It’s weird that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is so eager to set up a “9/11-style commission” investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, considering that Democrats are already so sure of what happened and why.
Isn’t that what their rushed, last-minute impeachment of Donald Trump was about?
The way Pelosi and her party tell it, then-President Trump whipped up a fanatical group of white supremacists and directed them to attack the Capitol in order to stop the certification of the 2020 election and even to kill elected officials in an armed insurrection.
Of course, that’s not really what happened. But Democrats want to tell that story over and over again until our ears bleed. It’s their best shot at delegitimizing Trump, what he meant to his voters, and then, by association, the rest of the Republican Party. This isn’t supposed to be a fact-finding mission. It’s a partisan weapon, and we know that because Pelosi is trying to stack the commission with more Democrats than Republicans, according to Politico.
Republicans should refuse to be part of the show. But they can’t because, as one senior aide on the Hill told me, “the political die has been cast. Our job now is to make sure Pelosi doesn’t run rampant with it.”
Good luck with that!
Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who served as the Democratic lead on the original 9/11 Commission, told Dan Balz at the Washington Post earlier this month that any new commission examining the events of Jan. 6 will need “high-quality people who have the good of the country at heart, are serious about it and honest about it, people with integrity who will examine the facts and not be swayed by ideology or partisanship.”
Sorry, Lee, but Democrats have already forfeited any claim to integrity or even the veneer of nonpartisan information gathering. The impeachment on this very subject was, by definition, as political as Democrats could get, and there’s no putting that slime back in the tube.
In any event, we’ve seen the videos from what happened inside the Capitol that day, and we’ve heard testimony from law enforcement officers tasked with securing our federal buildings. Their version of events is that the storming of the Capitol was a premeditated action, as evinced by the ladders and other materials brought to the riot. Police were simply unprepared for what happened, given that prior intelligence had indicated there was no need for heightened enforcement. This wasn’t a spontaneous reaction to something a politician said that day.
As far as ensuring that such a thing never happens again, intelligence and law enforcement agencies will need to coordinate better.
This isn’t a complicated mystery, and the answers are obvious. Democrats know that, but what they want to do is say the words “white supremacy” over and over on national television to advance the lie that there are Klansmen hiding around every corner and that they include every Republican and every Trump supporter.
There will be a commission on the Jan. 6 riot, but be prepared for it to be a partisan joke.
