Opinion: Kevin McCarthy’s top pick for the Jan. 6 panel is already trying to sabotage it
This is thrust upon us by the news of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) choices for the committee to investigate the insurrection. One is Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), who has already signaled his intent to sabotage the proceedings.
Banks released this extraordinary statement:
If Democrats were serious about investigating political violence, this committee would be studying not only the January 6 riot at the Capitol, but also the hundreds of violent political riots last summer when many more innocent Americans and law-enforcement officers were attacked.
Oozing with phony victimization, Banks added that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) created the committee “solely to malign conservatives.”
Once you’re done weeping for the plight of these “maligned” conservatives, please note this: The select committee comes after an extensive effort by Democrats to create a bipartisan commission with a process that was extraordinarily fair to Republicans.
Guess what: Banks voted against the bipartisan commission. So did three of McCarthy’s other picks for the new committee: Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), and Troy E. Nehls (R-Tex.).
Only one of McCarthy’s new picks — Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) — voted for the bipartisan panel. And three — Banks, Jordan and Nehls — voted to object to the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral votes on the day of the riot.
Banks appears to be McCarthy’s most important choice. As Politico reports, McCarthy sees this as a way to elevate Banks up the leadership ladder.
It is remarkable and telling that someone being groomed for higher GOP glory has unabashedly declared that the insurrection should not be the primary focus of the committee’s investigation. Remember, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) was elevated in large part due to her public role in elevating the very lies about Donald Trump’s 2020 loss that inspired Jan. 6.
Banks’s declaration that the panel should look at leftist violence — which he casts as a more serious threat than what we saw on Jan. 6 — is just a continuation of the game Republicans have played for six months now.
The ugly GOP game
Republicans have insisted any accounting must be broadened this way to obscure public understanding of some large and lethal truths: Right-wing radicalization is far and away the primary threat to democratic stability in this country, and Republicans themselves have actively fed and exploited that radicalization, heavily implicating them in what happened.
McCarthy’s choice of Davis and Armstrong suggests how he could have handled this. All five picks could have been relatively public-spirited, as those two Republicans are, at least in the context of today’s GOP.
But the appointment of two people whose obvious role is sabotage — like Banks, Jordan played a big role in sowing doubts about 2020 — shows that McCarthy must do all he can to muddy up a full accounting.
Historian Kevin Kruse draws a comparison with the Kerner Commission, which was created by President Lyndon B. Johnson to study the urban riots of the 1960s. Republicans who served on it, Kruse told me, “were ones who believed in its mission, who sincerely wanted to get to the root causes of urban unrest.”
The commission, Kruse continued, did not include Republicans who saw the urban unrest as a tool to continue inciting “white backlash” rather than finding “solutions” that would address the problems underlying the unrest and, in so doing, potentially unite the country.
Appointing people such as Banks and Jordan to the Jan. 6 committee, Kruse told me, is akin to “appointing Strom Thurmond to the Kerner Commission.”
Thurmond, a segregationist Dixiecrat, had by then switched to the GOP. Just as segregationists disdained the Kerner Commission’s fundamental goals, Kruse said, so do Banks and Jordan “have contempt for the Jan. 6 inquiry.”
Just say no to GOP bad faith
At bottom, Republicans cannot allow Jan. 6 to become anchored in our collective understanding as a uniquely revelatory event that is worthy of an exceptional level of serious examination precisely because the stability of the country demands it.
They cannot allow Jan. 6 to be understood for what it truly revealed: the ongoing presence of a broader movement, one aligned with Trump and a non-trivial faction of the GOP, one that’s anti-democratic to its core. It’s a movement that is only metastasizing and is even benefiting from a cadre of intellectuals who are developing an ugly and disconcerting ideological foundation for it, as Laura Field details.
It’s a movement that sees despised electoral outcomes as subject to nullification through highly dubious and potentially illegal means, including mob intimidation and violence.
But this level of bad faith about a matter involving nothing less than the durability of our political order requires a response: Democrats must say no to it. And the media has a role here, too. As Brian Beutler notes, this sort of GOP “bad acting” can no longer be covered as a “given.”
Instead, the basic facts of the situation — like McCarthy’s choice of Banks and Jordan — should be unflinchingly rendered as what they truly are: central to a broader campaign to cover up an effort to overturn our political order, a coverup saturated in a level of venality, bad faith and contempt for the public interest that has no place in a functioning democracy.
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