House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is seeking to create a hand-picked committee to pursue yet another investigation of the January 6 Capitol riot after Republicans blocked her effort to set up and independent commission to carry out the probe.
Pelosi said that since there was no chance of establishing the independent inquiry, she instead will form a new panel of lawmakers tasked with investigating the causal factors which led a mob of Trump supporters to attack the Capitol and seek preventative measures for the future.
She called January 6 “a day of darkness,” and dramatically stated that the “temple of democracy was attacked.”
Multiple Senate and House committees have already probed the security and intelligence failures that allowed the January 6 mob to breach the Capitol building, which interrupted the Congressional certification of the results of the Electoral College for the 2020 presidential election.
House Democrats then attempted to impeach Trump claiming that he incited the mob, but he was acquitted of such charges by the Senate after he had left office.
The House passed a bill that would create a bipartisan, independent commission to investigate the riot, but the bill died in Senate, failing to garner the necessary votes. The bill was modeled on a similar panel that investigated the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks. The probe was vocally opposed by Senate Leader Mitch McConnel and Trump himself, calling on Republicans to block it.
While if that panel had passed it would have been evenly split between appointees of both political parties, a panel selected by the House would certainly have a strong Democratic majority placed in charge.
Representative Liz Cheney, who’s actions against the GOP have been well attested and who was one of Trump’s most outspoken critics insisted that a full investigation should be conducted.
She told reporters that the bipartisan commission should have passed, but since it failed, now something else would have to take it’s place. She stressed the importance of the investigation on the grounds that the attack was the worst incident since 1814 regarding the Capitol.
McConnel and other GOP officials accuse the Democrats of seeking a political weapon for use in next year’s campaigns by focusing on Trump as the key factor in the riots.
Author: Iris Summers
