Republicans offer a vile new excuse for opposing a Jan. 6 commission

Republicans offer a vile new excuse for opposing a Jan. 6 commission

Washington Post

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

May 20, 2021 at 11:38 p.m. GMT+9

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) (Oliver Contreras/Pool/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

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With Republicans gearing up to kill a commission to examine the Jan. 6 insurrection, they have offered a barrage of comically weak excuses. They say the commission is “slanted,” that its work will overlap with other investigations, that its mission fails to target left-wing “political violence” and that Democrats are driven only by politics.

Now, with debate beginning in the Senate over the bill creating a commission that passed the House late Wednesday, Republicans are offering a vile new excuse. It somehow manages to be both candid and evasive at the same time.

Yet this excuse also reveals how deep flaws in our public discussion of this whole matter — by neutral media and Democrats alike — unwittingly enable GOP spin.

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The new excuse is that we shouldn’t be wasting our time re-litigating the 2020 election. The No. 2 in the Senate GOP leadership puts it this way:

“Anything that gets us rehashing the 2020 election, I think, is a day lost on being able to draw contrast between us and the Democrats’ very radical left-wing agenda,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the minority whip.

Demonstrating that this is becoming a talking point, Thune has repeated it almost verbatim elsewhere.

“I want our midterm message to be about the kinds of issues that the American people are dealing with — it’s jobs and wages and the economy, national security, safe streets, strong borders and those types of issues,” Thune said. “Not re-litigating the 2020 election.”

It’s both useful and despicable of Thune to admit that Republicans fear a commission will step on the GOP’s midterm message. But that aside, the idea that this commission is all about re-litigating 2020 is also staggeringly dishonest, and revealingly so.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on May 19 said that he will oppose legislation to create a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. (U.S. Senate)

This isn’t just about Trump

It’s critical for Republicans to not only block a real accounting into the insurrection, but also to obscure why they want to block it. Above all, what must be buried is that they fear a real accounting will put them in a terrible political position and expose their own culpability for what happened.

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Most obviously, an accounting would put pressure on House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to testify on his private shouting match with President Donald Trump during the attack. McCarthy reportedly pleaded with Trump to call off the rioters, and Trump said: “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

Obviously McCarthy does not want to testify about this. It would demonstrate Trump’s apparent sociopathic relish of the idea that the mob he incited was threatening the lives of lawmakers who’d failed to overturn the election for him. McCarthy doesn’t want to refuse to testify about this, either.

But also, bringing all this up would cast the current and ongoing conduct of Republicans in a horrible light. Remember, McCarthy was so rattled by the attack — and by his experience of Trump’s conduct — that just after, he flatly declared that Trump “bears responsibility” for the “mob.”

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A full accounting would not just vividly demonstrate both Trump’s depravity and McCarthy’s own horror at it at the time. It would also shed a harsh light on what Republicans are doing now by minimizing it in all kinds of ways, all to placate Trump and keep his voters happy. And they’ll have to keep doing this for at least the next year, heading into the midterms.

This goes well beyond McCarthy: Other leading Republicans, such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), also blamed Trump just after the attack but have since gone quiet or actively minimized his culpability.

A real accounting threatens Republicans themselves

Meanwhile, an accounting threatens to expose Republicans in other ways. It might expose communications between Trump and loyalist GOP lawmakers in the lead-up to Jan. 6 that demonstrate their hopes for that day in an incriminating way. It might unearth new communications during the attack that further demonstrate both the terror experienced by lawmakers and Trump’s malevolent refusal to stop it.

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And since the commission’s scope includes a look at the “causes” and “influencing factors” that led up to Jan. 6, this would focus on how Republicans themselves fed Trump’s lies about the election for weeks and weeks, helping incite the mob.

That, in turn, would intensify the focus on the ways Republicans are abandoning any sense of obligation to honor election outcomes. Note that the sham Arizona recount, a kind of test run at manufacturing fake ways to contest election results, is now gaining GOP imitators in other states.

At a time when GOP voter suppression efforts are underway everywhere, even as Republicans need to win back suburban voters by appearing to be a more inclusive party, they can’t allow a serious accounting of the ways in which they’re abandoning democracy.

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That’s why they purged Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) from the House leadership: because she was drawing too much attention to exactly that.

Our discourse gets this wrong

Take this to the bank: The spin that we mustn’t “re-litigate the 2020 election” will soon be echoed more widely. Unfortunately, our media discourse — and weak rhetoric from Democrats — is making this more likely to work.

It’s constantly said that Republicans are guilty of “fealty to Trump and the ‘big lie.’” This reinforces the idea that this debate is backward-looking and obscures the fact that it’s about the Republican Party’s ongoing unshackling of itself from any obligation to behave as an actor in a democracy.

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But let’s not lose sight of this fundamental truth. What Republicans must obscure is that they are covering up Jan. 6 not because they don’t want to re-litigate the past, but because they don’t want to litigate what the party currently is — and what it’s becoming.

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