It should be a bicameral, bipartisan body with the authority to investigate potential impeachable offenses.
It should be a bicameral, bipartisan body with the authority to investigate potential impeachable offenses.
This is the third and final column in a three-column series on the House Select January 6 Committee, prompted by the Republican National Committee’s censure of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the House committee’s two GOP members, and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s rebuke of the censure resolution. The first column in the series is here; the second is here.
B ecause of House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s partisan heavy-handedness, the January 6 Committee — presently constituted as a panel of implacable Trump enemies tasked to portray the Capitol riot as the Battle of Fort Sumter — has been dismissed by much of the country.
Moreover, its rigged nature is a gift to Donald Trump, though a poison chalice for the Republican Party. Trump is using the January 6 Committee’s blatant bias and Javert style to rile up his supporters in anticipation of a revenge-tour presidential run. Regrettably, Trump continues to exert much more influence over the RNC, state GOP organizations, and elected Republicans, than on the public at large. Unless Republicans come to the realization that electability is an indispensable quality in a presidential candidate, Trump could conceivably be nominated. His mere announcement that he is running would dissuade many solid Republicans, from across the party’s competing factions, from entering the race. That would lead to a crushing GOP defeat in the general election and four more years of ruinous progressive-Democratic governance.
For all their obsessions about Trump’s destructiveness, Democrats have done more than their share of norm-bulldozing. It was outrageous for Pelosi to deny House Republican leaders their prerogative to choose members to serve on the committee.
Her edict that two senior GOP representatives, Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, would not be permitted to serve was a sheer power play. Pelosi claimed, straight-faced, that the pair of ardent Trump loyalists would compromise the committee. This, after stacking the committee with some of Washington’s most infamously Trump-deranged Democrats. For example, her chosen chairman, Bennie Thompson, had personally sued Trump after the Capitol riot . . . a lawsuit Thompson quietly dropped because he badly wanted to run the high-profile committee and realized the suit showed how ill-suited he is for that role. Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin had piloted the Democratic-driven first (Ukraine) and second (Capitol riot) impeachments of Trump, respectively. Schiff was the principal peddler in Congress of the Democrats’ fraudulent “Trump collusion with Russia” narrative. At the joint session of Congress to acknowledge Trump as winner of the 2016 election, Raskin had baselessly objected to the counting of state-certified electoral votes cast in Trump’s favor, the same anti-constitutional tactic used by Trump’s congressional supporters in trying to invalidate electoral votes won by Biden — a tactic Raskin and the committee now blame for instigating the riot.
Patently, Pelosi insulted the nation’s intelligence by contending that the Trump sycophancy of Jordan and Banks would undermine her hand-picked committee’s objectivity (ahem) and legitimacy. The committees that investigated Watergate had plenty of Nixon sympathizers. That is how credible congressional committees work — as with courtroom due process, the adversarial approach crystallizes disputed issues. Yet, for the short-term partisan goal of keeping a spotlight on Trump, Pelosi has risked blowing up the House as a functioning bipartisan institution. She and her fellow Democrats will remember this ruefully if, after likely GOP victories in the midterms, a new Republican House speaker starts stripping coveted committee assignments from influential Democrats — right after disbanding whatever remains of the January 6 Committee.
Not content with setting reckless precedents, Pelosi compounded the public-perception that she has rigged the January 6 Committee by hand-picking Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger — to provide a bipartisan façade, notwithstanding the strenuous objections of House Republican leaders. Cheney and Kinzinger could have declined to be political footballs, but they accepted Pelosi’s invitation for what they judged was the greater good of exposing the breadth of Trump’s derelictions. Kinzinger has since had to abandon any hope of seeking reelection later this year (Pelosi’s enticements did not include insulation from gerrymandering by Illinois Democrats), and Cheney, who in 2020 won her Wyoming seat by a whopping 44 points, will need all the grassroots support she can muster to overcome a very contentious 2022 primary challenge, fueled by former president Trump and state-party leaders he influences heavily.
It was especially juvenile for the RNC to censure Cheney and Kinzinger while this democratic process is playing out — going all-in against Republican incumbents on behalf of an unstable lightning rod who, with all the advantages of incumbency, managed to lose to the notoriously insipid Joe Biden. For what it’s worth, I remain a Liz Cheney fan — I don’t always agree with her, but she is a principled conservative. No matter how one feels, though, about the anti-Trump message that she and Kinzinger so zealously convey, their motivation includes saving the party from itself. They want to position Republicans as unambiguously on the side of the Constitution and against political violence. Beyond that, they intuit that the broader public is dismayed by Trump’s grip on the GOP. Should that grip endure, it would spell disaster for Republican electoral prospects and for the country that would thus be consigned to additional years of woke-progressive governance.
