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**FEBRUARY 23, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

More Commission Conundrums

In a piece
I
wrote last week, I suggested that congressional Democrats and
Republicans would have very different ideas about the composition and
direction of a 9/11-style commission to investigate January's
insurrection at the Capitol.

As an article

that ran Monday in Politico documents, I was right. House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi has suggested giving Democratic appointees a majority on the
commission, while Republicans seek equal representation. Pelosi wants
the commission to be charged with investigating specific issues-among
them, I would guess, the incitement of the riot, the planning that went
into it, the misinformation that led to it, the failure of law
enforcement to respond to and suppress it, and what changes in policy
are needed to squelch a repeat performance. Republicans, by contrast,
want no such delineation of subjects to be investigated, preferring to
let commission members look into anything they wish-which could
include, I suppose, the Dominion voting machines connection to Josef
Stalin and the role that antifa played in the insurrection and the Klan
rallies of the 1920s.

Politico

****also reports that some veterans of the 9/11 Commission advised
Pelosi to go with a commission that has equal partisan representation.
That counsel made sense in the aftermath of al-Qaeda's 2001 attacks,
which didn't involve the complicity of the president, or one political
party's failure to hold a complicit president accountable or to accept
the electoral votes of two states (Arizona and Pennsylvania). It made
sense when the Republican who chaired the commission was former New
Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, a moderate who understood the difference
between fact and fiction.

Today, the Republican Party that once elected Thomas Kean has gone the
way of the dodo bird. In a Suffolk University/

**USA Today** poll

released Monday, 73 percent of Trump voters said that Joe Biden's
election wasn't legitimate, and 58 percent said that the insurrection
was antifa's handiwork. Today, every Republican senator or
representative who didn't vote to indict or absolve Trump and is up
for re-election in 2022 is sure to face a primary challenge from a Trump
supporter who'll almost surely be favored to win.

Speaker Pelosi might go along with a balanced commission if she prevails
on outlining the commission's charge, and if Mitch McConnell lets her
know in advance whom he is planning to appoint, and if they all are
latter-day versions of Thomas Kean. That would limit the political
flat-earthers on the commission to House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy's
appointees, who could issue a minority report. But McConnell, already in
hot water for calling Trump "practically and morally responsible" for
the insurrection, is in no position to offer Pelosi any such assurances,
much less make Kean-like appointments.

That's why no 9/11-style commission is even possible in times such as
ours, when truth and bipartisanship don't rhyme.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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