Nancy Pelosi Calls BS
The pundit class clutches its pearls
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Washington is shocked
because Nancy Pelosi decided yesterday that making a farce of an attempted
insurrection was not normal.
Like much of the
numbed political establishment, Kevin McCarthy had assumed that Pelosi would
simply go along with his decision to try to beclown the January 6 committee.
Three of his five appointees had voted to overturn electoral votes from states
won by Joe Biden.
That, in itself ought to
have been disqualifying, but the appointment of Jim Jordan and Jim Banks was
starkly unsubtle. Jordan is a one-man clown car, whose only role on the
committee would have been to throw merde into the gears and
provide Fox News with soundbites.
But it was actually
worse than that.
Back in December,
Jordan had fully embraced Trump’s Big Lie, saying that Trump should refuse to
concede the election. There was, he told CNN, “No way, no way, no way” that Trump should concede. “We should
still try to figure out exactly what took place here. And as I said, that
includes, I think, debates on the House floor — potentially on Jan. 6.”
As the New York Times reports: “Later that month, he participated in a meeting at the White House, where Republican lawmakers discussed plans
with Mr. Trump’s team to use the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 to
challenge the election outcome.”
In other words,
McCarthy — who is himself a potential material witness — named another material
witness (and potential co-conspirator) to the panel investigating the attack on
the Capitol.
As for Banks, our
colleague Tim Miller wrote:
He is an election
truther who polled his constituents on whether or not he
should cancel the votes of citizens from other states. . . . Banks’s communications director
is Buckley Carlson, son of Tucker, ensuring that the White Power Hour will have a
direct line to leaks from the committee.
From the beginning,
Banks made it clear that he intended to derail the committee’s work. He accused
Democrats of creating it to “malign conservatives.”
“I will not allow this
committee to be turned into a forum for condemning millions of Americans
because of their political beliefs,” he declared.
Banks also pledged an
aggressive campaign of distraction and whataboutism. “If Democrats were serious
about investigating political violence,” Banks declared, “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.”
Under the Old Rules,
Pelosi was expected to go along with all of this.
Conventional wisdom
assumed Pelosi would accept the New Normal in which the minority party was
openly declaring its intention to memory-hole and retcon an attack on Congress
itself. The smart set figured she would go along with the GOP’s decision to
turn the probe into a clickbaity shitshow.
On Wednesday, Pelosi
decided to hell with that.
“With respect for the
integrity of the investigation, with an insistence on the truth and with
concern about statements made and actions taken by these Members, I must reject
the recommendations of Representatives Banks and Jordan to the Select
Committee,” Pelosi said in her statement.
“The unprecedented
nature of January 6th,” she said, “demands this unprecedented decision.”
In other words:
She drew a red line
because an act of sedition requires the drawing of red lines.
The result was a
cascade of faux outrage.
McCarthy sulked and
DC’s pundit class collectively clutched its pearls. “Nancy Pelosi just doomed the
already tiny chances of the 1/6 committee actually mattering,” opined Chris Cillizza. “Should have left well enough alone,”
former Ohio Governor John Kasich insisted on CNN. Others insisted that it was a
gift to McCarthy,
But this requires us
to accept the idea that it is perfectly normal to name members who, as Tim
Miller puts it, “literally supported a MAGA coup” as a precondition of
“bipartisanship.”
Of course, the
committee is already bipartisan, both literally and seriously. (Reminder: the
GOP killed an actual independent, non-partisan commission.)
Not at all
surprisingly, it was left to Liz Cheney to provide the reality check about
Pelosi’s decision. “This investigation must go forward,” she said. “The idea
that anybody would be playing politics with an attack on the United States
Capitol is despicable and is disgraceful.”
The
Republican Accountability Project @AccountableGOP
Cheney noted that
Pelosi had rejected two appointees.
One who may be a
material witness to events that led to that day . . . the other who disqualified
himself by his comments over the last 24 hours demonstrating he's not taking
this seriously
And then she trained
her fire on McCarthy:
The rhetoric we have heard from the minority leader is
disingenuous . . . at every opportunity, the minority leader has attempted to
prevent the American people from understanding what happened.
I think that any
person who would be third in line to the presidency must demonstrate a
commitment to the Constitution and a commitment to the rule of law and Minority
Leader McCarthy has not done that.
Exit take: Pelosi and
Cheney reminded us yesterday that we don’t have to eat the shit sandwiches — or
pretend that there is anything normal about any of this.