Nothing will be settled this week
ICYMI: “The Select Committee will hold a business meeting on Monday, December 19th at 1:00pm.”
What the January 6th Committee does later today will not settle anything. Whether the rule of law still pertains in this country (if ever it did) or survives as an even more hollowed-out, two-tiered mockery of justice still hangs in the balance.
The House Jan. 6 committee is wrapping up its investigation of the violent 2021 U.S. Capitol insurrection, with lawmakers expected to cap one of the most exhaustive and aggressive congressional probes in memory with an extraordinary recommendation: The Justice Department should consider criminal charges against former President Donald Trump.
At a final meeting on Monday, the panel’s seven Democrats and two Republicans are poised to recommend criminal charges against Trump and potentially against associates and staff who helped him launch a multifaceted pressure campaign to try to overturn the 2020 election.
While a criminal referral is mostly symbolic, with the Justice Department ultimately deciding whether to prosecute Trump or others, it is a decisive end to a probe that had an almost singular focus from the start.
To wit, a failed coup by plotters inside the White House and in Congress, backed by outside Republican operatives and by thousands of rioting MAGA foot soldiers, QAnon fanatics, and organized militia.
The committee’s final report is due Wednesday and is expected to be roughly 1,000 pages.
Trump’s defenders will not be idol idle, writes Heather Cox Richardson. They plan to issue their own counter-report to deflect attention from the committee’s conclusions. Theirs will claim the January 6th Committee “never dealt with the serious issues” of security lapses. “The committee report is expected to discuss security failures,” Richardson writes:
One of the authors of this Republican “shadow” report is Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), himself implicated in the attempt to overturn the election. Another is Representative Jim Banks (R-IN), whom Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) called out in October 2021 for falsely representing himself as the ranking member of the actual January 6th committee.
House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) warned the January 6th committee to preserve all its materials. Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) seemed unimpressed. Not only does the committee have to preserve all its materials by law, but it intends to make its material available to the public. “He’s the public. If he wants access to it, all he has to do is go online and he’ll have it,” he told [Axios reporter Andrew] Solender.
The Cold War was metaphor for the West’s standoff against Communism in the 20th century. In this second Gilded Age, a second Cold War settles in like Ukrainian defenders against Russian invaders for a harsh winter. Supporters of democratic governance face a long struggle against oligarchs and would-be autocrats who would use fantastic wealth and reactionary populism to drive this nation towards, if not open fascism, a mockery of its once lofty ideals.
It seems clear now that oligarchs such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel finance Republicans in the short term not simply for tax cuts, subsidies, and deregulation. They share a common enemy: democracy itself. They mean to rule.
Today’s events on Capitol Hill are just another skirmish.
“We want to cross the Rubicon. We want total war. We must be prepared to do battle in every arena. In the media. In the courtroom. At the ballot box. And in the streets,” New York Young Republican Club’s (NYYRC) president Gavin Wax told supporters at its annual gala in Manhattan on Dec. 10.
“This is the only language the left understands. The language of pure and unadulterated power,” Wax added.
Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House official and Donald Trump Jr. attended:
Republicans publicly lauded members in attendance from an Austrian political party founded by World War II-era Nazi party members. Racist political operative Jack Posobiec shared jokes across a table with Josh Hammer, the opinion editor of Newsweek. Multiple recently elected GOP congresspeople applauded Marjorie Taylor Greene, who told the NYYRC crowd in the event’s closing remarks that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol would have succeeded if she had planned it and that the insurrectionists would have been armed.
This is going to be a long, cold war.
It’s Happy Hollandaise time here at Hullabaloo. If you like to throw a little something in the old Christmas stocking it would be most appreciated.