We Don’t Need a Commission to Investigate the Capitol Riot By Andrew C. McCarthy
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/we-dont-need-a-commission-to-investigate-the-capitol-riot/
This Democrat-driven project would be hopelessly politicized.
W hy do we need a commission for this?
That’s one of the questions Rich Lowry and I batted around on The McCarthy Report podcast a couple of Fridays ago. We happened to be recording just as news broke that House Homeland Security Committee chairman Bennie Thompson (D., Miss.) and ranking member John Katko (R., N.Y.), had reached an agreement to create a special bipartisan commission to examine the Capitol riot.
We should not be astonished that this agreement proved fleeting. Congressman Katko is a moderate who voted to impeach President Trump after the latter’s instigation of the rally that devolved into an uprising, which the media-Democrat complex monotonously brands as an “insurrection” (though when even worse mayhem is perpetrated by leftists, it is branded “mostly peaceful protest” by the same partisans). Recall that House Republicans voted overwhelmingly against impeachment, and Senate Republicans lopsidedly opposed conviction. Although he is hardly alone in his views, Katko is out of step with most of his party on what we should make of January 6.
The commission concept, at least as he negotiated it with Thompson, was quickly panned in pro-Trump circles. That prompted the usual hand-wringing in the GOP mainstream, which is on fret-alert about offending the former president and his supporters. Within days, the Republican minority leaders of the House and Senate, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, respectively, announced their opposition. On Thursday, as NR’s Caroline Downey reports, the Democrat-controlled House comfortably approved the commission proposal, 252–175, with 36 Republicans on board — considerably more than the ten who voted with House Democrats to impeach Trump in January over the Capitol riot. The legislation now heads to the Senate, where its fate is uncertain as this is written.
I oppose the commission. It’s not that I don’t think the events of January 6 are important. I do, and if there is going to be a commission, I’d want it to do a good job, which would require a strong set of Republican commissioners, determined both to get to the bottom of what happened and to thwart the Democrats’ ceaseless politicization of it. Still, I oppose commissions of this kind for the same reason that we should be outraged by the events of January 6: They undermine our constitutional system.
A big part of why we have Congress is to do the fact-finding that the proposed commission would do. Any such investigation should be done by the elected officials who are politically accountable to us, and who are empowered to enact any curative legislation. There is no reason to farm the task out to a blue-ribbon panel of supposed experts whom nobody elected and who have no law-making authority — no reason, that is, other than the standard Washington instinct to do something but be accountable for nothing . . . other than jabbering on cable TV about how bad things are.
A January 6 commission would be hopelessly politicized. Indeed, the Democrats’ very insistence on having a commission betrays their purpose to — absurdly — equate the Capitol riot to the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001, which prompted creation of the 9/11 Commission.
There is nothing stopping Democrats, who narrowly control both congressional chambers, from tasking one of the many standing committees to investigate January 6, or even from creating a special joint committee with members from both chambers to do the work.
Democrats control the work of Congress’s committees, they have subpoena power, and no one can stop them from narrowly focusing an inquiry on the Capitol riot. I happen to think Republicans are right that other ideologically based violence should be examined, at the very least to provide some context in contrast to the Democrats’ selective outrage. But Democrats have the whip-hand. They need not indulge Republican on this point — just as, in 2019, they ignored pro-Trump Republicans who urged that Biden family activities in Ukraine should be examined contemporaneously with the House impeachment probe of Trump’s pressure on the regime in Kyiv to investigate the Bidens.
Nevertheless, Democrats would rather have a commission, for three reasons.
First, they know the public would regard congressional committee hearings and reports that they control as a partisan exercise rather than good-faith investigation. Don’t be fooled, though: Democrats fully intend to conduct a partisan exercise under the commission camouflage. They’d prefer to package the effort as a bipartisan cavalcade of subject-matter experts dispassionately seeking the truth . . . while, behind the scenes, they ensure the Democrat-appointed chair of the commission gets to hire and fire the staff that would do the actual work.
Second, Democrats see a commission as an opportunity to exploit Republican fissures. When it comes to their “insurrection” mantra, and the closely related trope that white supremacism, supposedly instantiated by the January 6 mayhem, is the most perilous “violent extremist” threat facing the United States, Democrats are completely unified. Republicans, by contrast, are divided into competing camps of Trump loyalists, Trump opponents, and those who see Trump as a headache whose influence will dissipate over time if people just stop talking about him — which, naturally, Democrats have no intention of doing. Since they are in harmony while the opposition party is arrayed in a circular firing squad, Democrats know they would have a working majority to steer the course of any commission (just as they called the tune on the “bipartisan” impeachment article against Trump back in January — and, in elevating their partisan messaging over the national interest, undermined the drafting of a strong, accurate set of allegations).
Third, if they can talk Republicans into a commission that, by rule, myopically focuses on Trump-inspired rioters, Democrats could more effectively exclude consideration of the rioting galvanized by Antifa and Black Lives Matter (just as they have been scheming to divert attention from radical leftists and Islamists since Biden’s election). To the contrary, if this partisan exercise is done as a regular congressional committee investigation, Democrats will have a tougher time stopping Republicans from turning the spotlight on the politically motivated violence to which progressives are sympathetic.
Republican leaders, including Senator Mitch McConnell (who was unsparing in his rebuke of the Capitol riot and Trump’s role in it), are being rational in opposing the proposed commission. They can’t stop Democrats from investigating, but they can ensure that any investigation be done in the regular congressional oversight process. They don’t have to help Democrats pretend that a transparently partisan gambit is an exercise in altruistic fact-finding.
Moreover, as I mentioned to Rich during our aforementioned podcast: Have you noticed that when there is a criminal investigation of prominent Democrats — Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Andrew Cuomo, the Russiagate investigators, et al. — we are lectured that there must be no public discussion, and little or nothing in the way of exploratory congressional hearings, because nothing can be permitted to interfere with the work of the prosecutors? Yet, when it comes to January 6, with respect to which we are told there are hundreds of active criminal investigations into what Democrats portray as an atrocity on the scale of 9/11, it turns out there is apparently no concern about interfering with criminal investigations — it is the prosecutors who must take a back seat to media-Democrat political messaging.
Funny how that works.
Remember, it is not like January 6 has not been investigated. We already impeached a president over it. So . . . shouldn’t we be asking why the investigation Democrats now demand didn’t happen then, when they were invoking the Constitution’s most consequential process?
When I was a prosecutor, you investigated the case before you lodged formal allegations — you didn’t, for example, mindlessly repeat slanderous allegations about the brutal killing of a police officer that you read in the newspaper for weeks after it was clear that the allegations weren’t true.
January 6 may rate yet more examination. But color me cynical about the Democrats’ motivations.
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