Today, Explained - Remember the insurrection?

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

Some would rather forget. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. Remember the insurrection on the United States Capitol building? There are a whole lot of politicians in Washington who would rather forget. Andrew Prokop has been covering the story for Vox. So shortly after the Capitol was stormed on January 6th of this year, an idea took hold about what needed to be done. And this idea was mainly pushed by moderate Republicans at first. The idea was that there needed to be a commission, a bipartisan commission, established by Congress to look into what went wrong and how to prevent something like it from happening again. So naturally, this bipartisan idea is now completely mired in partisan infighting.

So most interestingly, this was originally proposed by moderate Republicans? Yes. So Representative John Katko of New York. It was not only an attack on this institution, but an attack on our law enforcement brethren who defend us every day. And Representative Rodney Davis of Illinois. This isn't just about one party or the other. We've got to we've got to bring everybody together to find out why decisions were made and frankly, why decisions weren't made leading up to the six. They're both Republicans. And, you know, in the days after that chaotic event happened, Republicans were really on the defensive and not all of them ended up voting to impeach Trump, but they felt pressure to support something like they recognized that what happened was horrible and unacceptable and that they needed to explain that they're doing something. The American people in the Capitol Police deserve answers and action as soon as possible to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.

So this is when the idea of this bipartisan commission took hold. And it is explicitly and directly modeled after the 9-11 commission, which was established by Congress after the September 11th, 2001 attacks and has this sterling reputation now as the gold standard of members of both parties working together to overcome partisanship and to do the right thing for the country. The real story is more complicated, but that's the myth. And that's what these moderate Republicans were nodding to. What would this commission, be it modeled after the 9-11 commission

or otherwise, look like? What was the initial proposition? In the bill that has actually been passed by the House at this point, it calls for a commission of 10 members. It'll have a 50-50 split of Democrats and Republicans with subpoena powers requiring cooperation from both sides.

And they would be tasked with examining things like the preparedness and the day of response of the Capitol police, of the rest of government. We need a dedicated bipartisan commission to look at the whole picture. But also of the root causes of contributing factors of why the storming of the Capitol did take place. And that's where the controversy comes in. So if this commission was just going to be limited to, did the Capitol Police do a good job or did they drop the ball? I think that's something that Republicans could get on board with. But, of course, when it comes to anything touching on the behavior of one former president, Donald J. Trump, things get a little more dicey in Republican land.

Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. Because when you look at the root causes or contributing factors to why these hundreds of people decided to storm the Capitol on January 6th, the reason is pretty obvious. We're going to walk down to the Capitol and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. There are other aspects of this commission's mission that could also reflect very poorly on Trump. Specifically, it would surely dig into the federal government's decision making and any role that Trump himself had in organizing the

response on January 6th itself. And it could theoretically surface some rather unflattering things. There have already been anonymously sourced reports in the press that when minority When minority leader Kevin McCarthy called Trump to ask him for help at stopping the chaos, Trump responded, quote, Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are. To which McCarthy responded, Who the F do you think you're talking to? CNN confirmed this exchange, Wolf, with Republican Congresswoman Jamie Herrera Butler of Washington. That's the sort of stuff that the commission could surface, could more thoroughly document, and could cause new rounds of controversy. Let's just take Kevin McCarthy here as an example, House minority leader for the GOP. You just mentioned the president called him and said, like, tough luck. How does he feel about this commission? Back when the second impeachment was taking place in January and February of this year, it was common for members of Congress like Kevin McCarthy to voice support for the commission as an alternative to

impeachment. Most Americans want neither inaction nor retribution. They want durable, bipartisan justice. That path is still available, but is not the path we are on today. And so what happened after that was that McCarthy deputized a moderate Republican, John Katko of New York, to negotiate with Democrats on the parameters of this commission. And Democrats actually made a lot of compromises. They gave McCarthy almost everything that Republicans had been asking for. The commission would be evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans rather than giving Democrats who have a House majority the majority on the commission. The commission would not be

able to issue any subpoenas without some Republicans signing on to it. That is, it couldn't be just turned into a partisan subpoena weapon by the Democratic commissioners. And yet, once these concessions were made, McCarthy decided that he would oppose such a commission anyway. You've got two committees in the Senate already doing their investigation. I believe in two weeks, they'll already have their report back, even though Pelosi wasted all this time. And then you've got the Justice Department, rightfully does a much better job than we could ever do, arrested already 445 people. I just think a Pelosi commission is a lot of politics. It's this afterlife of Trump and the big lie that continues to roil the Republican

Party that resulted in Liz Cheney being purged from leadership. It is simply not acceptable within mainstream Republican circles these days to do things that reflect poorly on Donald Trump. So this culminates last week in a vote in the House of Representatives for this commission. The GOP minority leader essentially tries to scuttle it, but it squeaks through. It squeaks through, but it was always going to pass because Democrats have a majority in the House and they can pass whatever they want. So the Democrats were unified behind this. What was interesting is that 35 House Republicans voted for it as well.

