Lawmakers reach deal on bipartisan commission to investigate Jan. 6
Source: Axios
House negotiators have reached an agreement on the parameters of a 9/11-style commission to investigate the "facts and circumstances" surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the House Homeland Security Committee announced Friday.
Why it matters: The formation of a bipartisan Jan. 6 commission had been delayed for months, after some Republicans insisted that the scope of the investigation be expanded to include violence by far-left protesters last summer.
Details, according to the House Homeland Security Committee:
Legislation will establish a 10-person bipartisan commission. Five commissioners, including the chair, will be appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. The other five, including the vice chair, will be appointed by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. "The commission will be charged with studying the facts and circumstances of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol as well as the influencing factors that may have provoked the attack on our democracy," according to the committee. "Commissioners must have significant expertise in the areas of law enforcement, civil rights, civil liberties, privacy, intelligence and cybersecurity. Current government officers or employees are prohibited from appointment." The commission will be granted authority to issue subpoenas, which will require agreement between the chair and the vice chair, or a vote by a majority of members. The commission will be required to issue a final report with findings and recommendations to "prevent future attacks on our democratic institutions" by Dec. 31, 2021.
Read more: https://www.axios.com/january-6-commission-deal-6b1b41dd-b0c6-406d-824c-645a842c7b68.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
There is no "prosecutorial" function associated with this. 
I.e., this is not like the "Mueller Investigation".
And who do you think would be on the "select Committee". It certainly wouldn't be all "one party". The example of the Senate's "Ervin Committee" was 4 (D) and 3 (R) (most likely reflecting the Senate's make up at the time (56 (D), 42 (R), 2 "other" )
Both the House and Senate have been holding hearings regarding January 6 (chaired by Democrats) continually since the insurrection happened. You have to be a CSPAN junky to catch them. CSPAN 3 often televises these hearings live if either or both chambers are in session and using up their respective CSPAN and CSPAN2 channels.
And this is NOT 1972 where the general public would tolerate interruption of the major broadcast networks. Watergate would be the equivalent of the now two-Impeachments that occurred over the past 2 years or the "Special Prosecutor" type hearings like the "Mueller Investigation". But not something as innocuous as what is planned here and certainly not if it were a "Select Committee" if it didn't directly deal with a President's involvement.
And as a note, the 2nd impeachment WAS done as a direct result of what happened on January 6. The Article of Impeachment was -
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-resolution/24/text
"Commissions" are generally considered "boring" for most non-political followers but are basically "Lessons Learned" exercises to come up with ways to look at a problem and find ways to resolve it and/or to not let something impactful to the nation, happen again.
Hi BRDS:
As usual ( 
), we agree on most everything, particularly on how different the Rs are now vs during Watergate. However, there are a few specific points that I disagree, one pedantic, one kinda' relevant, and the last most relevant.
1) Howard Baker was not the Senate Minority or Majority Leader during Watergate. He only took on those roles on/after 1977, well after Nixon resigned and the criminal cases were over. Hugh Scott from PA was the R Minority Leader during Watergate (and probably a helluva' lot more forthright than the Turtle). In fact, I think it was Hugh Scott, along with Barry Goldwater and John Rhodes, who told Nixon in early August 1974 that most Rs had abandoned Nixon and that he would be impeached and convicted. Nixon resigned just a couple of days later. Of course, that would not happen today with our favorite insurrectionist party. But that is EXACTLY why you have something more than a toothless commission....you fight fire with fire.
2) Howard Baker and Minority Counsel Fred Thompson fed a lot of information directly to Nixon and his lawyers. They were not independent of Nixon by any means but actually aided him in the cover-up, probably unwittingly.
3) The battle today is for the hearts and minds of people. I do believe that, if trump and/or Congressional Rs were directly tied to the insurrection, there would be a massive loss of R votes. That's clearly why the Rs don't want a full blown investigation. Yes, we have the Department of Justice going after the foot-soldier insurrectionists, but a multi-prong attack (Congressional investigations, criminal investigations, and even civil cases) as to who or what was the real cause of the insurrection could expose the awful truth. That's the only way you crack conspiracies. It is most definitely not through part-time Commission members who do not have any real subpoena power. The Rs did us a lot of damage with a bare minority in the Senate in 2017-2019, and we should do the same.
And most importantly, since we control the DoJ and the US Attorneys, going after Congressional committee witnesses for contempt, perjury, and/or obstruction is now a real prospect. By contrast, that was NOT the case in 2017-2021 (and hasn't really been the case since January 2011, when we lost the House and Senate). This is first time in a decade we control the Congress and the USDoJ.
I know a LOT of Rs, not rising to level of MAGAts, who find what happened on January 6 repulsive. To the extent that trump or other R officials were directly involved, that would be devastating to these Rs, and they would either not vote or change their vote.
Getting the truth out is the best disinfectant and the best for democracy. And, yes, we CAN handle the truth! And, currently, we control all the levers for getting the truth out. It is a real sin not to use those.
MH
), we agree on most everything, particularly on how different the Rs are now vs during Watergate. However, there are a few specific points that I disagree, one pedantic, one kinda' relevant, and the last most relevant.
1) Howard Baker was not the Senate Minority or Majority Leader during Watergate. He only took on those roles on/after 1977, well after Nixon resigned and the criminal cases were over.
