This dilemma is revealed by McCarthy’s deliberations over whether to appoint Republicans to the select committee, which are detailed in a new report from Punchbowl News. His deliberations are highly illuminating about the state of GOP politics today.
Under committee rules, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) must appoint five out of 13 members after "consultation” with McCarthy (giving her veto power), but he isn’t required to exercise this option. Yet Punchbowl reports that he all but certainly will.
Pelosi’s appointment of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is already jamming McCarthy, as Joan Walsh points out. After all, he’s required to criticize Cheney’s appointment — it’s GOP orthodoxy that her insistence on accountability for Donald Trump is unacceptable — which underscores the GOP’s adamant opposition to any real accounting.
But McCarthy’s option to pick Republican appointees could also create a serious predicament for him.
McCarthy’s problem
Consider McCarthy’s choices. Punchbowl reports that he might choose Republicans such as Reps. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) and Jim Jordan (Ohio). These own-the-libs disrupters would win right-wing media plaudits: Indeed, their very consideration shows the strong pull exerted by the need to satiate that drooling right-wing media beast.
But Stefanik’s star has risen precisely because of her high-profile advocacy of the lie that Trump’s loss was dubious or illegitimate. Jordan, too, went to great lengths to sow doubt about the legitimacy of Trump’s loss.
That lie, of course, was central in inciting the insurrection. Given that the committee is charged with investigating the “causes” of the attack, that lie itself will be a major focus of the committee.
How can Republicans who earned renown due to their willingness to echo that same lie sit on this committee without drawing attention to the Republican Party’s own large role in feeding the pathologies that led to the violence?
Indeed, of all the Republicans that McCarthy may pick — according to Punchbowl — just about every one of them voted against certifying President Biden’s electors, a vote that enshrined that lie, on the very day of the attack. There is no way to appoint these Republicans without highlighting the GOP’s own culpability in creating the conditions leading to that day’s horrors.
Theoretically, McCarthy might pick Republicans who didn’t vote against Biden electors, or didn’t feed Trump’s lies, or intend to participate in a real accounting. McCarthy is also reportedly considering several such Republicans.
But this further illustrates his problem. As Cheney noted, her service on the committee is a matter of honoring her “oath” to defend the Constitution. McCarthy can’t appoint too many Republicans who will treat this service as such — as defending the Constitution — because it will invest the proceedings with a gravity that McCarthy cannot allow.
Meanwhile, not appointing anyone would show the GOP to be uninterested in any accounting.
Let’s not forget that McCarthy himself was a pivotal player. His frantic appeals to Trump to call off the rioters will surely be a focus: They will illustrate Trump’s full intention to intimidate lawmakers into reversing the election with mob violence.
‘An insurgency against democracy’
Rick Perlstein suggests we’re witnessing “an insurgency against democracy with parliamentary and paramilitary wings.” The first consists of lawmakers who sided with Trump’s efforts to overturn the election through legal means that morphed into efforts at direct theft. The second consists of those who crossed into violence toward that same end, at Trump’s instigation.
Perhaps all this is best understood as a spectrum moving from “parliamentary” to “paramilitary.” Some Republicans fed the lies about Trump’s loss. Some supported sham lawsuits to overturn the results. Some voted to overturn Biden electors. Some state Republicans entertained sending rogue electors.
Some called on people to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally that produced the violence. Some now minimize and distort the attack, giving cover to a movement that actually did attempt to overturn the constitutional order through mob violence.
The committee’s investigation will inevitably shed light on the place of Republicans all along that spectrum, including any role that GOP lawmakers might have had in planning the rally and, possibly, communicating with Trump about what his true intentions for it were.
I asked Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the committee, whether the role of individual Republicans in the organization of the rally, and the role that the mass GOP feeding of Trump’s lies played in inspiring the violence, will be topics of the inquiry.
“Our charge is to determine the events of Jan. 6 and the causes of those events,” Raskin told me. “If we are willing to identify the role of the president of the United States in these events, surely we have to be willing to look at the role all other relevant actors played. We want nothing but the facts.”
It’s hard to see how McCarthy can avoid appointing Republicans who themselves fell somewhere on that spectrum. Yet if he appoints Republicans who treat the committee’s mission with the weight it deserves, that will also pose a huge problem. His lack of any obvious way forward itself illustrates how deeply implicated the GOP is in the very horrors that the committee is designed to illuminate.