You know, that's still the vast majority of House Republicans voted for it as well. You know, that's still the vast majority of House Republicans voted against it. But it showed that some House Republicans were feeling a bit of pressure on this issue. And they didn't think that continuing to close ranks and defend everything that Donald Trump did after the 2020 election would be a good look for them when they run for their own reelections next year. So it did pass, but now it's in the Senate where there is the problem of the Senate filibuster. So unlike in the House, Senate Democrats cannot pass whatever they want with just a majority. They need 60 votes to get a bill past the filibuster,

and they have 50 Democrats, which means they need 10 of the 50 Senate Republicans. What are the chances of that? The chances currently look quite grim. Even moderates like Susan Collins of Maine are saying they oppose the commission in its current form. Now, that could make you think, oh, well, they're open to negotiation. They could reach some sort of deal. But other Republicans have taken a stronger line. Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, who was a very surprising vote to convict Trump when the impeachment trial went to the Senate in February. He said that there's no version of this commission that he could support because he thinks it is just a political

ploy by Democrats to make Republicans look bad. And Mitch McConnell has basically said the same thing. It's not at all clear what new facts or additional investigation yet another commission could actually lay on top of existing efforts by law enforcement and Congress. What is clear is that House Democrats have handled this proposal in partisan bad faith going right back to the beginning. McConnell's number two in the Senate, John Thune of South Dakota, gave probably the clearest confirmation that this is what's going on here. He said, anything that gets us rehashing the 2020 election, I think, is a day lost on being able to draw contrast between us and the Democrats' very radical left-wing agenda. So they want to move on. They want to

focus on how the Democrats are bad. They don't want to talk about bad things that Donald Trump did. It is at once surprising and not at all surprising that there is now political gamesmanship over an investigation into an attack on the very building where all this political gainsmanship is taking place. Are Republicans feeling any pressure to work with Democrats from, I don't know, Capitol Police, who were attacked on January 6th, protecting the very lawmakers who are now saying there's no point in having this commission? Interestingly, the Capitol Police organization themselves is staying out of this. There was a letter circulated by certain members of the Capitol Police that got some attention saying that they needed a commission and they supported it.

How could Republicans be blocking it? But the official organization has not taken a position. As to, you know, how could Republicans defend an attack on democracy? We've been pretty much seeing this play out since the 2016 election. When the Russian government hacked emails belonging to Democrats and arranged their leaking, and then the Republican Party sort of lined up against investigations about whether Donald Trump had any role in this and whether this was an attempt to interfere with the election result. And we saw it again in the advance of the 2020 election when Rudy Giuliani went looking for dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine and President Trump began pressuring the president of Ukraine to come up with some dirt on Biden. That led to Trump's first impeachment and the Republican Party closed ranks again

on this effort to interfere with the 2020 election and they acquitted Trump. More with Andrew in a minute. Thank you. card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, r-a-m-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC.

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Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to be modeled on the 9-11 commission. Could you just remind us a little bit about how that commission went? So after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, obviously it was a shocking, traumatic moment for the United States.

And there was a big drive to find out what exactly happened and what went wrong. What eventually Congress came up with was the 9-11 Commission. It would be 10 commissioners, five Republicans and five Democrats. A lot of them were retired politicians. So the idea was that they would be freer to fully devote themselves to a mission of seeking the facts and coming up with, you know, a shared kind of national narrative about what happened

and fully answering people's lingering questions. And I remember the upshot of that was an actual report that was published and sold in bookstores all across the country, right? Maybe across the world. I remember seeing it in bookstores. I think I own it. Yes, it was a surprising bestseller, even though it was offered for free on the internet. And it was written very compellingly. It was almost like a novel, not in the traditional confusing jargon of committee reports. I do think, though, that rose-colored glasses are applied with how we remember this commission as this sterling moment of bipartisanship, because 9-11 had the potential to reflect very badly on the recent presidents of both parties.

Bill Clinton was in office throughout the 1990s when Osama bin Laden was putting al-Qaeda together and getting entrenched in Afghanistan. And then George W. Bush was in charge for the eight months or so before 9-11 happened. So, you know, depending on what such a commission turned up, it could have had really serious political consequences for both parties. Really what happened is that both commissioners ended up kind of making sure their own party wouldn't look that bad. I want to thank these two gentlemen for serving their country so well and so admirably. They've done a really good job of learning about our country, learning about what went wrong prior to September the 11th, and making very solid, sound recommendations about how to move forward. With George W. Bush's election looming, with the Clintons huge in Democratic politics and Hillary Clinton rumored to be thinking about running for president. No one of these commissioners was going to agree to something that was really, really tough on either Clinton or Bush.