More to the point, the censure was political malpractice. It signals that when it comes to January 6, the RNC stands with Trump and the rioters. That signal is not obscured by the RNC’s rationalizing about double standards: railing about the harsh prosecutorial treatment of the rioters compared to radical-Left violence; intimating that January 6 was essentially just “legitimate political discourse,” while hyping a storyline that the uprising — in which rioters are on tape beating on cops — was really an FBI entrapment scheme.
For the last seven years, going back to the Hillary-emails scandal, your humble correspondent has been as vocal as they come in condemning two-tiered justice. Yes, it’s a disgrace that Marxist radicals have not been more aggressively pursued for their mayhem. But serious people cannot mince words on political violence. And even less so when the target of that violence was the seat of our government, where elected officials were then carrying out a constitutionally mandated obligation. There is nothing conservative about the radical conceit that we have to suppress the Constitution in order to save the Republic. Not surprisingly, then, the RNC’s ineptitude resulted in a week of Republican leaders scurrying away from reporters and hiding under their desks to avoid addressing the censure.
That is why Senator McConnell had to act, swiftly condemning the censure.
An Overhaul to Shore Up the Committee’s Legitimacy
Now, to conclude that the censure was asinine is not to say that GOP anger at Cheney and Kinzinger is without any justification. By accepting Pelosi’s invitation to join the committee, they pulled the rug out from under Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
McCarthy took a righteous stand in withdrawing Republican participation from the committee in response to Pelosi’s despotic nixing of his appointees. It may have been counterproductive on balance: Pulling out left McCarthy without allies on an important committee that is liberally exercising subpoena power. Still, he made a defensible judgment that the best strategy was to deny the committee’s legitimacy after Pelosi’s blatantly partisan affront, which offended even Trump-hostile Republicans.
Besides, at the time, McCarthy was still hoping to pressure Pelosi into backing down. He knew she wanted GOP participation so the committee, despite her tight control over it, would appear legitimate to Republicans, independents, and moderate Democrats. Pelosi also had to realize that the precedent she set by denying Republican committee appointments would eventually be turned against Democrats, probably sooner rather than later.
Cheney and Kinzinger gutted McCarthy’s leverage. Sure, I believe they acted in good faith. But political parties are collaborative enterprises, and the my-way-or-the-highway approach of Cheney and Kinzinger is not conducive to party discipline. Without such discipline, it is hard for Republicans to joust with rigorously disciplined Democrats. That said, the first allegiances of the People’s representatives must be to themselves and their constituents, not their party.
The Trump problem is a vexing challenge for GOP leaders. The anti-Trump duo’s disdain for McCarthy’s erratic management of it is palpable: The minority leader was vocal in condemning Trump right after the riot, but changed his tune when Trump’s devoted followers did not abandon their man. Like several other influential Republicans, McCarthy assesses that the best approach to Trump is to bide time, appease him, and hope his relevance fades away as more pressing issues take center stage. Cheney and Kinzinger clearly find this craven, concluding that the problem, far from fading away, is getting worse and has to be taken head-on. Reluctantly, I suspect that they are right — or at least that it’s not an either/or situation: The bide-our-time strategy can’t work unless the party’s Cheneys and Kinzingers accelerate matters by being confrontational.
Disagreement with Cheney and Kinzinger was not a rational reason for the RNC to censure them. Party leaders are not wrong, however, to complain that Cheney and Kinzinger could have supported McCarthy’s prerogative to seat Republicans of his choice on the committee, even as they expressed strong public support for the establishment of the committee. That could have strengthened McCarthy’s negotiating hand. Getting a cross-section of Republicans on the committee would have enhanced its credibility. And if Cheney and Kinzinger had helped McCarthy on that score, it might even have generated public support for the appointment of one or both of them to the committee, whether by McCarthy or Pelosi.
Who cares whether McCarthy exercised his discretion to tap some pro-Trumpers? Again, that is how congressional committees work. Trump supporters represent an important faction of the party — and, when push comes to shove, although most Trump sympathizers in Congress may try to deflect the Capitol riot by changing the subject when it comes up, they do not dare try to defend it.
So, as things now stand, we have a committee whose focus on potential crimes is constitutionally dubious, and whose blatantly partisan, stridently anti-Trump provenance will result in its eventual report’s being ignored by much of the country. Worse, by so obviously stacking the deck against Trump, Democrats have played right into his hands — keeping the spotlight on him and enabling him to rile up his loyalists by playing the victim.
