McCARTHY IS ACTUALLY TRYING TO SABOTAGE THE INVESTIGATION OF THE JAN.6^th INSURRECTION

…Kevin McCarthy’s choice of Jim Jordan for Pelosi’s committee is obviously a goal of sabotage

 

McCarthy’s 5 choices for the committee are obvious, even to casual observers

 

If and when any Republicans that serve on the Jan. 6 select committee, do everything in their power to sabotage a full accounting, let’s not treat this as just Republicans being Republicans.

We are not obliged to accept the GOP’s bad faith and contempt for the public interest as just normal features of our politics, ones that we must all tolerate, because, that’s just how Republicans conduct politics these days.

This is thrust upon us by the news of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) choices for the committee to investigate the January 6^th insurrection. One is Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), who has already signaled his intent to sabotage the proceedings.

Banks released this extraordinary statement:  "If Democrats were serious about investigating political violence, this committee would be studying not only the January 6 riot at the Capitol, but also the hundreds of violent political riots last summer when many more innocent Americans and law-enforcement officers were attacked."

Full of phony victimization, Banks added that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) created the committee “solely to malign conservatives.”

Once you’re done weeping for the plight of these “maligned” conservatives, please note this: "The select committee comes after an extensive effort by Democrats to create a bipartisan commission with a process that was very fair to Republicans."

Guess what: Banks voted against the bipartisan commission. So did three of McCarthy’s other picks for the new committee: Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), and Troy E. Nehls (R-Tex.).

Only one of McCarthy’s new picks: Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), voted for the bipartisan panel. And three Republicans: Banks, Jordan and Nehls, they voted to object to the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral votes on the day of the riot.

Banks appears to be McCarthy’s most important choice. As Politico reports, McCarthy sees this as a way to elevate Banks up the leadership ladder.

It is remarkable and telling that someone being groomed for higher GOP glory has unabashedly declared that the insurrection should not be the primary focus of the committee’s investigation. Remember, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) was elevated in large part due to her public role in elevating the very lies about Donald Trump’s 2020 loss that inspired Jan. 6.

Banks’s declaration that the panel should look at leftist violence, which he casts as a more serious threat than what we saw on Jan. 6, this is just a continuation of the game Republicans have played for six months now.     

Republicans ae just sponsoring a very ugly game as they have insisted any accounting must be broadened this way to obscure public understanding of some large and lethal truths: Right-wing radicalization is far and away the primary threat to democratic stability in this country, and Republicans themselves have actively fed and exploited that radicalization, heavily implicating them in what happened.

McCarthy’s choice of Davis and Armstrong suggests how he would have handled this if he was running the show. All five picks could have been relatively public-spirited, as those two Republicans are, at least in the context of today’s GOP.

But the appointment of two people whose obvious role is sabotage, like Banks & Jordan, they played a big role in sowing doubts about the 2020 election.  It shows that McCarthy must do all he can to muddy up a full accounting.

Historian Kevin Kruse draws a comparison with the Kerner Commission, which was created by President Lyndon B. Johnson to study the urban riots of the 1960s.  Republicans who served on it, Kruse has said, “were ones who believed in its mission, who sincerely wanted to get to the root causes of urban unrest.”

The commission, Kruse continued, did not include Republicans who saw the urban unrest as a tool to continue inciting “white backlash” rather than finding “solutions” that would address the problems underlying the unrest and, in so doing, potentially unite the country.

Appointing people such as Banks and Jordan to the Jan. 6 committee, Kruse said is ridiculous and akin to “appointing Strom Thurmond to the Kerner Commission.”

Thurmond, a segregationist Dixiecrat, had by then switched to the GOP. Just as segregationists disdained the Kerner Commission’s fundamental goals, Kruse said, so do Banks and Jordan.  “They have contempt for the Jan. 6 inquiry.”

Overall, the GOP just has bad faith.

At the bottom, Republicans cannot allow Jan. 6^th to become anchored in our collective understanding as a uniquely revelatory event that is worthy of an exceptional level of serious examination precisely because the stability of the country demands it.

They cannot allow Jan. 6^th to be understood for what it truly revealed: the ongoing presence of a broader movement, one aligned with Trump and a non-trivial faction of the GOP, one that’s anti-democratic to its core.

It’s a movement that has metastasizing and is benefiting from a cadre of intellectuals who are developing an ugly and disconcerting ideological foundation for it, as Laura K. Field details in her Bulwark Article:  “What the Hell Happened to the Claremont Institute?  How did this once-distinguished conservative think tank plunged into Trumpism, illiberalism, and lying about the election.

It is a movement that sees despised electoral outcomes as subject to nullification through highly dubious and potentially illegal means, including mob intimidation and violence.

But this level of bad faith about a matter involving nothing less than the durability of our political order requires a response: Democrats must say no to it. And the media has a role here, too. As Brian Beutler reports that the cover-up is worse than the crime, and this sort of GOP “bad acting” can no longer be covered as a “given.”

Instead, the basic facts of the situation, like McCarthy’s choice of Banks and Jordan, should be unflinchingly rendered as what they truly are: central to a broader campaign to cover up an effort to overturn our political order, a coverup saturated in a level of bad faith and contempt for the public interest that has no place in a functioning democracy.

The new House committee that Pelosi is putting together, she must disqualify at least Banks & Jordan for what they have already stated against seriously looking into the causes for the insurrection on January 6^th.

Copyright G. Ater 2021