Republicans Will Regret Their January 6 Stubbornness

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, July 01, 2021

 

The pollster Morning Consult published an interesting survey this week headlined “Republican Voters Largely Want to Move on From Jan. 6. The Rest of the Country Doesn’t.”

 

The poll found that Republican voters are inclined toward a variety of logically incomprehensible convictions. Among them, that Joe Biden generally deserves more blame than Donald Trump for the events that culminated in a riot inside the Capitol Building and that the rioters’ affinities were not with either the GOP or the former president. Those beliefs have caught on with self-described Republicans even as everyone else is increasingly likely to disagree. Most of all, though, a solid two-thirds of Republicans told this pollster that they think the sacking of the Capitol has received “too much focus.”

 

Rank-and-file Republicans do not so much want the nation to “move on” from the events of January 6 as much as they want their preferred ambiguities around those events to remain ambiguous. GOP lawmakers have responded to their demands by doing their best to postpone a definitive reckoning with the horrors of that day. This was always an untenable position.

 

When the Senate failed to endorse a House-passed proposal that would have created a bipartisan, independent commission to investigate the events of January 6, it was inevitable that Democrats would find other, more partisan avenues to pursue such an investigation. That was predictable if only because it was predicted. And although only two Republicans backed the House’s new probe into those events (a strong contrast from the 35 Republican representatives and six GOP senators who endorsed a commission), Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to tap Rep. Liz Cheney to serve on this panel and Cheney’s acceptance ensure that the Republican effort to brand this a partisan exercise will resonate only with those who are already committed to the Republican version of events.

 

This chain of events could not be stopped, and not because Democrats are single-mindedly focused on tarnishing the Republican brand by associating the party with the violence on January 6. It could not be stopped because Donald Trump and his acolytes within the party did not want to stop it.

 

The former president has not backed off the claims that so antagonized his supporters. He continues to allege that fraudulent practices stole from him his rightful victory—“THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY,” which contributes to “our Country being destroyed.” He continues to obsess over the state-level commissions conducting shambolic recounts of the 2020 election results. He is publicly demanding that other closely contested states commit to similar travesties. And, according to the Department of Homeland Security, the prospect of renewed violence among his most addlebrained supporters who believe the (apparently Trump-endorsed) theory that he will be reinstated to the presidency in August is real. It is madness to suggest that only Republicans are allowed to obsess over the 2020 election and its associated conspiracies while branding anyone who merely notices this mania a crank.

 

Most Republican lawmakers welcome this. Trump’s behavior is a serious electoral headache. They would love to avoid being tarnished by associating themselves with this unpopular figure, but many have concluded that they cannot afford so much distance from him that a more unscrupulous Trumpian insurgent will defeat them in a primary race (or that they might miss fundraising goals as the “Stop the Steal” crowed wrings donations out of the party’s grassroots contributors). But it should be self-evident at this point that, even if Donald Trump’s influence over the party is waning entropically, he will not shuffle off into obscurity willingly.

 

Republicans are right to fear the political consequences of a partisan January 6 probe. There is still plenty we don’t know about the day’s events. As a Senate report published in June concluded, U.S. Capitol Police were ill-prepared and under-informed by government intelligence agencies about the threat that was materializing ahead of that day. The ongoing prosecutions of those involved in the rioting have led some observers to conclude that there is no evidence to support the notion that a premeditated conspiracy led to these events, though that is cold comfort. An entirely spontaneous ransacking of the capitol as the result of mass hysteria would render future similar events impossible to interdict. We have no idea where the pipe bombs placed outside of Republican and Democratic National Committees came from or what role they were intended to play. And we still don’t know what the president was doing in the roughly three hours between the time when National Guards deployments were requested and when they were delivered.

 

These questions may not be answerable by any commission, much less one led by political actors with a partisan objective in mind. But that was what Republican lawmakers invited when they nixed the establishment of an independent commission. And just as Republican lawmakers didn’t set out to uncover Hillary Clinton’s secret email server when they embarked on a probe into the U.S. response to the deadly attack in Benghazi, Democrats who set out on this expedition may surprise themselves with what they find.

 

Republicans had the chance to shape the narrative around January 6, but they have passed on every opportunity. Now they will be buffeted by events. And in resisting a definitive accounting of those events, they’ve only made the political imperative of divorcing the party from Donald Trump’s most off-putting pathologies that much harder.