Speaker Nancy Pelosi has grown increasingly frustrated with a lack of cooperation from Senate Republicans on forming a commission to examine the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Her angst on Thursday apparently made her forget the name of her Senate GOP counterpart, Mitch McConnell, who she blamed for the failure to convene the commission.
“Senator, what’s his name? McConnell,” Pelosi said when a reporter asked about the proposed Jan. 6 panel. “When I asked him, are you serious about wanting to do this? And he said yes, it depends on the scope.”
The California Democrat said while it appeared that the Kentucky senator was interested in forming a commission to examine the attack, the next day, “he went to the floor … and just dumped all over, all over the fact that we would be investigating Jan. 6 without other things as well.”
McConnell, in a February floor speech, said any commission formed to examine the cause of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol should also investigate the causes of civil unrest, rioting, and destruction in cities across America that appears to have been carried out by Black Lives Matter protesters, antifa, and other left-wing groups.
“If Congress is going to attempt some broader analysis of toxic political violence across this country,” McConnell said, “then, in that case, we cannot have artificial cherry-picking of which terrible behavior does and does not deserve scrutiny.”
Pelosi has rejected McConnell’s demand to expand the investigation, and the commission proposal has essentially stalled.
Republicans are also opposed to the proposed partisan slant of the commission.
Instead of modeling the evenly split commission formed two decades ago to examine the causes of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, the Jan. 6 panel would be comprised of seven members appointed by Democrats and just four appointed by Republicans.
Democrats blame the Jan. 6 attacks on former President Donald Trump, who the House later impeached for inciting an insurrection that led to the riot.
Pelosi said Thursday the FBI has reported the nation’s domestic terrorism problem stems from “white supremacy, antisemitism, xenophobia, it goes on like that.”
She added, “Republicans don’t want any findings that would show us a path to how some of this happened.”
Pelosi said that she wants the commission “to be as bipartisan as possible” but plans to move on without the GOP.
“We have to find the truth, and we will and we are not walking away from that,” Pelosi said.
