Congress’s pursuit of an independent investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection is facing long odds, as bipartisan resolve to hold the perpetrators and instigators accountable erodes, and Republicans face sustained pressure to disavow that it was supporters of former president Donald Trump who attacked the U.S. Capitol.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced late last week that she had drafted a fresh proposal for an outside commission to examine what caused the deadly riot. But in a sign of how delicate the political climate has become, she has yet to share her recommendations with Republican leaders, who shot down her initial approach, labeling it too narrow in scope and too heavily weighted toward Democrats in composition.
“Compromise has been necessary,” Pelosi wrote in a letter to other Democrats, informing them she had begun to share her latest proposal with other Republicans in Congress. “It is my hope that we can reach agreement very soon.”A spokesman for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) declined to comment on a proposal that the leader had not yet seen, adding that “hopefully the speaker has addressed our basic concerns of equal representation and subpoena authority.”
Many rank-and-file Republicans have been forced to walk a political tightrope, as a majority still believe the election was stolen from Trump. The former president still wields outsize influence in the GOP, which is presently the minority party in Washington but is within striking distance of making a comeback in 2022 — if leaders can hold their ranks together.
The pressure to prioritize a political win over accountability for the former president kept the vast majority of Republicans in both the House and Senate from endorsing impeachment charges against Trump accusing him of inciting the riot. The discrepancy was especially apparent in the Senate, where several Republicans — including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) — blamed Trump for the attack but refused to vote to convict him.
“We have a real dilemma on our hands,” said Norm Ornstein, an emeritus scholar with the American Enterprise Institute and a longtime observer of Republican congressional dynamics. “The political imperative at this point is to discredit any investigation, to deny any ties either to Donald Trump or to the members of Congress . . . who either helped to plan the [riot] or helped to incite it.”
In recent weeks, public hearings held by the House Judiciary and Armed Services committees have devolved into shouting matches, as GOP members accuse Democrats of ignoring threats from the far left, while Democrats accuse them of equivocating to distract from the fact that far-right extremists have become an active force in the Republican Party.
The ex-president is pressuring congressional republicans to put politics above defense of democracy and they are responding as he commands. That is cult fascism in action moving America closer and closer to the destruction of democracy and the hated rule of law. The only moral imperative for the republican leadership is winning power at all costs, including the death of democracy, law and respect for facts, truth and reason.
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