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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