Monday, May 24, 2021

In opposing January 6 commission, Republicans are scrambling like rats in the dark from fear the light will shine on the guilty

 

The images from the January 6 insurrection by supporters of Donald Trump speak for themselves. It happened after months of Trump’s refusal to accept defeat with grace and furthering the evidence of his unfitness for office, and while his “legal team,” Fox News and some Republican senators and most House Republicans gave sustenance to wild conspiracies about a “stolen” election. After the last of the insurrectionists were removed from the Capitol building, 140 House Republicans still voted for to contest the election based on the conspiracies they themselves had aided in peddling, and thus were themselves equally culpable for the events of that day.

Nevertheless, last week 35 House Republicans voted to approve an independent commission to investigate the cause of the insurrection. Ten Republican in the U.S. Senate had voted to impeach Trump for his role in inciting the insurrection, seemingly enough to head off a filibuster. Yet now we are to understand that the Republican leadership is now desperate to block any investigation into responsibility for the insurrection, with many Republicans who voted for impeachment now suddenly more concerned about party over country. Republicans who were all talk in condemning Trump for inciting the insurrection are now suddenly behaving like rats which prefer to operate in the dark where their crimes are hidden, and are now are scurrying for cover once the bright light of the truth threatens to shine on them. This promises to be not just media reports here today, gone tomorrow, but an official accounting of their crimes in horrific (for them) detail.

House minority leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy and his counterpart in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, represent a hypocritical front that insists that it isn’t “fair” to simply focus on the insurrection; what about last year’s BLM and Antifa protests? But that isn’t even an apples and oranges comparison. Those kind of protests over police abuse have been going on many decades, at least since the Rodney King incident 30 years ago. Nobody ever claimed that those protests were aimed to overthrow an election or government. Last year’s protests were not only fueled by an increase in cases that were captured on video, and by people with too much time on their hands because of the pandemic lockdown, but also by Trump because of his total absence of personal moral capacity to even make an effort to calm the nation. If anything, Trump only exacerbated last summer’s protests because of his racist dog-whistling and total absence of sensitivity to those outside his guilded cage.

So Republicans have no real reason to oppose the commission save for one: they are fearful that an investigation will drag on into the 2022 midterms, and more and more evidence will come to light not just how Trump and his stooges in front and behind the scenes sought to inflame passions with conspiracy claims they knew to be false—just look at how Sidney Powell is now “defending” herself by claiming she didn’t actually “believe” the conspiracies she was peddling everywhere—but many Republicans in Congress were also directly involved in stoking the flames of insurrection, and possibly even aided in the invasion of the Capitol. 

Yes, some Republicans like McConnell and Lindsey Graham pretended to act like statesmen after the insurrection, but talk is cheap; but being “men” and not boys when it is time to correct a wrong even when it means that some of their “friends”—and even themselves—will be revealed to be less than heroic in the drama is quite another thing. In doing so, these Republicans will reveal themselves to be on same “level” as the insurrectionists themselves. As political commentator Kurt Bardella tweeted, “Asking Republicans to investigate 1.6 is like asking Al-Qaeda to investigate 9.11. The people who helped plan/promote the attack aren’t going to be partners in the investigation.”

Most Republicans insist on being tied to the hip to a man who is nothing more than representative of a cult of personality, like Jim Jones, and who may soon be indicted on criminal charges. Those who tried to “reason” with Trump—like McCarthy—during the height of the insurrection know the truth, but outside of those Republicans who are just as crazy as Trump (Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, Rand Paul, Josh Hawley, et al.), the only thing that really matters is pleasing his white nationalist/nativist base.

But there is a limit to how useful Trump is to Republicans, which is why they oppose the commission most of all. Any investigation that even goes skin deep will prove that Trump is batshit crazy with conspiracy thinking, engaging in far from what one would call “presidential” behavior, and only listened to a sycophantic lunatic fringe fearful of his wrath. On the other hand, you can believe that there will be a long line of witnesses to Trump’s crimes willing to clear their consciences under oath. What this means is that the “stink” of Trump will rub-off on Republicans running for office in contested races in 2022 who claim to be his most ardent supporters. Voters in the middle will wonder why they should vote for Republicans who have tied themselves not just to an insane man, but a man facing criminal charges.

This is why this commission is needed; a recent poll states that 48 percent of Americans are “satisfied” with the present FBI investigation, but they shouldn’t be. The FBI is only investigating those physically involved in the insurrection; they are not investigating those who incited it. Those political and media figures who incited the insurrection are not just equally guilty—but even more guilty. And that is why they don’t want this, and why we need to do this.

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