Democrats Should Turn 1/6 Into Benghazi 2.0

Republicans are demanding we all stop talking about their terrorist attack on America. Democrats should destroy them with it, instead.

Photo/Getty Images

by Justin Rosario

After dragging their feet for months, hoping the public and, more importantly, the press, would move on, Republicans reluctantly hammered out a deal with Democrats to kind of, sort of, but not really investigate what happened on January 6, 2021. This deal would create a “non-partisan” 9/11-style commission to delve into the terrorist attack on the Capitol instigated by Donald Trump and carried out on live TV by his MAGA cult.

Republicans in the House and Senate immediately announced their opposition to it after months of pretending the negotiations were honest. These are not the actions of innocent people. They’re afraid a 1/6 commission will be Benghazi 2.0 but they’re wrong. Any public investigation will be infinitely worse and they’ll have no one to blame but themselves. Accordingly, Democrats should bludgeon the GOP to death with their guilt.

The Commission Is Already A Sham So Why Fight It?

Democrats have given Republicans just about everything they asked for short of “You’re not allowed to investigate 1/6.” Max Boot of the Washington Post explains how “bipartisan” the setup is:

The proposed version of the 1/6 Commission is scrupulously bipartisan with five members, including the chair, appointed by Democratic leaders, and five members, including the vice chair, appointed by Republican leaders. While the chairman would be allowed to appoint senior staff members and demand information from the federal government, the panel could only issue subpoenas if both the chair and vice chair agreed, or if a majority of the members voted to do so. The bill also set Dec. 31 as a deadline to issue a report — far too little time to litigate subpoenas if potential witnesses (such as Trump and McCarthy) refuse to voluntarily testify.

This is not a bipartisan bill. It is a bill designed to fail. And yet, both Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell are simply aghast at the whole thing:

McCarthy accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) of not negotiating “in good faith” and wasting “time playing political games.” McConnell chimed in to accuse House Democrats of having “handled this proposal in partisan bad faith going back to the beginning.”

Being accused of bad faith by Mitch McConnell is like being accused of infidelity by Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich. Still thy wagging tongue, hypocrite. McCarthy, for his part, knows of playing political games since he once openly bragged that the multiple Benghazi hearings were explicitly about hurting Hillary Clinton politically.

It is all but certain Republicans will block the bill in the Senate, killing the commission. But why? The commission is clearly designed to allow Republicans to manipulate and obstruct everything. Why aren’t Republicans willing to use it the way they used the Mueller Report, to create a fictional account of what happened and hopelessly muddy the waters?

The answer lies with who is in charge of the Executive and Legislative branches.

Elections Matter

At first blush, a 1/6 commission almost completely corrupted by Republicans seems like the ideal way to erase the terrorist attack from the public’s mind and replace it with a jumble of confusion, “alternative facts,” and “total exoneration!” But importantly there is no corrupt Republican Attorney General to suppress information and lie to the public.

Without Bill Barr to politicize the Department of Justice and turn it into a weapon for the GOP, the rule of law would hold sway. No more fake “summaries” while withholding final reports. No more squashing politically inconvenient subpoenas. No more “investigating the investigators”. Republicans can no longer rely on the DoJ to provide cover for them.   

It gets worse from there. Now that Trump is no longer in the White House, the press is far less willing to bend the knee to Republican dishonesty. This is especially true when it comes to the terrorist attack on the Capitol. While not enough of the press is holding Republicans accountable, far fewer of them are turning a blind eye to the fantasy that nothing really happened on January 6th or that it was “Antifa”. Usually, the press gets bored of stories about Republican scumbaggery and moves on as quickly as possible but that is not happening this time. As long as the press refuses to stop talking about it, neither will the rest of the country.

The House and the Senate are controlled by Democrats who won’t pressure the DoJ to turn a blind eye or threaten the Attorney General. Neither chamber will launch endless investigations of their own designed explicitly to confuse the public.

Without the machinery of the federal government and a compliant media to protect them, Republicans have to rely on their own vast propaganda network. That has serious limitations, though. To the surprise of no one, the narrative the right is trying to create, that the violent mob were just “tourists” and nothing bad happened, is being gobbled up by the cult of Trump. But it’s not working on the rest of the country. It probably doesn’t help that besides being broadcast live to the world, dozens of the terrorists idiotically took pictures and streamed videos of themselves rampaging through the halls of Congress, screaming for blood.

Even so, the commission is so compromised from the start that Republicans should be able to stall and lie enough to make the entire exercise pointless. Which would be true, except that the events of 1/6 are so vile, so shocking, and so entirely the fault of the GOP that their usual propaganda is failing. 

