Capitol Riot Commission Doomed to Fail if Politicized by House Speaker Pelosi

ANALYSIS – The violent riot at the Capitol on January 6, and the failures leading to it, as well as the militarized overreaction afterwards, deserve an independent and bipartisan investigation akin to the 9/11 Commission. Americans need to know what exactly happened and who failed. And, as I have written earlier, they also need to know what justified the response afterwards.

But Americans also need to have faith in the integrity of the commission and investigation itself.

None of this will happen if Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi insists on forcing through a partisan sham inquiry run by a majority Democrat Commission. But this is exactly what Pelosi appears to be doing.

According to CBS News, “Democrats are proposing a structure for a commission to study the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol that will allow their party to appoint the majority of the commission’s members…”

In Pelosi’s partisan plan:

…House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and Senate leaders Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell will each get to appoint two people to the commission. President Joe Biden will get to appoint three members, including the chair, the aide said. That would allow Democrats to appoint seven commissioners and Republicans to appoint four. [emphasis added]

If this plan is followed, it would make a farce of the investigation, guaranteeing a partisan whitewash of Democrat failures, and make the inquiry itself a failure. As House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy said in a statement last week – Republicans and Democrats should have equal say in appointing the commissioners, as was the case with the commission that studied the September 11, 2001 attacks.

CBS News reported McCarthy as correctly saying:

It is our responsibility to understand the security and intelligence breakdowns that led to the riots on January 6 so that we can better protect this institution and the men and women working inside it. A commission should follow the guidance of [9/11 commissioners] Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton to be ‘both independent and bipartisan’, and to preserve that integrity it must be evenly split between both parties.  

In order to achieve this laudable goal, Congressman Rodney Davis of Illinois, the top Republican on the House Administration Committee, drafted a proposal last month to create a commission that would have 10 members evenly divided between both parties. This is the path Congress should follow.

But Pelosi hasn’t stopped at simply trying to pack the commission with partisan Democrats. She has also been harshly criticized for tasking the highly partisan retired Lieutenant General, Russel Honoré, with reviewing Capitol security in the wake of the attack.

Republicans are outraged by his offensive and unprofessional public rants directed at various conservative Congressmen and Senators, as well as Capitol Hill Police, all before beginning his review.

The Washington Examiner reported that Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, called Honoré an “extreme partisan,” saying on Twitter that the retired general “should be the LAST person to head up an investigation of what happened at the Capitol on Jan 6th.”

AAN Staff