Andrew Prokop: ‘Any Bipartisan January 6 Commission Is Probably Doomed’

 

From Vox:

Days after the chaotic storming of the Capitol on January 6, some Republican members of Congress had an idea.

What the country needed, Reps. John Katko (R-NY), Rodney Davis (R-IL), and others decided, was a bipartisan commission, akin to the one established after 9/11, to sort through the facts and determine just how such a terrible breach of government security happened.

Now, though, the chances for such a commission are imperiled. A bill to establish it passed the House last Wednesday [May 19, 2021] with support from every Democrat and 35 Republicans. But most others in the GOP, including party leaders, have come out strongly against the bill, with the party’s senators planning a filibuster.

Republicans have evidently calculated that such a commission’s findings would likely hurt their party’s electoral prospects. Some even admit this: “Anything that gets us rehashing the 2020 election, I think, is a day lost on being able to draw contrast between us and the Democrats’ very radical left-wing agenda,” Senate Minority Whip John Thune told reporters last week.

But even if a deal does somehow come together, there are real reasons to doubt whether such a commission would achieve anything substantial.

Read the full article.

Ed Kilgore: ‘Imagining a Post-“Roe” America’

From New York magazine:

 

Last week, the Supreme Court finally took up the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, raising the specter of a clock turned back to 1973, before Roe v. Wade created a constitutional right to abortion.

For those who favor greater reproductive rights, the Supreme Court’s decision to reconsider long-established precedent is deeply ominous. There won’t be a ruling until spring or summer of 2022, and it’s impossible to guess exactly what the new conservative majority might support. The Court could surprise us, as it did with the 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey; rather than making it illegal to terminate a pregnancy, the Court reaffirmed its prohibition on banning abortions that occur prior to fetal viability (around 24 weeks), while opening the door to limited state restrictions. Or the Court could return the country to the pre-Roe status-quo ante, in which states could effectively set whatever policies they wanted.

What might the latter scenario look like? Below is a preview of the savage landscape of inequality and culture war that could be unleashed by the Dobbs decision.

 

 

Read the full article.

Joy Reid: ‘G.O.P. Not Offering Anything for the Power They Want’

David Pakman: ‘Does It Matter If Trumpists Don’t Believe Trump Lost?’

Andrew Prokop: ‘Why the Republican Party Can’t Reckon with Trump’

 From Vox:

Most Republican critics of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election result have gone quiet.

Sure, Liz Cheney spoke out — and ended up being booted from House Republican leadership earlier this month in spectacular fashion. But she’s the exception. The rest of the party has united around a strategy of moving on, as seen in Mitch McConnell’s newly announced opposition to a bipartisan commission investigating the storming of the Capitol in January.

For the segment of the party composed of die-hard Trump supporters, that approach makes sense. But even Republicans with deep misgivings about Trump’s post-election behavior have managed to rationalize avoiding the topic.

There are likely three reasons for this. First, there’s the cynical calculation that the GOP can best win future elections by seeming united, rather than spotlighting party divisions. Second, there’s the fear of openly defying Trump and earning the enmity of his supporters, since those deemed insufficiently loyal to the former president tend to see their jobs put at risk. And third, there’s the fatalistic view that this criticism simply won’t achieve anything, because the GOP base will trust the propaganda pipeline of conservative media and social media over their own leaders.

Read the full article.

Robert Reich: ‘Why Democrats Are Running Out of Time’

Randy Rainbow: ‘Clang, Clang, Clang Went Josh Hawley!’

David Atkins: ‘What Happens When Republicans Simply Refuse to Certify Democratic Wins?’

 From Washington Monthly:

What will the institutions of liberal democracy do when Republican officials simply refuse to concede Democratic victories? The question isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem, and the reckoning may be coming far sooner than most expect.

The entire left-leaning political world has spent the months after the 2020 election obsessed over the fairness of elections, and conservative attempts to rig the vote through gerrymandering and voter suppression. This is for good reason, of course: Republicans know they lack the support to win majority support in a fair contest, but believe they have the right to rule nonetheless for reasons that ultimately boil down to white supremacy, religious dominionism and antiquated patriarchal beliefs. So Republicans have been busy passing bills to restrict voting among young people and non-whites, while doing their best to ensure that exurban conservative whites continue to be dramatically and unfairly overrepresented in the House, Senate and Electoral College.

But there’s another even more sinister trend among conservative politicians that deserves greater attention: an unwillingness to concede any electoral victory by a Democrat as legitimate, and an eagerness to punish any Republican elected official who concedes the will of the voters. The Big Lie that Trump really won the election is now canon among a majority of Republican voters. Any Republicans who refuses to toe the line is branded a heretic, and elections officials who dared to certify Biden’s win are being censured or stripped of their power. Arizona Republicans have sponsored a bogus “audit” of the election full of crackpot conspiracy theories, and Republican legislatures have been busy taking control of both running and certifying elections out of the hands of county official in Democratic-run cities and counties. The context of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol was the attempt by Congressional Republicans to refuse to certify the Electoral College tally, in the hopes of sending the election back to gerrymandered Republican state legislatures, thus handing Trump a win as part of a anti-democratic coup. It was a physical coup attempt designed to intimidate Congress into enforcing a legislative coup. Republicans who refused to back the latter are facing steep primary challenges.

 

Read the full article.