WASHINGTON – A sharply divided house voted on Wednesday to establish an independent commission to investigate the January 6th Capitol attack to overcome Republican opposition determined to halt high-profile coverage of the deadly pro-Trump uprising.
But even as the bill passed the House, top Republicans shut down arms to freak it in the Senate and protect former President Donald J. Trump and her party from re-examining their role in that day’s events.
The 252-175 votes in the House of Representatives, with four-fifths of Republicans opposed, indicated the difficult road ahead for the Senate proposal. Thirty-five Republicans resisted their leadership to support the bill.
The vote came hours after Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, declared his opposition to the plan. Mr McConnell had only said the day before that he was open to voting in favor and that he previously had both Mr Trump’s role in sparking the attack and some Republicans’ efforts on Jan. 6 to block the certification of, loudly condemns the 2020 election results.
His reversal reflected broader efforts by the party to politically move beyond the attack on the Capitol – or to recast the riots as a largely peaceful protest – under pressure from Mr Trump and over concerns about the issue they were facing in the mid-term elections Tracked in 2022.
Proponents hailed the move to establish the commission as an ethical and practical imperative to fully understand the most violent attack on Congress in two centuries, and Mr Trump’s election lie that fueled it. Following the example of the panel that investigated the September 11, 2001 attacks, the 10-member commission would conduct an investigation from the convention halls and deliver results by December 31.
“I was on the floor of the Capitol with the spokesman in the chair and a howling mob attacked the United States Capitol,” said representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat and chair of a committee that had already investigated the attack lively roll call before voting. She reminded colleagues of the “knocking on doors” and the “mutilated police officers”.
“We have to get to the bottom of this, not only to understand what happened before the sixth, but how we can prevent it from happening again – how we can protect the world’s oldest democracy in the future,” said Ms Lofgren.
However, the prospects for Senate passage deteriorated significantly after Mr. McConnell, along with his counterpart, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, and Mr. Trump considered the Democratic and moderate Republican proposal of the House to be overly partisan and a duplicate of the ongoing law enforcement action Justice Department and close Congressional investigations.
“After careful consideration, I have decided to oppose the House Democrats’ weird and unbalanced proposal for another commission to investigate the January 6th,” said McConnell in the Senate.
Many ordinary Republican senators who had flirted with support for the commission idea also quickly agreed, arguing that the proposal wasn’t really bipartisan and that the investigation would take too long and learn too little. Their positions made it less likely that Democrats could win the 10 Republican votes they would need to hit the 60-vote threshold required to pass the bill in the evenly-divided Senate.
Republican leaders who witnessed the January 6 events and fled for their lives when an armed mob overtook their jobs had briefly considered supporting the commission out of fairness. The 9/11 Commission was adopted almost unanimously two decades ago, and its work was widely publicized.
Their recent opposition pointed to a colder political calculation propelling the Republican approach through 2022: Better to avoid a potentially uncontrollable reckoning centered on Mr Trump and the false claims of electoral fraud that he continues to proclaim.
“I want our medium-term message to address the issues that the American people are dealing with – jobs and wages and the economy, national security, safe roads, strong borders and such issues,” said Senator John Thune of South Dakota, Mr. McConnell’s No. 2. “Don’t Religious the 2020 Elections.”
After a bipartisan negotiation approved by Mr McCarthy, the outcome was disheartening to those who believed that Mr Trump’s resignation from the public scene and the reality of an assault on the seat of government could help ease strained Republican relations and democrats.
The two parties are expected to stall again on Thursday if Democrats over a 1, four months after the deaths of at least five people in connection with the invasion, which injured nearly 140 people and injured dozen of people. Vote $ 9 billion spending plan to strengthen Capitol defenses Millions of dollars in damage to the Capitol complex.
Democrats were furious. They had made several concessions to Mr McCarthy, believing that he would support the deal only to see he slammed it publicly for not investigating unrelated “political violence” on the left. Some Democrats said the episode only pointed out to them that there was no point in negotiating with Republicans over one of the big issues dividing the parties, including President Biden’s infrastructure proposal.
