Your Hypocrisy Is Showing Again: Republican Opposition To Bipartisan January 6 Commission
Democrats putting pressure on ahead of Senate vote
Republican hypocrisy appears to have no bounds.
After all, these are the folks who insisted that there was just no way you could fill a Supreme Court vacancy in a presidential election year. “Let the voters decide!” Republicans demanded.
So Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans — then in the Senate majority — denied President Barack Obama's nominee to the high court to succeed the deceased Justice Antonin Scalia as much as even a hearing.
But when Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away in September of last year, that supposed Republican principle of “No Supreme Court vacancies in a presidential election year” — yeah, not so much when it's one of their own in the White House available to make the nomination.
So — even as voting was already underway in many states at that point — Donald Trump and Senate Republicans hustled Amy Coney Barrett through confirmation to become the nation's newest Supreme Court justice, only weeks before Election Day.
Fast-forward a matter of just a matter of months, and that reliable sense of hypocrisy Republicans are known for, is back.
This time, it's about the formation of a bipartisan commission — in the manner of the bipartisan group which studied the September 11, 2001, attacks — this time to probe the violent riot of January 6 at the US Capitol.
Republican leadership in both the House and Senate have turned against such an investigation.
A bipartisan commission to study the worst American insurrection since the Civil War would just get in the way — and would just be too darn redundant.
Says Mitch McConnell:
“Federal law enforcement have made at least 445 arrests and counting relating to crimes committed that day. Hundreds of those people have been charged. Law enforcement investigations are ongoing and federal authorities say they expect to arrest at least 100 or so more.
“Bipartisan investigations are also already underway, and have been for months, at the committee level in the Senate.
“So there is… there have been… and there will continue to be no shortage of robust investigations by two separate branches of the federal government.
“It’s not at all clear what new facts or additional investigation yet another commission could lay on top of the existing efforts by law enforcement and Congress. The facts have come out and will continue to come out.
This is rich, coming from the party who grabbed onto the 2012 Benghazi attack in Libya — and wouldn't let go.
When it came to Benghazi, where was that same sense of Republican restraint?
In the words of McConnell himself, the facts from Benghazi came out — and continued to come out.
But that didn't stop the Republicans. They wanted to embarrass the incumbent Obama administration at the time, and particularly smear Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton — respectively, the incumbent White House national security adviser and secretary of state at the time.
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif), who has the smarts given a bag of hammers, even admitted so as Clinton was running for president in 2016.
And the Republicans, who today are worried that a bipartisan commission would just be one investigation too much into the near-coup which were the events of January 6?
They didn't stop until they had launched 10 — yes, 10! — separate investigations into the Benghazi attack.
Hypocrisy, thy name is Republican.
Especially when you consider that the real reason Republicans don't want this January 6 commission to see the light of day is they believe that such a public and prolonged investigation into the insurrection which nearly toppled American democracy will cost them gains in next year's midterm elections.
Yet Democrats still may have a glimmer of hope to approve the commission.
This week, when it came up for a vote and passed the House, 35 House Republicans joined Democrats to approve the commission — over the vehement objections of Republican leadership and Donald Trump.
So now to the Senate it moves, where a vote is expected next week. Senate Democrats must win over a minimum of 10 Republicans in order to overcome the filibuster McConnell's sure to mount.
So Democrats are pulling out all of the stops and pouring on the pressure they can apply.
“It's really hard, I think, to be against it unless it's just purely political and playing to the base, which I think is what the leadership is doing, and -- and we’ll see I know at least in my mind, at least 25 Republicans are going to vote for it. I hope it's more than that,” Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich), and a former analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency analyst, said prior to the House vote.
The events of January 6 were severe enough to warrant a bipartisan commission's investigation, despite the efforts of Republicans like Rep Andrew Clyde of Georgia to claim the insurrection was nothing more than “tourists” strolling the halls of Congress.
“I support getting to the truth. We have got to be clear-eyed about this. This was an insurrection. This was a bloody, deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol. Our democracy was hanging on a thread, and to somehow call it a ‘Capitol tour’ when 140 police officers were injured… one lost his eye, one lost his finger, one is dead today, one committed suicide, one had a heart attack. I mean, this is not something that can be swept under the rug,” said Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif). “Now be careful what you wish for in the Senate. I would love to have Majority Leader Schumer actually have this go to a full-fledged filibuster. Let’s talk about what went on.”