Does that mean that the 9-11 commission was somewhat inaccurate in its final published form. It was definitely incomplete. And it was incomplete in part because information was withheld from them by the Bush administration. But the real success of the 9-11 Commission report was PR, basically. I'm here with the co-chairs of the 9-11 Commission, Thomas Kaine, the former governor of New Jersey, a moderate Republican, and Lee Hamilton, Democrat from Indiana. They kind of joined hands and agreed to sell the final product as a bipartisan success. The policymakers were very wary of us. They were wary because they knew we'd be looking back. We'd be trying to identify mistakes.

We would be looking at how well they performed in the Clinton administration and then in the Bush administration the first eight months. So they would always do media appearances together. They had some gravitas. They performed in the Clinton administration and then in the Bush administration the first eight months. So they would always do media appearances together. They had some gravitas. narrative about what happened, where the blame really fell on the intelligence agencies and various mishaps that happened there. And that is part of the story, but it's not the whole story either. So just thinking about how that commission went in comparison to this one, there were some fears of blowback for the administration. There were some partisan issues. There was inaccuracies or at the very least, an incomplete final version, but it still meant something. It still resulted in a greater understanding of the event.

Why 20 years later, is it an impossibility to achieve something like this? If Democrats could achieve something like the 9-11 Commission report for January 6th, I think they would be thrilled because, you know, despite its shortcomings, it did have this shared factual understanding and national narrative. And I think there are a few reasons why the same thing is not in the cards today. First of all, there's the issue of mutually assured destruction. That was the case for political blame for 9-11. Both parties had a big chance of looking bad in that report

unless they could manage to get together and be bipartisan. When it comes to January 6th, there's really only one party that has a chance of looking bad, and it's the Republican Party. And everyone involved in this knows that. The second lesson, I think, is that Tom Kane and Lee Hamilton, they really sold a bipartisan product because they wanted to sell a bipartisan product. But for the January 6th commission, the Republican commissioners would be appointed by McCarthy and McConnell, who are both opposed to the very idea of such a commission. So they are highly likely to appoint commissioners who will not want to produce a bipartisan product, who will want to defend their own party as much as possible. And there will inevitably be even more conflicts

and gridlock than there was in the 9-11 commission. Because again, this is really an issue that hurts the Republican Party by far the most, far more than the Democratic Party. Can the Democrats just go it alone and do this themselves? They absolutely can, but they wouldn't be able to do the 9-11 commission themselves when it comes to how that commission was viewed by the press and the public. So when it comes to the actual formal powers of a commission like this, there's nothing special about a bipartisan commission. They would have the same powers as any ordinary congressional committee. They can request witness testimony and documents

voluntarily, or they can issue subpoenas to try to get sworn testimony and documents when people are a little more recalcitrant. Any congressional committee can do this. The House especially, the Democrats have majorities on every committee, so they can do this with their votes alone. Another possibility is after the Benghazi attacks of 2012. We are coming on the air because we have just learned that the U.S. ambassador to Libya has been killed. It happened overnight when angry militants stormed the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. They fired shots, set the building on fire. Almost a dozen Americans were inside being guarded by Libyan security.

At least one other American died, most likely of smoke inhalation. House Republicans created a special select committee that was appointed just for this issue. Get to the bottom, supposedly, of what happened in Benghazi. But what people are looking for from this commission is the ability to shape a national narrative, to find a shared factual universe. And that's not what we got with Benghazi, to be clear, right? Yes, the Benghazi investigations by Republicans were viewed as highly partisan. So it definitely did not succeed in creating a shared national narrative. It did have another success, though, which is that the Benghazi committee ended up turning up the fact that Hillary Clinton had not used a government email account and had only used her personal email for all which was allowed by the State Department, because I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails

instead of two. And that started the snowball rolling that eventually led Hillary Clinton to be put under FBI investigation and the controversy over her emails that loomed over 2016 and may have ensured Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election that year. Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she's untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened had we not thought and made that happen. I agree. That's something good. I give you credit for that.

So a really motivated dirt digging committee can find stuff that hurts the other party. When it comes to common ground, bipartisanship, feel good, kumbaya type stuff, I don't think that's what would come out of a committee like this. But if Democrats want to really go after the truth here with the understanding that the truth will make Republicans look bad, they can certainly vigorously pursue that if they want to.

I think the fantasy that if Trump voters only had the right information, that his support would plummet, that's been disproven again and again over the past several years. But I do still think that it is valuable to find facts and get to the bottom of things, you know, in and of themselves. It might not change anything, but for history, if for nothing else, it is useful to know as much as we can about this effort to prevent the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election from being ratified and moving forward.

Madam Speaker, let me be clear. Last week's violent attack on the Capitol was undemocratic, un-American, and criminal. The president bears responsibility for Wednesday's attack on Congress by mob rioters. The mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people. President's language and rhetoric often goes too far. I think yesterday in particular, the president's language and rhetoric crossed a line and it was reckless. When it comes to accountability, the president needs to understand that his actions were

the problem, not the solution. Which is why I think a fact-finding commission and a censure resolution would be prudent. Thank you.