Pelosi’s Capitol Riot Commission If it’s stacked with Democrats, it won’t be a credible inquiry.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosis-capitol-riot-commission-11614210098?mod=opinion_lead_pos3
Nancy Pelosi wants a “9/11-type” commission to investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, and there’s a case for doing it—if the goal is truly to find out why America’s seat of government was so poorly protected and how much of the violence was planned. Is that what Mrs. Pelosi is after?
There’s reason to doubt it, since she pushed to make the commission a partisan body. Her initial plan was to have seven members appointed by Democrats and four by Republicans. This is impossible to justify, especially in a country so closely divided. Democrats have 51% of House seats and Republicans have 49%, and the Senate is 50-50. Why, then, would Democrats get to appoint 64% of a Jan. 6 commission?
The only way an inquiry can defang disinformation and conspiracy theories, like the idea that the Capitol rioters were antifa agitators in disguise, is if the country thinks the effort is factual and fair. An even partisan split is crucial for credibility. Otherwise a sizable share of Americans will suspect it’s a political weapon designed to find President Trump guilty of incitement to insurrection, more or less, after a failed impeachment trial.
Mrs. Pelosi should want an inquiry that delivers a unanimous outcome, not one that breaks down on party lines. Heed the veterans of the 9/11 commission, which she invokes. Its Democratic vice chairman, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, told Politico that Mrs. Pelosi’s proposal “does not sound to me like a good start; it sounds like a partisan beginning.” Its GOP chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, said that without equal representation, “the report won’t have as much confidence from the American people.”
A bad example, which Mrs. Pelosi seems intent on repeating, is the commission created to investigate the causes of the 2007-08 financial crash. For its leader, Mrs. Pelosi and Harry Reid tapped Phil Angelides, a former chairman of the Democratic Party of California. Their main goal seemed to be getting ammunition to help congressional Democrats pass the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul.
The result was a partisan failure. The six members appointed by Democrats issued their official findings. The four members chosen by Republicans did not sign on and issued two dissents. “The majority’s almost 550-page report is more an account of bad events than a focused explanation of what happened and why,” one of the dissents said, focusing on the pre-cooked and simplistic “hypothesis that too little regulation caused the crisis.”
Today it looks like Mrs. Pelosi’s goal is to keep the Jan. 6 riot alive in the public mind until the 2022 election. If four GOP commissioners issue a dissent, maybe she doesn’t mind, as long as the official findings are written like a political document by seven Democrats. But then why should the GOP participate in a charade? If Mrs. Pelosi won’t structure the inquiry in a credible fashion, Republicans should sit it out.
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