Good morning,
THE JANUARY 6 HEARINGS
Last night was the first of a series of public hearings by the January 6th commission. It began with statements by the leaders of the Committee and the showing of graphic violence against the Capitol, its police and our democratic institutions. And while I would hope these hearings have the impact of the 9/11 hearings, the Watergate hearings, the Warren Commission, the Challenger investigation, and other seminal examples of Congress acting to ferret out the truth and provide important data and historical analysis, I fear it will yield much less.
The Trumpist-right no doubt will characterize the hearings as nothing more than a witch-hunt and to be discarded like the HUAC hearings of the 1950s. Others will compare it to the Bengazi hearings (which, by the way, will continue if the Republicans regain control of the House) and view it as tit-for-tat political grandstanding that will give rise to the shit-show that will emerge when the Republicans take over the House and investigate Hunter Biden, 24/7.
For those of us old enough to remember, do you recall how rapt we were on the Watergate hearings? Did you for a moment believe that the Committee, for all its political posturing and grandstanding, ever believe the Committee wouldn’t get to the truth and Congress would act upon that truth? The evidence was presented and it was clear as day to the Senate and clear as day to the viewers watching on TV. Growing up in Republican Orange County, California, our community was partisan in its support of President Nixon. Yet, when his crimes, and the crimes of those around him, were revealed, it became clear to virtually everyone that he had to go. Our Congressman at the time, Charles Wiggins, was one of the people who met with the President to say it was all over. He was teary-eyed when interviewed. The leaders of the party, including the grand old man of the conservative right, Barry Goldwater, told Nixon that he only had a handful of votes in his corner (and the implication was that Goldwater was not among them). The president was shamed and he resigned the following day.
Today we live in a “no shame culture.” No one stood up and told the president to back down. And while many Republican leaders spoke against Mr. Trump’s treasonous behavior, they backed-down when their pollsters and handlers suggested they toe the Trump line. The world has changed.
WHAT THE COMMITTEE WILL LEARN
The fact is that we already have a general understanding of the facts. Little new will be revealed. We will learn that:
· The Proud Boys and other paramilitary right-wing organizations are far more organized than we imagine.
· The January 6th insurrection may well have been mere civil disobedience by some, but it actually was orchestrated by others—others who had clear intent to disrupt the functioning of our democratically elected legislature and who sought to cause bodily harm to those they perceived not acting in the best interest of the “big lie.”
· The crowd was riled up by President Trump and his acolytes. They were responding to specific encouragement and direction from the President (they read his tweets aloud to the assembled insurrectionists, by the way).
· Trump would have been happy with bodily harm coming to Vice-President Pence, given his disloyalty.
· It was Pence who called out the military to secure the Capitol, not Trump.
· The President sat and did nothing for over three hours, while the Capitol was overrun.
· The advisors with the expertise to know advised Trump repeatedly that he had lost the election and there was nothing he could do.
· His family ultimately accepted the election results and, much like Attorney General Barr, made clear to him that the election results were definitive and indisputable.
· The “big lie” was being perpetrated throughout the insurrection and continues to this day, propounded by people who know better and don’t believe in it.
· Fox News personnel actively advised the President and his advisors to back down on the election fraud hoax and to stop the violence, in large measure because it was politically inexpedient and didn’t make him look good—but not because it was simply wrong. But that didn’t suit Mr. Trump.
We will learn much and will have much confirmed, but it won’t matter. It won’t matter because people no longer believe facts, but believe their own accepted narrative. It won’t matter because the Republican party leadership won’t just step out and tell their people the truth.
WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR
The Committee presented many aides of Trump stating that Trump’s claims of a stolen election was false. The Committee showed that his cabinet discussed invocation of the 25th Amendment to remove Trump. The Committee showed that Trump endorsed the hanging of his vice president. The Committee demonstrated that Trump was orchestrating a coup.
But will it matter?
SOME THOUGHTFUL VOICES
Frank Bruni says “Whatever you think of her father, her past or the rest of her ideology, Liz Cheney has, for the past year and a half, been a model of truth over tribalism.”
Bruni wrote a brilliant piece of this: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/09/opinion/liz-cheney-trump-january-6.html
Bruni says in this article that Cheney is on the other side of the Democrats on a number of issues and is fighting against the lie of the right. He notes: “I’d say she’s a woman without a country, except she has this country — our country — foremost in her thoughts. She knows what makes it special, and she recognizes what her Republican colleagues in Congress choose to ignore, which is that the “sacred obligation to defend the peaceful transfer of power has been honored by every American president — except one,” as she observed when she received a 2022 Profile in Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston in April.”
In the meantime, David Brooks expounded on the meaning of the election lie and the subsequent efforts of the Republican right to ensure they are empowered to circumvent democratic elections. Brooks really hits upon the big point. The point is that looking backward and examining the history (which we already know) is important, but not the major event. The major event is what’s happening TODAY. Today, the forces aligned with Mr. Trump, who maintain the election in 2020 was stolen, who seek to repress voting and who seek for State legislators and Secretaries of State to overturn legitimate election results are hard at work. They are working full-time today and are not being called out or challenged nearly enough in, what Bill Maher calls the “slow motion coup.” We should all be concerned. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/08/opinion/the-jan-6-committee-has-already-blown-it.html
As Brooks notes: “The core problem is that there are millions of Americans who have three convictions: that the election was stolen, that violence is justified in order to rectify it and that the rules and norms that hold our society together don’t matter.” And that is a big problem.
We’ll be talking about this in the coming weeks—I’m sure!
Have a good weekend,
Glenn
I want to have hope that IT WILL make some difference. Watching it last night was so depressing. To actually hear the crowd repeat Trump’s demands, to know that Bannon warned of this (happily), to see it so very organized, is depressing. I wonderful if Trump is still talking to his daughter. All Trump cares about is himself, period!
Last night’s hearing also put to rest the lie that Fox News is a separate entity from Fox commentators like Tucker Carlson. The News Division had an obligation to televise the hearings and they chose not to bring their viewers an unfiltered lense into this stain on American democracy. It’s unfortunate that the FCC, through court rulings and regulations, has become a toothless tiger.