Howard Baker was an influential Senator at the time and ranking Member on that Committee, and yes he didn't take leadership over the GOP conference until later (the one at the time was one of the Senators from my state of PA), but he was an overarching voice on that Committee and for a direct comparison, was like a day and night opposite of someone like a Lindsey Graham when it came to "common sense".
I.e., back then, they were in essence the quintessential "annoying Republicans" as I call them. They were definitely "loyal" to their party and their own, and would battle for their stalwart principles. But they hadn't jumped on the crazy train like has happened now, and back then they at least had sense enough to finally realize that they needed to cut bait and quit while they were ahead (especially after they had already lost Spiro Agnew, another who had been right on the precipice of being impeached for his own issues).
That was for their party's self-preservation because they at least had "an agenda" that tied to their party's platform. At this point, the GOP not only threw out the previous platform but they neglected to replace it with anything that might have been a revision or update to one from the past. Their modus operandi essentially became "following wacky orders" depending on the whims of a social media blitz. And of course as a reminder, there was no "social media" back then to magnify the propaganda that was already swirling in the print and broadcast media.
One of the things I have posted a number of times before as one of the biggest causes of what we are seeing, is someone who is STILL there behind the scenes planning and scheming and instigating. And that is Newt Gingrich. I had posted excerpts from an "Atlantic" interview with him and it was basically there in black and white. I posted this OP a couple days after the insurrection - https://www.democraticunderground.com/100214854444 and I included that excerpt in a reply -
Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise. Now he’s reveling in his achievements.
Story by McKay Coppins
November 2018 Issue
Updated on October 17, 2018
[snip]
On June 24, 1978, Gingrich stood to address a gathering of College Republicans at a Holiday Inn near the Atlanta airport. It was a natural audience for him. At 35, he was more youthful-looking than the average congressional candidate, with fashionably robust sideburns and a cool-professor charisma that had made him one of the more popular faculty members at West Georgia College. But Gingrich had not come to deliver an academic lecture to the young activists before him—he had come to foment revolution.
“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he told the group. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.” For their party to succeed, Gingrich went on, the next generation of Republicans would have to learn to “raise hell,” to stop being so “nice,” to realize that politics was, above all, a cutthroat “war for power”—and to start acting like it.
The speech received little attention at the time. Gingrich was, after all, an obscure, untenured professor whose political experience consisted of two failed congressional bids. But when, a few months later, he was finally elected to the House of Representatives on his third try, he went to Washington a man obsessed with becoming the kind of leader he had described that day in Atlanta. The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. Scores of Republican lawmakers had been wiped out in the aftermath of Watergate, and those who’d survived seemed, to Gingrich, sadly resigned to a “permanent minority” mind-set. “It was like death,” he recalls of the mood in the caucus. “They were morally and psychologically shattered.”
But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. “His idea,” says Norm Ornstein, a political scientist who knew Gingrich at the time, “was to build toward a national election where people were so disgusted by Washington and the way it was operating that they would throw the ins out and bring the outs in.”
[snip]
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gingrich-says-youre-welcome/570832/
This "no-holds barred" behavior that we are seeing from the GOP, literally "breaking all the rules" and Congressional regular order, is HIS doing. He started it off back in the '90s under Clinton, when after 40 years of the GOP being out of power in the House, he "delivered" the House for them in 1994 on this type of behavior. He eventually got his hand slapped and run out of office, but he has been getting his "just desserts" the past 4 years.
And as a note in this case, remember that doing investigations like this requires starting at the bottom and working your way to the top. That's often what happens when they do RICO cases. They go after the bagmen, the fixers, the small time burglars and hitmen and whatnot, who eventually point the fingers up the chain to the "Captains", and eventually to "the boss".
January 6, 2021 happened less than 4 months ago and they are only at the embryonic stages of the DOJ portion of the investigation. There were hearings by the House, for example, that established issues with the Capitol Police and DOD with respect to what was and was not done. So all of that is a parallel thing going on that DOJ would eventually get to.
Well that was definitely my point. Congress and it's Rules and decorum have been officially "broken". So it will be up to the Executive Branch (DOJ), which has the power to do those "raids" and door knocks and that is not something that Congress, which is a non-criminal legal entity, can do.... although I know there were many calls on DU about getting the Sergeant at Arms to frog-march people defying subpoenas, and charging people with inherent contempt, and actually locking them up in the basement of the Capitol. That's not going to happen. But it is something that can happen if DOJ presents a subpoena.
They have to work their way up that chain. We know there are members of Congress on the GOP side who were intimately involved in what happened but there needs to be irrefutable proof or the entire operation will be dismissed out of hand.
What more do you expect Congress to do at this point? The meat of the evidence-gathering is happening in the Executive Branch with DOJ because it is their wheelhouse, not that of the Legislative Branch.
Congress (both chambers) has been having ongoing hearings since the insurrection happened and that included a 2nd impeachment directly associated with the insurrection, with the actual Article of Impeachment explicitly referencing "Inciting an Insurrection". And this "Commission" is nothing more than an additional "informational tool" that will inform them on what type of legislation might be needed as a result of what happened.
I wouldn't put much value on what a "Commission" comes up with but would rather watch what is happening with DOJ as AG Garland (or Pres. Biden) would be the one(s) who in future, could appoint a "Special Counsel" to do a true "criminal" investigation. I expect that may be coming.
WTF? So, we are going to go through another charade from which the only possible benefit is the public’s’ judgement about the legitimacy and integrity of each party’s perspectives. No accountability!
