WASHINGTON (AP) – Americans are working on the nightmare of the massacre of children in Texas, the racist killings in Buffalo, New York, and other rigid recurring scenes of the United States carnage.
They are fighting something that looks like a highway robbery at a gas station, they are bitten by a virus that the world cannot shake off, and they are divided into two hostile camps in terms of politics and culture – the nation’s twin foundation.
They have already gone through two planned dramas of the presidential impeachment – in fact, through the numbness of all things Donald Trump.
Now, beginning in prime time on Thursday, the House of Representatives selection committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol is working to establish historical records of an event that harms not only the community or individual families idea of democracy itself.
After more than 100 subpoenas, 1,000 interviews and 100,000 documents, the committee has a story to tell in hearings starting this week. It has been said for centuries.
The open question: How much will the country care?
The commission’s investigation into the actions of Trump and all the president’s men and women, more aggressive than any investigation before him, has created many storylines that together will tell the story of a violent uprising fueled by the poison and lies of a defeated president.
Many Republicans, even those who have condemned Trump and the current violence, have taken a “nothing more to see here” position since then, rejecting calls for an independent 9/11-style commission to investigate.
A whole disinformation ecosystem has emerged with completely false claims about the nature and character of the attack. Instead of condemning him, Trump continues to insist that his defeat of 7 million votes should be reversed, effectively confirming the cause of the rebels.
Dozens of rebels have been brought to justice, many of whom have been convicted or convicted of serious crimes. But the commission’s goal is larger: Who in power should also be responsible?
There are endless query tapes.
Did Vice President Mike Pence refuse to leave the besieged Capitol because he suspected that the Secret Service, on Trump’s orders, was trying to take him away to prevent him from certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s victory? Did Trump throw out incriminating documents in the White House restroom?
How do we explain the difference of more than seven hours in the White House telephone diaries of Trump’s talks during the uprising? Will it go down in history alongside the infamous 18 1/2 minute hole in President Richard Nixon’s secret recording system at the White House in 1972?
The Watergate affair, which exposed the cover-up of Nixon’s politically motivated criminal activities and destroyed his presidency, focused on a question asked by Republican Senator Howard Baker in Tennessee: “What did the president know and when did he know?”
For the commission on January 6, the key question about Trump’s involvement in the uprising was: What did the president do and when?
One of the goals is to determine whether Trump’s actions are criminal, as one judge believes they may be, and whether this would lead to politically severe persecution of the former Justice Department president.
More broadly, efforts are being made to see who can be punished in the large circle of Trump aides. Some of them are members of Congress who helped him plan how to try to call a fair election, only to suffocate in fear with everyone else in the Capitol hideout when the rebels – in the service of this conspiracy – filled the marble corridors of power on January 6, 2021
The prime time situation for the commission’s hearing is rare and a kind of return to the era when people gathered en masse in front of their TVs the night before the video streaming distributed the viewers.
Representative Jamie Ruskin, a Maryland Democrat on the committee, has set expectations that may be difficult to justify as the committee seeks to rekindle the country’s interest with a brief focus on machinations that have been in the rearview mirror for nearly 18 months. .
The dangers in this mirror are closer than they appear to be as seen by committee members.
“The hearings will tell a story that will really blow up the roof of the house,” Ruskin said in April. “Because this is the story of the most heinous and vile political crime ever organized by the president and his followers and his entourage in the history of the United States.
This crime? In short, he said at a forum in Washington, “an internal coup” combined with a violent attack by “neo-fascists.”
Trump is not expected at any of the hearings, but his words and actions will hang heavily over the procedure, as lawmakers are looking to put him at the center of the chaos. It seems very plausible that he will find a way to oppose them, which does not include being under oath.
The commission will almost certainly look for a close link between Trump’s resounding rejection of the election results and his January 6 rally in front of the White House, sending the angry mob to Capitol Hill.
Freed from the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, committee members are likely to try to show that the Capitol riot is not a spontaneous gathering, but part of a wider conspiracy and a natural result of weeks of exposing democratic processes.
Biden presented January 6 and its existential implications for the threat to democracy. This is a “battle for the soul of America,” he said. But the president can only have one priority number at a time, and that’s not his. He says again and again that this is inflation.
Whatever revelations the hearings produce, much is already known, because the attack took place on big and small screens in real time, and Trump called on his supporters to “fight like hell” with shouts for the world to hear.
“In quieter times, the hearings would have more public attention,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Center for Public Policy in Annenberg at the University of Pennsylvania and a political communications body. “But, as it is, they will compete for attention with topics of greater immediate importance in our lives.”
Hungry babies without formula. Rising gas and food prices. Increasing hospitalization with COVID-19 among vaccinated. The scenes of destruction in Ukraine and the threat that the Russian invasion will escalate, including the use of nuclear weapons. And he has monkeypox.
“Not to mention the summer vacation,” Jamieson added.
“If the hearings are to do anything other than bolster our existing political leanings,” she said, “they will have to uncover previously covert events that threaten something Democrats, independents and most Republicans may agree that it must be holy. “
Some of the juicy parts of the inquiry have already come out. Text messages and emails that are considered personal when sent have become public, including by Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
But the commission is meeting with much more information and will have tens of thousands of exhibits and hundreds of witnesses, said commission chairman Benny Thompson of Mississippi.
Seven Democrats and two Republicans – both shunned by their party – make up the committee. Among them, the stakes are certainly the highest for Republican Liz Cheney, the deeply conservative but fiercely independent Wyoming MP who is virtually alone in the Republican Party in the Trump attack, while seeking re-election to Congress.
The daughter of a vice president and once the personification of the Republican establishment, she is now a renegade in a new order dominated by Trump, who wants her ousted from the August election.
That new order became clearer in February when the Republican Party convicted Cheney and another Republican from the committee, Illinois Republican Adam Kinzinger, who is not seeking re-election, for participating in the investigation. The party adopted a resolution according to which witnesses called by the commission for their actions on and around January 6 participated only in “legitimate political discourse”.
Matthew Delmont, a history professor at Dartmouth College who specializes in black history, said Jan. 6 cast such a sinister shadow that he expects people in the United States, despite all their urgent care, to be drawn into the investigation.
“I think people will be watching the hearings on January 6 because they want to know how our democracy came to this abyss,” he said. “I don’t know how many people will want to hear the evidence that will be presented, but I think it’s important that the findings are shared openly so that people can assess what happened today and in the future.”
January 6 has some differences with other past agonies. As with 9/11, you can narrow down the date to January 6, and people know it. Like Watergate, he speaks of corruption in the highest office. As with the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle and 9/11 and beyond, the scene brought so much visceral shock that many people remember where they were and what they did when they saw it.
As for the far right, the historical analogy is the Boston Tea Party, with liberals, Democrats and the Washington establishment as red robes.
Trump’s Republican friends sanctioned what happened the day after the shock that nearly everyone experienced on Jan. 6 subsided. In opinion polls, Republican voters generally said they believed the 2020 election was rigged when absolutely all measures – courts, non-partisan and even Republican civil servants and their own observers of the Trump administration’s election, including its chief prosecutor – the election was purely fair.
A year later, the violent uprising was apparently remembered as much or extremely violent by less than 4 in 10 Republicans polled, compared to nearly 9 in 10 Democrats.
However, there were signs in the last …
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