Republicans clearly are determined to block the exposure of their partisans’ participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection, rather than cooperate with the investigation of the failed coup.
The House on Oct. 21 voted 229-202 to find Steve Bannon in criminal contempt of Congress for his refusal to comply with a subpoena in the House investigation of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. Only nine Republicans voted to enforce the subpoena after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy urged his caucus to vote against it.
McCarthy argued that Bannon’s subpoena was “invalid,” because the minority was not permitted to participate in the select committee. Of course, that was a lie. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked McCarthy to nominate members for the committee, and he nominated five Republicans, but pulled all of them when Pelosi rejected Reps. Jim Banks of Indiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio because of concerns they supported the insurrection. McCarthy decreed that Republicans should not serve on the panel, but Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinziger of Illinois ultimately accepted Pelosi’s invitations to serve.
Cheney is vice chair of the select committee, and before the Jan. 6 panel voted to hold Bannon in contempt Oct. 19, Cheney suggested that Trump and Bannon may have been “personally involved” in organizing the Capitol attack and urged her Republican colleagues to do their “duty to prevent the dismantling of the rule of law.”
“As you think about how you will answer when history asks, ‘What did you do when Congress was attacked, when a mob, provoked by a president, tried to use violence to stop us from carrying out our constitutional duty to count electoral votes—when a mob, provoked by a president, tried to overturn the results of an election?” Cheney said, ”will you be able to say you did everything possible to ensure Americans got the truth about those events? Or did you look away? Did you make partisan excuses and accept the unacceptable?”
Cheney also revealed McCarthy has been putting the squeeze on House Republicans to cover up details about the Capitol siege.
Her colleagues, Cheney noted, “don’t want to anger Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, who has been especially active in attempting to block the investigation of the events of Jan. 6, despite the fact that he called for such a commission the week after the attack.”
Shortly after that moment of clarity by McCarthy, he was summoned to Mar-a-Lago, where he apparently repented for his criticism of the Great Misleader and pledged fealty to the dark lord. McCarthy has been in lockstep with the Trumpers ever since.
Cheney went to the House floor to reiterate that Bannon predicted the mayhem of Jan. 6 even before it happened.
“I urge all Americans to watch what Mr. Bannon said on his podcast on Jan. 5 and 6. It is shocking and indefensible,” Cheney said, during debate before the House vote on Bannon’s contempt charge. “He said, ‘All hell is going to break loose.’ He said, ‘We are coming in right over the target. This is the point of attack we have always wanted.’”
McCarthy countered with a message privately delivered to Republican consultants who have worked with Cheney, that they had to choose between working for Cheney and working for McCarthy, the New York Times reported. At least one firm working for Cheney has severed their relationship. McCarthy also has threatened private companies that cooperate with the Jan. 6 probe.
For his part, Trump, before the House vote, said the the election was the crime, and he praised the riot — which injured 140 police officers and claimed several lives — as a legitimate response.
“The insurrection took place on Nov. 3, Election Day,” Trump wrote. “Jan. 6 was the protest!”
There is growing evidence that Republican members of Congress and White House officials participated in planning the “Stop the Steal” rally. The only question is whether those plans explicitly included an attack on the Capitol, and how Trump was involved.
Republicans pay a price for standing up against Trump. Only nine House Republicans were prepared to pay that price. The House established its own select committee because Senate Republicans filibustered a proposed independent commission. Only six Republican senators were willing to support a probe and risk Trump’s wrath.
The Justice Department now must decide whether to prosecute Bannon, who claims executive privilege, even though he was not a government employee when the events occurred, and President Joe Biden has waived executive privilege in the investigation.
If the Justice Department declines to prosecute Bannon, the House should order Bannon arrested under its own authority, under the principle of “inherent contempt,” and hold Bannon until he agrees to turn over relevant documents and to testify before the committee.
Whichever way it goes, Bannon and other Trump conspirators hope to delay the work of the Jan. 6 committee into next year’s mid-term election, so they can dismiss conclusions as political persecution.
Belief that the presidential election was stolen by Democrats is a matter of faith for the Republicans. They rationalize it allows them to enforce new laws in red states to limit access to voting.
Polls show voter approval of President Biden has sagged to 43.6% on Oct. 25, down from the height at 55.1% in March, after passage of the American Recovery Act, which pumped $1.2 trillion into the economy, helping the nation recover from Trump’s recession.
Those polls will rebound again if Biden gets the Senate to pass his “Build Back Better” bill, which would provide, among other things, universal preschool for children; child care to help parents get back to work; up to 12 weeks of paid family leave for new parents and caregivers; two years of free community college; and extension of the child tax credit, which has paid up to $300 per month per child since July, but expires at the end of this year under the current law.
Build Back Better also would expand Medicare to cover vision, hearing and dental care; expand Medicaid to cover working poor people in Republican states that refused to cover the poor under the Affordable Care Act; and allow Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs, over the dead bodies of pharmaceutical lobbyists.
There’s also money for affordable housing, tax credits for electric vehicles and other climate incentives to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy, which will have a hard time surviving the objections of coal magnate Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), whose vote is critical to the passage in a 50-50 Senate, .
Those are pretty popular features, so Republicans are stuck with complaining about the overall cost of the bill, which started at $6 trillion over 10 years in the original draft proposed by Senate Budget Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and was pared to $3.5 trillion in Biden’s first compromise, but Manchin says $1.5 trillion is about as much as he can support.
Progressives should continue to insist on as many of their priorities as they can get past Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), who mainly has objected to raising taxes on wealthy people and corporations to pay for the bill, even though she voted against those tax cuts when Trump got them through Congress in 2017.
Once Build Back Better is signed into law, Dems can run for re-election in 2022 on the recovery that already has added 4.5 milion jobs since Biden took office, and give voters the choice of keeping those benefits under a Democratic Congress, and extending them if they can add a few more Democratic senators. Or voters can let Republicans repeal those benefits, as they surely would, if they get back in control. R’s have little else to run on, except fascism and mask resentment. — JMC
From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2021
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