A couple of reactions this morning to Senate Republicans’ refusal to approve a Jan. 6th Commission.
Karen Tumulty in the Washington Post says give Sen. Mitch “Cravenly” McConnell credit for candor for admitting why he will not allow formation of a Jan. 6th commission:
In pressing Senate Republicans to kill the idea of an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump, McConnell did not bother to disguise the fact that he was making a cravenly political calculation.
Anything that looks back to the final ugly spasms of the Trump presidency,as opposed to pressing the case against the current occupant of the White House and his party, would hurt the Republicans’ chances for gaining back control of Congress, McConnell acknowledged to reporters on Tuesday.
That was another way of saying that he would prefer that voters not be reminded of Trump’s own culpability for inciting his supporters to smash their way into the Capitol two weeks before he was due to be evicted from the White House— and for doing little to stop a rampaging mob that Trump subsequently described as “very special” people.
Tumulty repeats the PRRI polling you have already seen. Fifteen percent of Americans and 28 percent of Republicans agree “things have gotten so off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” Trumpublicans in the Senate see no to reverse that. Trump didn’t.
Longtime Democratic influencer Donna Brazile tweeted, “The problem isn’t that Republicans don’t want to know what happened. The problem is that they know exactly what happened. So they don’t want anyone else to know.”
David Graham at The Atlantic remarks on how the anti-majoritarian filibuster has become normalized. Nothing about a Jan. 6 commission is a violation of a minority’s rights, yet “Political observers have become so inured to the topsy-turvy expectation that a supermajority is required for any moderately controversial legislation that it feels normal when popular legislation with a majority of votes in favor fails.”
Democracy is less of a rule than a guideline in the U.S. Senate.
“Outrage is as weak as straw,” tweeted Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent in response. “Why won’t more Democrats say straight out that Republicans are implicated in the crime and are covering it up?”
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Ak.) tried appealing to McConnell’s conscience as though he has one. She found yet again he has not sprouted a conscience since the last time someone tried to appeal to it. (Is our senators learning?)
“The Democratic Party is now literally the party of democracy,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told Sargent. “You can’t shame the shameless. At a certain point it just increases the glamour of their sinister enterprise.”
Sargent recommends Democrats abadon hope of trying to shame Republicans into doing the right thing and investigate Jan. 6th themselves by alternate means, perhaps a select committee in the House:
At this point, the only way anything will be done about all this is if Democrats do so on their own. This would entail moving forward with sweeping democracy reforms and, possibly, revising the Electoral Count Act to deal with the elector-sabotage threat.
Yes, the holdup is largely about Sen. Joe Manchin III’s (D-W.Va.) opposition to ending the filibuster. But as Ron Brownstein demonstrates, it’s not clear whether President Biden takes the macro-threat seriously, which would entail making serious appeals to Manchin and putting real muscle behind reform.
It’s time to give up on the theater of shaming Republicans. Instead, all this should be understood as a challenge that Democrats must rise to meet, if it is to be met at all.
“We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth,” Lincoln told Congress on December 1, 1862, almost two years into the Civil War. The Party of Lincoln today has lost all interest in preserving that hope.