More Commission Conundrums

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In a piece I wrote last week, I suggested that congressional Democrats and Republicans would have very different ideas about the composition and direction of a 9/11-style commission to investigate January’s insurrection at the Capitol.

As an article that ran Monday in Politico documents, I was right. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has suggested giving Democratic appointees a majority on the commission, while Republicans seek equal representation. Pelosi wants the commission to be charged with investigating specific issues—among them, I would guess, the incitement of the riot, the planning that went into it, the misinformation that led to it, the failure of law enforcement to respond to and suppress it, and what changes in policy are needed to squelch a repeat performance. Republicans, by contrast, want no such delineation of subjects to be investigated, preferring to let commission members look into anything they wish—which could include, I suppose, the Dominion voting machines connection to Josef Stalin and the role that antifa played in the insurrection and the Klan rallies of the 1920s.

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Politico also reports that some veterans of the 9/11 Commission advised Pelosi to go with a commission that has equal partisan representation. That counsel made sense in the aftermath of al-Qaeda’s 2001 attacks, which didn’t involve the complicity of the president, or one political party’s failure to hold a complicit president accountable or to accept the electoral votes of two states (Arizona and Pennsylvania). It made sense when the Republican who chaired the commission was former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, a moderate who understood the difference between fact and fiction.

Today, the Republican Party that once elected Thomas Kean has gone the way of the dodo bird. In a Suffolk University/USA Today poll released Monday, 73 percent of Trump voters said that Joe Biden’s election wasn’t legitimate, and 58 percent said that the insurrection was antifa’s handiwork. Today, every Republican senator or representative who didn’t vote to indict or absolve Trump and is up for re-election in 2022 is sure to face a primary challenge from a Trump supporter who’ll almost surely be favored to win.

Speaker Pelosi might go along with a balanced commission if she prevails on outlining the commission’s charge, and if Mitch McConnell lets her know in advance whom he is planning to appoint, and if they all are latter-day versions of Thomas Kean. That would limit the political flat-earthers on the commission to House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy’s appointees, who could issue a minority report. But McConnell, already in hot water for calling Trump “practically and morally responsible” for the insurrection, is in no position to offer Pelosi any such assurances, much less make Kean-like appointments.

That’s why no 9/11-style commission is even possible in times such as ours, when truth and bipartisanship don’t rhyme.

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