I have no doubt that Mitch McConnell truly believes in his heart of hearts that blocking a bi-partisan commission into the January 6 attack upon the Capitol is good politics for his party; that to have an in-depth, drawn out investigation into what happened that day and who was responsible would distract from the messaging he wants his colleagues to focus on in the upcoming midterms.
He couldn't be more wrong.
First, the politics. McConnell's calculation that he can somehow sweep the entire episode under the rug is based on a faulty assumption that simply rejecting a bi-partisan commission will be the end of any investigation. Instead, what it does is give House and Senate Democrats the justification they need to form their own select committees - committees, mind you, that will not allow for joint subpoena power, as the bi-partisan commission would have. And those committees will also not be constrained by time, meaning they could extend well into next summer, just as the midterm elections are heating up. Far from sweeping it under the rug, McConnell's short-sightedness has all but guaranteed that it will be front-page news in The Washington Post and The New York Times for the foreseeable future. Virtually every interview a Republican candidate does on CNN from now until next fall will involve to one degree or another the insurrection. You can bet the ranch on that.
But let's put aside the politics for the moment. Let's assume that Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer don't form their own select committees. Who knows? Maybe it does snow in July. McConnell is still wrong, because he naively believes that by not "re-litigating" the events of January 6 he and his party can move on from Trump and concentrate on branding Joe Biden and the Democrats as socialists.
Good luck with that. Trump plans on resuming his rallies this summer; in fact he plans on holding a bunch of them through the November elections. Imagine the sorest loser in presidential politics on an 18 month grievance tour. McConnell may be done with Trump, but Trump isn't done with Republicans. If anything, his grip on the GOP is tighter now than it was a few months ago. According to a recent poll conducted by Ipsos/Reuters, 61 percent of Republicans believe the 2020 election was rigged and 53 percent believe Trump is the true president.
Ole Mitch and his side-kick Kevin McCarthy may think they're running the show, but in reality the defacto leader of this party is a snake-oil salesman who no more cares about them than a picnicker would care about a swarm of mosquitos, and whose disciples run the gamut from those who feel the January 6 insurrectionists were just tourists, to those who believe in Jewish space lasers, to those who don't know what the fuck a pronoun is, to those who are conducting bogus audits of ballots and passing voter suppression laws in various states, to those who claim the second amendment gives them the right to topple the government, that is when their not shuttling under-aged girls across state lines in their spare time.
Behold today's GOP: where conspiracy theories have become mainstream and where the lunatics have taken over the asylum. The best thing McConnell could've done for his caucus would've been to not only bless the commission, but to encourage every single one of his members to vote for it. Only then could he have begun the process of exorcizing Trump and the malignancy he represents from the Republican Party. By kicking the can down the road, as it were, McConnell is not only prolonging the inevitable day of reckoning for the GOP, he's all but ensuring that another insurrection attempt will take place.
Just for the record, Democrats agreed to every demand Republicans made regarding the makeup of this commission. Any suggestion to the contrary is bullshit. It is now incumbent upon Democrats to launch their own investigation into the worst assault upon our democracy since the British burned the White House and Capitol in 1814.
And if Kevin and Mitch cry foul, Nancy and Chuck should tell them to go climb a tree. They had their chance to do the right thing; now they can sit back and watch as the the painful truth about that day comes out and the American public discovers the real reason why Republicans didn't want the investigation to move forward.
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