The House Jan. 6 committee’s message is simple:
Former President Donald Trump sought to reverse his 2020 election defeat by an array of improper acts, including inciting a violent invasion of the Capitol and installing Justice Department officials who’d do his bidding.
The politics of the proceedings now in their second week are more complicated.
Even Democrats who fully support their necessity and their message don’t expect them to limit their party’s likely losses in November’s midterm elections.
At best, they hope to remind some Democrats, who probably comprise most viewers, why they so opposed Trump and provide a voting rationale for those party adherents who are less than enthused by President Joe Biden.
As for Republicans, it’s unlikely the proceedings will make much of a dent among the millions of fervent Trump supporters who reject any effort to blame him for the Jan. 6 violence and accept the Republican National Committee’s characterization as “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
But polls show the GOP is divided between all-out Trump backers and those who wish the former president would stop claiming the 2020 election was rigged and leave the party’s 2024 field to other Republicans of similar ideology.
A recent NBC News poll showed that, by about 2-to-1, more Republicans consider themselves followers of the party than of Trump, a reversal of pre-2020 election attitudes. An ABC News-Washington Post poll last month showed that, while three of every five Republicans said the GOP should follow his leadership, one of every three said it should not.
That suggests there may be millions of Republicans who are at least open to a convincing presentation of his responsibility for fomenting the Jan. 6 demonstrations – and failing to heed pleas to stop them. Even if they haven’t been watching, it may be hard for them to escape news reports of the proceedings.
Meanwhile, though Democrats comprise a majority of the House panel, they made the politically wise decision to start by having their most prominent GOP member, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, detail the case against Trump. The panel then presented confirming testimony from the former president’s own appointees, including former Attorney General Bill Barr and Trump’s daughter Ivanka, and other Republicans.
Barr, who broke with Trump over his refusal to accept the 2020 outcome, testified that Trump knew he lost the election despite his continual false contentions that it was marked by widespread fraud. “I respect Attorney General Barr,” Ivanka Trump told the panel. “So I accepted what he was saying.”
The facts are so devastating to Trump’s case that Republican critics have been reduced to condemning procedural and political aspects of the sessions — such as the decision to hold some of them in prime viewing time — rather than their substance.
"Most committees in Congress start in the morning,” said New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, accusing the panel of “trying to take back the narrative to try and target patriotic Trump supporters across the country."
Republicans also complained about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision last year to reject GOP efforts to add two outspoken Trump supporters, Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, to the panel. In taking what she acknowledged was an “unprecedented decision,” Pelosi said their criticisms of the panel would impact “the integrity of the investigation.” She accepted three other Republicans, but they refused then to serve.
While Democrats acknowledged Pelosi’s action had some political cost, the House Republican leadership made a far more serious political miscalculation in deciding to block creation of a truly bipartisan panel.
House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, under pressure from Trump to oppose any Jan. 6 probe, pulled the props out from under Rep. John Katko, the GOP House member he had designated to negotiate the terms. The upstate New York Republican had reached an agreement with Democrats for a bipartisan panel on which the two parties would have shared key powers like the authority to subpoena witnesses.
A panel on which Republicans exercised some control might have been far less clear-cut – and far more contentious. Without that, the hearings are presenting the panel’s conclusions without dissent in a way designed to persuade anyone without a clear prior view of what happened that day.
Republicans have also questioned the legislative purpose. But many important congressional hearings have been undertaken primarily to educate the public, like Sen. J.W. Fulbright’s mid-1960s inquiry into the U.S. policy in Vietnam, or to uncover wrongdoing, like the Senate Watergate committee’s probe.
In fact, these current hearings have both a legislative and an educational purpose.
The legislative purpose is to make the case for strengthening existing law on congressional counting of electoral votes to ensure the process can’t be manipulated as Trump sought to do.
The educational purpose is to bolster the nation’s democratic system by portraying the events of Jan. 6 as part of a broad conspiracy by Trump to overturn the legitimate decision of the American people. Their relevance is underscored by the continuing efforts of Trump’s allies to change procedures and personnel in many states’ election machinery to make possible in 2024 what they failed to achieve in 2020.
The panel clearly hopes that, the more the American people understand what Trump did and the extent of illegality involved, the less likely they will be to sanction a repeat attempt in 2024.
