The January 6 Show

National Review Online

Monday, June 20, 2022

 

As has been true of so many things surrounding Donald Trump’s career in politics, many more people have come out of the January 6 committee hearings looking worse than looking better. Most importantly, the whole tawdry spectacle reminds us: As many good things as Trump accomplished with the presidency, he was unfit to be entrusted with the office, and Republican voters should discourage him from seeking it again.

 

The committee itself has been controversial since the beginning. Much of its purview involves events that occurred in full public view or that were widely known in January 2021. This includes Trump’s refusal to concede defeat; his pressure campaign against state and local officials who would not do his bidding; his efforts to intimidate Mike Pence into violating his oath of office; his summoning supporters to a “wild” protest on January 6; and his reluctance to take action once it was clear the protest had escalated into an all-out riot at the Capitol. If it aims to hold Trump politically accountable, its newer revelations arrive far too late for the botched second impeachment. If it aims to build a case for criminal prosecutions, that is not a proper function of Congress. If it aims to score partisan points — as House oversight investigations usually do — it has no particular claim on our attention. Some of the committee’s hyped claims, such as efforts to paint House Republicans as active collaborators in the riot, have landed with a thud.

 

The committee was also poorly constructed. Kevin McCarthy selected Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, both of whom were apt to act more as advocates for Trump — or distracting grandstanders — than as sober-minded factfinders. But such is often the role of the minority party in House hearings. Nancy Pelosi refused to seat Jordan and Banks on the theory that they had objected to Biden’s electors — yet, she chose Bennie Thompson, who objected to George W. Bush’s electors on no better grounds, to chair the committee and Jamie Raskin, who objected to Trump’s. Pelosi’s unprecedented maneuver, which she said was justified by “the unprecedented nature of January 6,” gave McCarthy all the cover he needed to abandon cooperation with the committee, leaving its presentation one-sided. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger remained as the only Republicans on the committee, resulting in their effective alienation from their party’s caucus. Democrats have also sometimes been selective in what topics the committee should examine regarding the security of the Capitol. Bad faith and bad judgment all around.

 

The committee’s work has been predictably partisan and acrimonious. Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, and other Trump associates have refused to cooperate, often on flimsy or implausible pretexts; Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice responded with overreaching indictments of Bannon and Navarro, although it declined the invitation to charge Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino. The committee also pursued ominous arguments in court; in its pursuit of John Eastman’s emails, it tried to convince a federal judge that law professors can’t have privileged communications with their clients if they use their university email accounts. The choice of prime-time televised hearings was obviously designed for partisan ends to distract from an unpopular Democratic president and a looming midterm disaster for his party. That spirit has pervaded the hyperbole and opportunism of much of the media coverage.

 

Yet, for all the problems in its design and operation, the committee has done important work. The January 6 Capitol riot and the associated “Stop the Steal” effort to prevent Joe Biden’s election from being certified is an important moment in our history, and there remains value in documenting it for posterity with evidence and testimony under oath. The subject of what the president did after the riot started, and why the Capitol was not secured more swiftly and decisively, was under-explored in the second impeachment, and has produced some revealing testimony.

 

The public record of Trump’s conduct has been damning, and his inability even to this day to let go of his false claims about the 2020 election — claims by the official constitutionally sworn to uphold the laws, claims that deluded and enraged his supporters, inspiring the more unhinged among them to storm the Capitol — are further evidence that he shouldn’t hold any public office again. Trump was warned in no uncertain terms by people who had long been loyal to him that, in seeking to overturn Biden’s electors, he was pursuing an unlawful strategy based on lies. Too deeply invested in his own delusions, he ignored them all. Even his daughter Ivanka testified to Trump’s abusive tirades directed at his own vice president, drawing a rare public dismissal from her father. This is no way for the leader of a constitutional republic to behave.

 

Trump’s enablers have also not been covered in glory. Foremost among these is John Eastman, the constitutional law scholar who acknowledged that his arguments would not draw a single vote from the Supreme Court, but insisted upon giving a fig leaf of lawyerly gravitas to Trump’s nonsense.

 

Amidst all of this, however, there have also been heroes. Mike Pence stands out for his principled refusal to cooperate in Trump’s scheme to object to Biden’s electors, a stance that was painful for Pence to take and put him in the crosshairs of an angry, threatening mob that came within 40 feet of coming upon him. Pence admirably stood his ground, refusing to leave the Capitol so long as the electoral-vote count remained unfinished. The vice president had to watch, from a secure location, while Trump continued to egg on the mob through his public Twitter feed.

 

Pence’s chief lawyer, Greg Jacob, and former federal appeals judge J. Michael Luttig played key roles in fortifying Pence’s position. Bill Barr’s testimony was characteristically blunt and unsparing on how he refused to let Trump bend the Justice Department to endorse bogus election claims. Several members of the Capitol Police and the D.C. Metropolitan Police also gave harrowing testimony that reflected their bravery and devotion in an intensely unstable and dangerous environment.

 

Moreover, say what you will of Liz Cheney’s political judgments; she has shown great courage in taking on this role at great cost, ending her tenure in House Republican leadership and quite possibly resulting in the loss of her seat.

 

Notwithstanding committee hyperbole about our democracy on the brink of destruction, the main hero of this dark episode is the Constitution. Ingeniously, the Framers divided power horizontally among the branches, and vertically among the federal government and the sovereign states. No one actor could have stolen this presidential election, and even a well-conceived conspiracy (which this wasn’t) would have been foiled at several turns. In this case, dozens of state and federal courts (including Trump-appointed judges and justices) rejected Trump’s frivolous lawsuits. The Justice Department’s top officials discredited his fraud claims and refused to thrust the baseless suggestion of voting fraud onto state election officials. Thanks to separation of powers, those officials did not answer to Trump and would have defied him — as, in fact, Georgia officials did. And Trump never even tried to seek armed-forces support for his scheme to remain in power because he understood he’d never get it: The military was loyal to the Constitution. So was Pence.   

 

The nation should move past Donald Trump. We should not forget what happened on January 6, but we should also be confident in the strength of our democratic institutions to withstand attempts by bad actors to illegitimately cling to power.