Josh Marshall: No Lucy Football with the Jan 6 Commission

[Nevilledog]

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Tweet text:
Josh Marshall
@joshtpm
"The core problem is that the GOP continues to embrace the insurrection or deny it ever happened. As long as this is the case any investigation cannot help but be 'partisan' inasmuch as one party supports the insurrection and the other does not."

No Lucy Football with the Jan 6 Commission
No Lucy Football with the Jan 6 Commission
talkingpointsmemo.com

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/no-lucy-football-with-the-jan-6-commission

I’ve mentioned a number of times that to avoid the errors of the Obama years Democrats must make a firm commitment not to engage with bad faith arguments or bad faith actors. “This to me is the greatest negative lesson of the Obama era: the willing engagement of good faith with bad faith in which bad faith is, by definition, always the winner.” This necessity has cropped up again with Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plan to create a commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection against the US capitol.

Congressional Republicans are doing everything they can to scuttle the idea. They’re opposing Pelosi’s plan to give Democrats a 7-4 majority on the panel (that’s not an unreasonable argument in the abstract) and more tellingly insisting that they can only support the idea if it also looks at violence during the summer protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. In other words, the Republican response is to whatabout the insurrection at the Capitol and the attempt to overturn the 2020 election by force. The latest gambit comes from Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who says he could agree to the whataboutist model – Capitol insurrection but also antifa and everything that happened last summer – or a much narrower commission focused solely on Capitol security procedures.

What is notable is how this resistance is being portrayed by DC insider publications. Politico says that Pelosi’s effort to “create a broad bipartisan review of the Jan. 6 insurrection is in peril” because of McConnell’s opposition and later that McConnell’s new terms “underscore the steep challenge Democrats face if they hope to create the spirit of the 9/11 Commission, a bipartisan review of the 2001 terrorist attacks that’s considered a model for intensive after-action reviews of nationally significant moments.”

As I said, you simply can’t engage bad faith arguments because the bad faith actors are definitionally the victors. Always. This is no different from the recidivist Lucy-footballing Republicans did through the Obama years and their current insistence that the only way to achieve national unity – as per President Biden’s pledge – is to grant Republicans a veto over Democratic policy making when Democrats control the White House and Congress.

*snip*

[HUAJIAO]

1. McConnell is just a 2 bit gangster.

He's not even a member of the House.. What business is it of his? Take a hike.

[blueinredohio]

2. Democrats shouldn't worry about bi partisanship.

Do what you have to do and hold their feet to the fire.

[Mr.Bill]

3. Exactly.

Get rid of the four republicans on the commission. Elections have consequences, Mitch.

[crickets]

4. +1