coming from Republicans amounts to political ass-covering and not much more. Whatever flowery language they dress it up in, their real concern is not facing the facts of what happened on January 6.