The Democrats Fumble on the January 6 Committee

Nancy Pelosi made a serious mistake yesterday by refusing to seat Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) and Jim Banks (R., Ind.) on the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot, prompting Kevin McCarthy to take his ball and go home. This deprives Democrats of the talking point they scored when Republicans refused to agree to a bipartisan commission — now, she’s the one refusing to cooperate. It also sets up a further downward partisan spiral over whether the minority party will be permitted to investigate topics that Pelosi doesn’t want investigated.

There are usually two ways to go with investigations. One is the bipartisan commission route, which is typically spearheaded by people retired from active partisan politics. The 9/11 Commission, for example, was co-chaired by ex-New Jersey governor Tom Kean and ex-Indiana Representative Lee Hamilton. Such commissions can gather evidence quietly through professional staff. The other is a committee that holds openly partisan public hearings where everybody grandstands, but at least the witnesses are forced into some made-for-TV soundbites. Pelosi wants to have it both ways here — a partisan circus that is treated by the media like an authoritative commission. Until this week, she could at least sustain the pretense that it was only Republican intransigence standing in the way of a thorough inquiry. The resulting process will be so consumed by partisan squabbles that it will be impossible for anyone to respect its work product.

As I noted at the time, while there are some legitimate lines of inquiry, much of what Democrats hope to accomplish is not really a good fit for a 9/11-style commission. This has been a fraught endeavor from the start, because not only have Democrats placed January 6 at the center of all of their partisan rhetoric for the past six months, this is unlike prior investigations because a good deal of the focus will be on the investigation of Congress itself, not just oversight of the executive branch. Pelosi just confirmed that. While her formal statement is somewhat vague, the Democrats are more or less arguing that Jordan and Banks are disqualified from sitting on this committee because they voted against certifying the 2020 election. That theory goes too far — while Donald Trump’s push against certification on January 6 was one of the elements of his conduct that led to the riot, it is overreaching to argue that anybody who voted that way (including a majority of the House Republican caucus) is effectively an accessory to the riot. If that is Pelosi’s position — and it is a popular one with some factions of the Beltway media — it demands that she stop treating the Republicans as a legitimate part of the House. That is not a sustainable position with the general public, and will be even more unsustainable if Republicans — as may well happen — regain the majority in the chamber next November.

Moreover, this compounds Pelosi’s previous effort to have the House majority kick Marjorie Taylor Greene off committees. The move against Greene would have been proper for Republicans to take (they get to decide who represents their party), but smacks of the House majority dictating internal Republican personnel decisions. But at least Greene is generally recognized as a crackpot. Jordan and Banks may be rhetorical bomb-throwers, but they are well within the mainstream of the kinds of rhetorical bomb-throwers that exist on both sides of the aisle. Democrats will not like it if Republicans start taking the same approach.

Democrats clearly believe that January 6 is their ticket to winning the 2022 midterms, so anything that heightens the political contradictions around it is good for them. But the problem with cynical opportunism is that the voters can see it. Letting Republicans take the hit for cynical opportunism in opposing the commission was a shrewd step. Trying to handpick which Republicans can sit on a committee, however, exposes the cynicism on the Democrats’ side.