McConnell’s RNC rebuke was necessary, but he should now push to overhaul the January 6 Committee.
McConnell’s RNC rebuke was necessary, but he should now push to overhaul the January 6 Committee.
Editor’s Note: This is the first 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.
M itch McConnell acted the part. The Senate minority leader is the nation’s most senior, responsible Republican official. It thus fell to him to address the toxic incompetence of the Republican National Committee this past week. And he has done it. His rebuke of the RNC was a strategic imperative, even if he made a tactical error in echoing the Democrats’ “insurrection” rhetoric.
In a puerile outburst, the RNC had censured Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for their service on the House Select January 6 Committee. As a matter of national political significance, that had the effect of framing the party as the pawn of former president Donald Trump, defending his indefensible derelictions of duty before, during, and after the Capitol riot.
This is the start of a three-part series of columns. It will address why McConnell’s intervention was necessary, why it was a tactical error for him to echo the Democrats’ “insurrection” rhetoric, why the focus of the congressional January 6 investigation should be impeachment, and how the committee should be restructured to shore up its constitutional propriety and political legitimacy. My suggestion would be to expand the committee: Maintain its current leadership and membership, but make it bicameral and truly bipartisan.
Our country has serious problems — problems that the Biden administration is making infinitely worse; problems that are McConnell’s focus and ought to be the RNC’s. Due to those problems, Republicans are fortunate that the public is not as preoccupied by the Capitol riot as are Cheney, Kinzinger, and partisan Democrats. We could argue that people should be more incensed. Or perhaps we should just realize that Americans watched the riot on live television; that it has already generated a robust public record thanks to press coverage, other congressional investigations, and over 700 criminal prosecutions; and that most people have thus made up their minds about it and moved on. Either way, apathy is not approbation, the RNC’s confounding of the two notwithstanding. When Americans do ponder the violent uprising at the seat of our government, while Congress was carrying out the constitutionally mandated business of what is supposed to be the peaceful transfer of power, they are overwhelmingly repulsed by it.
Understandably, people’s time is mostly spent worrying about soaring prices, rising crime, failing schools, and the Biden administration’s overbearing-yet-ineffectual response to a now-endemic virus that our overmatched president foolishly vowed to “shut down.” On the rare occasion that Americans reluctantly find themselves diverted into renewed consideration of the riot, it is because Narcissus can’t let it go. The former president continues to peddle the “stolen election” tripe that fueled the riot. He still wields outsized influence over a Republican Party that lacks the self-preservation instincts to burn him. And he is toying with another presidential run. That means the RNC, under the thumb of Trump loyalists, can’t let “stop the steal” go either.
By now, we know that there were voting irregularities. An irregularity is not necessarily an illegality, let alone electoral grand larceny. It is an oddity that should be addressed. In 2020, the irregularities were driven by Covid, which influenced how the election was conducted. The election procedures were valid, nonetheless. That is, the resolution of disputes over legal niceties, such as which set of state officials has authority to prescribe particular voting procedures, could possibly change our understanding of whether those procedures conformed to state election law; but that would not invalidate the votes cast under those disputed procedures. The irregularities were not the fault of the voters who relied on their ostensible legality.
When closely examined, the “stolen election” nonsense boils down to mostly minor technicalities and some dubious practices — e.g., vote harvesting, and the politicization of private funding that was permitted to underwrite some state election processes. These practices should be outlawed, or at least scaled back. In 2020, however, they were legal. Compliance with bad laws is not “stealing” an election.
What election scrutiny hasn’t turned up is the only thing that could have stolen the election — large-scale fraud. There is some fraud in every election. In 2020, there was not fraud of a dimension that could have altered the outcome. That was acknowledged by everyone from state officials to the Trump Justice Department to even the Trump legal team in grudging moments of candor when judges asked tough questions. Only Trump, and the (too slowly) dwindling ranks of his base supporters, continue to claim otherwise, based on “evidence” that they have not produced — at least not in a forum where it could be tested.
Despite these immutable facts, the RNC placed the GOP at the service of Trump and his stolen-election bunk. For the RNC, the main problem is the investigation of a hoax, rather than its perpetuation. The problem is somehow Cheney and Kinzinger, but not Trump. And not content with that, the RNC’s censure resolution also parroted the pathetic lie that the riot, in which scores of police were assaulted and the Capitol breached by fatigue-clad rabble-rousers, was merely a matter of “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” — citizens who, the RNC says, are now being “persecuted.”
Lest we forget, the point of having a national organization is to help a party win elections, not settle scores. One needn’t endorse the January 6 Committee’s formulation and direction (matters we’ll get to in due course) in order to grasp that the public deeply disapproved of the Capitol riot and favors an investigation of it. Manifestly, then, the RNC’s tantrum damaged the party’s chances of winning what should be eminently winnable national elections in 2022 and 2024.
That left Senator McConnell no choice. In the arena, where the battle against Democrats and their ruinous “progressive” policies is joined, he is the Republican Party’s leader. He had to condemn the RNC and make clear that Republicans do not support political violence in the service of an amateur-hour coup attempt. Otherwise, he and the party’s mainstream would be seen as part of the madness that has distracted the Trump-dominated RNC from the task at hand — defeating Democrats and reversing Washington’s destructive course.
Impeachment, Not Insurrection
Now, about that tactical error. In rebuking the RNC, McConnell invoked the Democrats’ favorite I-word. As he put it (my italics), the January 6 uprising amounted to “a violent insurrection with the purpose of trying to prevent a peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election.”
It is understandable that McConnell felt the need to be emphatic in contrast to the RNC’s “legitimate political discourse” inanity. But the insurrection rhetoric is going to cause grief. First, as a matter of fact and law, January 6 was not an insurrection — it was a riot; that is plenty bad enough. Second, insurrection is a politically fraught term because Democrats use it to connote that January 6 was a domestic-terrorism operation carried out by revolutionary white supremacists, which is how they want the country to perceive Trump supporters and Republicans in general. Third, insurrection is also a legally promiscuous term because Democrats have used it — most prominently, in their flawed impeachment article against Trump — as a launchpad for lawsuits; under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, Democrats and their lawyer-left allies seek through these lawsuits to disqualify from service in Congress scores of Trump-supporting Republican lawmakers, who joined in baselessly opposing the confirmation of Biden’s election victory at the January 6 joint session (legerdemain that Democrats conflate with violent “insurrection”). Fourth, it is worth noting that, although insurrection is a federal crime, the Justice Department has not charged it in the 700-plus cases it is prosecuting.
So “insurrection” was a poor word choice. But what’s done is done. On net, it is more important that McConnell distanced Republicans, who are listening to the country’s concerns about woke progressivism, from RNC officials, who are listening to Trump’s delusions about the 2020 election.
As far as “insurrection” is concerned, McConnell can cure any damage without undermining the seriousness of his message by focusing on a different I-word, impeachment. Yes, I know, nobody wants to go there again. But we need to go there because of the nature of the January 6 Committee’s investigation.
There is also the problem that the committee is regarded as illegitimate by much of the country. This owes to the blatantly partisan, norm-shattering manner in which Speaker Nancy Pelosi designed it. McConnell can try to fix that by working with Democrats and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy on a reboot: Subsume the current committee into a bicameral and truly bipartisan committee, with jurisdiction to investigate (a) whether former President Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors, and (b) whether there is constitutional authority to impeach him at this point (that was a major but insufficiently explored issue in last year’s shoddy impeachment process).
This must be done for a number of reasons, but mainly because the January 6 Committee, without saying so, is trying to do the investigation congressional Democrats inexcusably failed to do when they impeached Trump last year. That will be the focus of the second column in this series.