In the House of Representatives, Democratic leaders threatened to launch a more partisan investigation on January 6 through existing congressional committees or through the creation of a new selection committee if the commission’s proposal dies.
Democratic lawmakers and even some Republicans speculated that Mr McCarthy’s reluctance may have been driven in part by efforts to prevent harmful information about his own conversations with Mr Trump from coming to light around Jan. 6, at a time when he tries to help his party take back the house and become a spokesman.
“You have to ask them what they are afraid of,” California spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi told reporters. “But it sounds like they are afraid of the truth, and that is extremely unfortunate.”
New York Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer and majority leader, pledged to hold a Senate vote in the coming weeks to force Republicans to take a public position, despite not offering a specific date.
“The American people will see for themselves whether our Republican friends are on the side of the truth or on the side of Donald Trump’s great lie,” he said.
During the floor of the House debate, the Republicans who backed the panel tried repeatedly to make it a replay of the 9/11 commission whose leaders endorsed the new effort. Although the impeachment proceedings against the Senate and a handful of congressional committees have already produced a detailed report on that day, important questions remain, particularly about Mr Trump’s conduct and the roots of intelligence and security deficiencies.
“Make no mistake, it’s about the facts, it’s not partisan politics,” said Republican John Katko, Republican of New York, who was negotiating legislation to create the commission with Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi.
“Jan. 6 will haunt this institution for a long time, ”said Michigan representative Fred Upton, another Republican who voted to set up the commission. “Five months later, we still have no answers to the basic questions: who knew what, when, and what did they do about it?”
Among the Republicans who voted for the commission was a well-known group of moderate and staunch critics of Mr Trump, many of whom either voted to charge him with the January 6 attack or otherwise condemned his actions. Most notable was the Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, who was fired from the party leadership last week for refusing to stop criticizing Mr Trump for his attempts to overthrow the election.
The supporters also counted a large number of established Republicans from conservative districts who, despite the politics, were shaken by the attack and want a thorough investigation.
Among the votes against were Republican Greg Pence, Republican of Indiana, and the brother of former Vice President Mike Pence, whose opposition to the freeze on the confirmation of the election results made him one of the main targets of pro-Trump rioters, of whom some erected a gallows outside the Capitol. In a statement, Representative Pence said Ms. Pelosi had attempted to appoint herself a “hanging judge” in order to carry out a “pretended political execution of Donald Trump”.
The scale of the Republican spills in Wednesday’s vote embarrassed Mr McCarthy at a time when he was vowing to unite the party and few Republicans were ready to defend their opposition during the debate. Mr Katko’s allies were particularly outraged that the minority leader stood in for him to make a deal and then released him when he did.
Democrats attempted to further embarrass Republicans by distributing an unusual letter from Capitol police officers expressing “deep disappointment” with Mr. McCarthy and Mr. McConnell.
“It is incomprehensible to believe that anyone could suggest that we move forward and get over it,” the officials wrote in the unsigned letter.
In the Senate, a small group of moderate Republicans suggested Wednesday that they would continue to be interested in running a commission, albeit with changes to staff appointments. But Mr. McConnell left very little chance that his executive team could come to yes.
Mr. McConnell had emerged as one of the most outspoken Republican critics of Mr. Trump on Jan. 6. He blamed him for the loss of the House, Senate, and White House, and inspired the deadliest attack on Congress in 200 years. But in the months since Mr. Trump regained control of the party, Mr. McConnell has been increasingly reluctant to stir his anger.
On Wednesday, he insisted that he believed he could get to the bottom of what had happened, but argued that the ongoing investigation by the Justice Department and non-partisan Senate committees was sufficient. In reality, the scope of this work is likely to be much narrower than what a commission could investigate.
“The facts have come out,” said McConnell, “and they will come out.”