None of this bothers Democrats, because it suits their purposes. They realize that Trump could not win a national election. Four years before his tumultuous term in office ended with the “stop the steal” farce and a riot at the Capitol, it began with 54 percent of the country voting against him in his miraculous 2016 victory. In terms of national popularity, it never got much better than that. It has now gotten considerably worse. Yet Democrats calculate that Trump could very well win the Republican nomination. As they see it, that is Biden’s best shot at being reelected. The country’s sharp modern divide may no longer lend itself to landslide drubbings along the lines of Goldwater (1964), McGovern (1972), or Mondale (1984); but should Trump become the nominee, no one should be surprised when his trouncing proves worse than John McCain’s seven-point loss in 2008 — much worse.
That is why keeping Trump front and center while giving Republicans a reason to dismiss the January 6 Committee is a boon for Democrats. It is Republicans who have the most to lose here. If there is going to be a congressional committee focused on the Capitol riot, Republican leaders who care about the prospects of the party and the country in the next two elections need it to have public legitimacy. It must be seen as bipartisan and fair to the former president; but to the extent it investigates his suspected commission of crimes, it should be structured as an inquiry into Trump’s impeachable offenses — with findings on that score that he will have to bear if he tries to run again.
Senator McConnell should join with Minority Leader McCarthy to negotiate with Democrats for an overhauled committee framework and mandate. This must not be a partisan or retaliatory exercise. No current committee member should be removed from the panel, nor need Democratic chairman Bennie Thompson be dislodged from that role. The committee, however, should become bicameral and truly bipartisan — maybe think of it as building back better!
McCarthy should be permitted to appoint four members of his choosing. Democrats are the House majority party, so they should retain their committee majority (which, with Cheney and Kinzinger, is an even larger working majority). The Senate should be permitted to appoint eight or ten members, chosen by McConnell and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and evenly divided between the parties. Thus the joint committee would have 21 or 23 members, which would be manageable and fitting given the gravity of its mandate.
McCarthy and McConnell would be wise to avoid appointing members whose conduct has and will come under committee scrutiny. That is a prudential consideration, though; it is not a basis for disqualification. Congressional committees are inevitably partisan political bodies. That said, GOP leaders would be best served in this instance by seasoned, scrupulous members, regardless of whether they are Trump supporters or critics. They need to give former President Trump a fair shake, but be patriotically committed to a comprehensive, credible probe that lets the chips fall where they may.
The joint committee’s mandate should include not only crafting a complete account of the relevant events but also reporting on its determinations of whether (a) impeachable offenses were committed, and (b) there is a constitutional basis to conduct an impeachment — understanding that Trump has been out of office for over a year, but that he is laying the groundwork to run for the presidency again. Clearly, the Capitol riot is of continuing relevance, given Trump’s recent suggestion that he would pardon rioters, his persisting in the stolen-election claims, and his absurd insistence that Pence had constitutional authority to “overturn the election” result at the January 6 joint session of Congress.
Impeachment has always hovered here, but to acknowledge that aloud would be bracing. The country, quite sensibly, does not like the anxiety of presidential impeachment — which, no doubt, is why the January 6 Committee’s enabling legislation does not mention it, even as the committee openly investigates whether Trump committed impeachable crimes.
So let’s be clear on this: None of what I am proposing would oblige Congress to proceed to a third Trump impeachment. The committee would make its report to the full Congress and the public. The Constitution gives the House plenary power to decide whether to proceed with impeachment articles, so the House could decide what to do after the committee’s work is done. As a practical matter, if the committee were broadly accepted as legitimate by the country, a damning report would illustrate that Trump is no longer a viable Republican or independent presidential candidate — in the sense of being fit or electable. If he were to fold up his tent, there would be no point in further congressional action to disqualify him from future office.
If Senate minority leader McConnell were disposed to push for this course correction, it would firm up the committee’s legal and political foundation. It would demonstrate that Republicans are opposed to political violence and committed to investigating it credibly. It would ensure that the January 6 Committee would be permitted to complete its work — it would not be disbanded if the Republicans retake the House. And it would minimize the chance that Republican leadership, upon retaking the House, would retaliate for Pelosi’s aggression by stripping Democrats of various committee assignments — such reciprocity may sound like poetic justice but would kill the House as a functioning bipartisan institution.
Senator McConnell has struck a blow for normalcy and propriety by blasting the RNC. Here’s hoping he finishes the job.