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Opinion | The Jan. 6 Committee Has Been Almost Wholly Ineffective


By contrast, Mr. Trump faces what New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, author of a new book about Mr Trump, calls “the worst predicament he can imagine: being lost. the country turned into a loser.” He took extraordinary measures, including a phone call he made to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, four days before the storm on Capitol Hill, in which Mr. Trump said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” This is a clear violation of the constitution.

But members of the January 6 committee are focused on something else. They do not position themselves as investigators rather than defenders of American democracy. This is the wrong place for such a mission. The committee made the request too partisan to implement it. You can blame the Republicans who nominated Trump defenders to the committee or the Democrats for freezing them, but the reality is that the committee has seven Democrats and two Republicans, Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, both openly revolting against their Trumpified parties (and both on their way out of Congress).

The almost complete elimination of opposing checks leaves the committee unfit for what is indeed a very delicate task. The January 6 march on the Capitol was both a protest questioning the integrity of the 2020 election (protected by the First Amendment) and a violent attack on the integrity of the United States. integrity of the 2020 election (punished by law).

Above all, there are two different contexts for understanding the event: judicial and civil status. In the judicial landscape, those judges who have ruled against more than 60 lawsuits initiated by Trump and linked with Trump to reopen the vote tally and reverse the election results have done exactly the right thing. The courtroom is the wrong place to reward doubts about the legitimacy of elections. Overlying elections from the bench will undermine democracy and give tomorrow’s lawyers the impetus to undermine it further.

But in the civics context, matters are different. Citizens have the right to consider matters as freely and resolutely as they wish.

The Commission will bring all of these contexts together. Miss Cheney recently complained Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, “is currently campaigning for people who refuse to vote.” She continued: “You basically believe and will support our constitutional structure or you don’t.” But, of course, it is not unconstitutional to question the integrity of an election, and one who does so is not necessarily an enemy of democracy.

In June, the committee’s chair, Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, opened the hearings by mentioning that he was sworn to “defend the Constitution against all enemies at home and abroad.” He more that “that oath was tested on January 6.”

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