This is true. Those rioters wanted to block Congress from finalizing the electoral vote totals from the 2020 election, fueled by incorrect claims that those vote totals were inflated through rampant fraud and illegal voting. Trump, of course, actively promoted that false idea in service to his flailing effort to retain power. They were in lockstep from Nov. 3 until the Capitol was cleared: What Trump wanted is what they wanted.
What happened next is one of the more remarkable aspects of that day. After the Capitol was cleared, with detritus from the violence still littering the building and the grounds, with law enforcement officers still receiving medical treatment, the majority of Republicans serving in the House voted in favor of what Trump wanted, too.
Despite the fact that there was no evidence of significant fraudulent voting and despite the fact that months of failing to confront Trump’s claims helped till the soil for the day’s violence, most Republican legislators decided it was more politically feasible to stand with Trump and the rioters than to endorse the cast ballots of American voters.
That was manifested again one week later as the House voted to impeach Trump for his role in encouraging the attack, a vote that largely, though not entirely, fell on partisan lines. Ten Republicans, including Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), voted to hold Trump accountable. The rest of the Republicans did what they had done on Jan. 6, echoing a shared argument that aligned them with the former president, his base and conservative media. Since Nov. 3, the path of least resistance for the party has been to agree with Trump’s point of view at whatever volume.
That also meant rejecting a bipartisan commission aimed at probing the causes of the riot. So the House’s Democratic majority went ahead and created a commission anyway, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) naming seven members, including Cheney. On Monday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) offered up his own slate of five candidates for consideration — three of whom voted to block the election results on Jan. 6.
Again, this is not an insignificant bit of context. Reps. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) — the senior Republican member, should Pelosi accede to McCarthy’s suggestions — Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Troy E. Nehls (R-Tex.) all chose to follow the violence at the Capitol by publicly siding with the rioters’ desired outcome. Were this a criminal trial, it’s hard to see how these three would be allowed to sit on a jury evaluating the guilt of the rioters — but this is politics.
More concerning is that they have also echoed Trump’s false claims about election fraud, incontrovertibly the central cause of the day’s violence. Jordan both explicitly claimed Trump won the election and toed the more palatable people-are-asking-good-questions line that became a common GOP compromise between Trump’s claims and reality. Banks in December sent a survey to constituents claiming there were questions about the “legality of some votes cast in the 2020 election” and asking whether he should oppose the certification of electoral votes on Jan. 6. He also supported a flawed lawsuit filed by Texas’s attorney general aimed at throwing out the votes in several states. Nehls, for his part, supported Trump’s efforts to undercut confidence in the vote before the election and on Jan. 5 announced he would object to the electoral-vote count, to “fight … for election integrity.”
Again, this is the majority of the group that McCarthy selected to investigate the causes of a riot driven by rhetoric they had echoed.
Banks left little doubt where he stands on the utility of the commission, releasing a statement decrying it as existing “solely to malign conservatives and to justify the Left’s authoritarian agenda.” Jordan has made similar comments. Should Pelosi reject their nominations, it’s easy to predict the rhetorical pivot that would result.
What McCarthy’s nominations reinforce, though, is how much the institutional Republican Party overlaps with the conspiratorial one. We aren’t surprised by this, given five years of the GOP both being forced and choosing to stand with Trump as he made hundreds of false claims. But that there’s little effort from McCarthy to engage with an investigation of the causes of the riot and the failures that allowed it to happen highlights the extent to which the party sees more political value in Trump’s presentation of the world than reality’s.
Most Republicans believe the election was stolen through the introduction of millions of illegal votes, a false claim that also falls apart upon any serious consideration of what it would entail. But since Nov. 3, even as it became more clear that Trump would no longer serve as president, the Republican Party has been in thrall to supporting this idea instead of standing in unity against it. There is political utility in supporting the idea and no real resistance that follows from agreeing with Trump.
So to probe the Jan. 6 riot, McCarthy puts forward people who were politically sympathetic to its desired outcome. In the same sense that Trump meant, what the rioters wanted is what Banks, Jordan and Nehls wanted, too.
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