Calmes: Jan. 6 panel makes its case

Senate Minority Leader Mitch “Party over Country” McConnell was wrong, again.

In the spring of 2021, McConnell blocked Congress from authorizing an independent investigation of the deadly insurrection at the Capitol months before. Leave it to the Justice Department, the Kentucky Republican said: “I do not believe the additional, extraneous commission that Democratic leaders want would uncover crucial new facts.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who doesn’t take her cues from Donald Trump, went to Plan B: a select House committee to probe the backstory of Jan. 6, 2021. That McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy forced her to that fallback — two supposed stewards of the legislative branch opposing an investigation of an attack on Congress — is a shame they own.

Conversely, all those associated with Plan B have done themselves, and their country, proud. Contrary to McConnell’s hunch (or, more likely, realizing his fear), the Jan. 6 committee has given us “new facts” aplenty at its nine televised hearings since June. At the Justice Department, where a criminal investigation is ongoing, those facts are called leads.

The department clearly has its sights on Trump, though to date it has been busy prosecuting nearly 1,000 rioters — the small fry. The House committee, to its credit, has focused on the big fish: Trump was “at the center” of the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committee chair, said at the first hearing and the last.

In between, his committee narrated the story of the first president in history to resist the peaceful transfer of power with a clarity and focus that had otherwise been lacking. Its final report isn’t expected until after next month’s elections, but already the panel has given coherence to a saga that mostly had been told in disjointed news reports. With subpoena power that reporters lack, and testimony taken under oath, it has greatly added to what we know.

If you doubt the committee’s contribution, just imagine if Republicans had gotten their way and the panel hadn’t been created. The horrors of Jan. 6, 2021, were fading from memory. Republicans sought to either airbrush the trauma or rebrand the mob scene as “a normal tourist visit” and insurrectionists as “patriots.” The great benefit of the House committee has been to debunk Trump’s Big Lie(s) with real evidence, whether it points to crimes or simply abuse of office, and to do so quickly, even memorably. We now have loads of compelling sworn testimony, almost exclusively from Republicans who worked in the administration or on Trump’s campaign.

It all goes toward proving an unprecedented assault on democracy and the rule of law: Trump planned months before the 2020 election to claim victory. He knew he lost, yet pressed claims of fraud that his advisers and scores of courts rejected. He pressured officials in seven states to overturn their election results for Joe Biden, and schemed to send fake Trump slates to the Electoral College and Congress.

Finally, in what Thompson called Trump’s “last stand,” he drew his followers to Washington and, knowing some were armed, urged them to march on the Capitol. Then he watched the mayhem on television for three hours, doing nothing even as the mob hunted down the two people next in line for the presidency.

We knew something of this before the hearings started, but it took the House committee to connect the dots: Jan. 6 was not a one-day event, but a monthslong web of conspiracy spun by the president, aided by far too many co-conspirators.

The voters now have the facts in time for the midterm elections, yet they may give Trump’s party control of Congress anyway. For all of the committee’s contribution to history, its work has not budged our calcified politics.

Proof of the committee’s short-term political inconsequence: Most of the Republican candidates for Congress and key statewide offices still deny or question the legitimacy of Biden’s election. Many are favored to be elected, while most of the few Republicans who condemned Trump have already lost their seats.

That includes, of course, the House committee’s defiant Republican vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney. As she said at the first hearing, addressing those in her party who lack her courage: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone. But your dishonor will remain.”

And that’s another fact for which we can thank the Jan. 6 committee.

Jackie Calmes is an opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times in Washington, D.C.