Democratic leaders want to achieve partisan balance on the commission investigating the Capitol Hill siege despite persistent disagreements with Republicans on scope.
An area that has been met with general agreement is that the 9/11-style investigation on the Capitol riot should be bipartisan, with several Democrats agreeing to see an equal number of Republican members serving on the commission.
“The leaders of the 9/11 Commission have said that part of why it was so successful was that it was even, it was balanced, and it was led by folks who were well respected and well regarded, who had a reputation of working across the aisle,” Sen. Chris Coons, a member often noted for his bipartisan efforts, told CNN. “I think it’s important that we have a balanced Jan. 6 commission. … This is important. It’s one of the key ways, John, of how we come together as a country.”
Sen. Dick Durbin, the second highest-ranking Democrat in the upper chamber, reportedly agreed, telling reporters on Thursday that he’d “like to suggest [the commission] be balanced.”
Despite the area of agreement, the two sides differ in terms of the scope of the commission. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell slammed Democrats’ proposal for the commission to be broad in scope during a speech on the chamber floor on Thursday.
“If this new commission is to go beyond a targeted, after-action analysis of the security failures here at the Capitol complex, if Congress is going to attempt some sort of broader analysis of toxic political violence across the country, then, in that case, we cannot have artificial cherry-picking of which terrible behavior does and which terrible behavior does not deserve scrutiny,” he said. “We could do something narrow that looks at the Capitol, or we could potentially do something broader … [but] we cannot land at some artificial, politicized halfway point.”
McConnell invoked the commission investigating the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as a paragon of what he hopes the Jan. 6 commission will achieve.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi slammed McConnell’s remarks during a press conference on Thursday.
“I’m disappointed in what I heard the minority leader yesterday, McConnell, say on the floor,” she said. “It was really quite stunning because, in my brief conversation with him on this subject, I had the impression that he wanted to have a Jan. 6 similar to 9/11 Commission, but what he said on the floor was really a departure from that.”
Pelosi argued that McConnell was fixated on a “political violence problem” when what the United States is truly suffering is a “domestic terrorism challenge.”
She also dismissed concerns that the panel is not split evenly as lawmakers in both parties have proposed and said Democrats need the majority to ensure the panel does not simply focus on the attack and security problems at the Capitol.
Democrats drafted the proposal to create the Jan. 6 commission on Monday. The temporary panel would be tasked with providing a report by the end of 2021 on the attack and would disband 60 days later, according to a discussion of draft details provided by a senior Democratic aide.
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A representative for Durbin did not immediately reply to the Washington Examiner‘s request for comment.