There’s No “Both Sides” To The Capitol Attack

Republicans have been poisoning America for decades using ‘bothsiderism’. Whenever Republicans would do something heinous, they would insist Democrats were guilty of something equally bad and the press would credulously repeat the lie. This is how Bernie Sanders asking for free, universal healthcare, something every industrialized nation on earth has (as well as not a small number of developing nations), was somehow “just as radical” as Donald Trump’s white nationalist policies.  

Bothsiderism is why people blame “Congress” when Republicans shut down our government multiple times or say “both sides are corrupt” when the reality looks more like this:

Trump’s regime, of course, isn’t quite up to Nixon levels yet (if you exclude all the indictments for Russian nationals). But that is only because Bill Barr obstructed justice for years and may himself end up being added to the tally of people from the Trump regime facing a jury and jail time as investigations resume.

Regardless, the Capitol attack was so egregious that Republicans are finding it impossible to craft a “both sides” narrative the public will swallow. They have been trying for almost five months now but no one outside of their bubble is buying it.

A commission would keep the attack in the headlines for the rest of the year and it would be all bad press for the GOP and their base of violent fanatics. A condition of the commission is that it has to wrap up by the end of 2021 to keep it from spilling into an election year, but the fallout would cast a shadow over the entire Republican Party for all of 2022, regardless. There would be no escaping it.

Every Republican running would be repeatedly asked about the attack on the Capitol and they would all have to regurgitate the Big Lie or be destroyed by their base. Openly and repeatedly supporting a terrorist attack on America won’t sit well with non-MAGA voters and cost Republicans seats they might have won if the 1/6 attack had faded away from the public’s memory, even a little. 

That is assuming, of course, that we don’t learn anything new about the events of that day which seems extremely unlikely. The more details we learn about what happened, how it was done, and who enabled it, the more treasonous Republicans will look. And the rest of the GOP will have to defend it or, again, be destroyed by a base and party that has gone all in on fascism. 

It would be great to see Republicans defend their party when we find out that the “tours” given by several members of the House were, in fact, for reconnaissance. Or when we find out who gave the “Stand Down” order that delayed the National Guard for three hours and why they did it. The GOP really loved that particular lie about Benghazi, and while it’s not a political law, it should be: Every Republican accusation is a confession.

This is precisely the kind of stuff Republicans do not want a bipartisan commission to discover or even ask about which is precisely why Democrats should be screaming those questions from the rooftops. The harder Republicans work to cover it up, the guiltier they look. And they already look extremely guilty.

The Republican Benghazi

Last week, fellow Banter writer Bob Cesca pointed out that McConnell and McCarthy are fighting the commission because Trump doesn’t want it and it would infuriate his cult. It would also expose the GOP’s “stolen election” story as a lie which would devastate their ambitions to steal the 2024 election.

But beyond all of that, Republicans need America to stop talking about their attempt to violently end the American Experiment before the midterm elections. It is an albatross around their necks. Benghazi, but far worse because it is all true, all on video, and almost the entire party is complicit. They are exposed like never before and they know it.

Democrats need to hammer Republicans with ads linking them to their party’s attempted coup: “Congressman Bob Whiteguy refuses to condemn the rioters who attacked the United States. He called them ‘patriots’ as they desecrated American history. Then he voted to steal the election for Donald Trump. Is that the kind of hate for America you want in Washington?”

What are Republicans going to do? Whine to the press that the Democrats are being unfair? Will Republicans put out ads calling Democrats liars? They are all on record either voting to overturn the election, spending months supporting the attack, or both. There are very few Liz Cheneys running next year and she’s almost certainly going to lose her primary because she wouldn’t defend insurrection against the government of the United States. 

Republicans tried to violently overthrow our country and they did not pay a price for it. Now they would very much like for Democrats to stop talking about their treason so they can run for office unencumbered by their criminality.

It is the Democrats’ job then, to remind every single person at every available opportunity that one of our two major political parties launched a violent terrorist attack on the Capitol just five months ago. If we can’t have a commission, House and Senate Democrats should have multiple loud, public investigations that make the Benghazi hearings pale in comparison.

Donald Trump should be dragged in front of Congress and be made to testify for twelve hours. Let the country hear the confessions of a madman who won’t be able to stop himself from bragging. Force terrorist after terrorist to testify and let them tell the nation all about how their “Foxitis” and believing Trump’s lies made them do it. Make it ten times the spectacle Benghazi was.

If Republicans do not pay a price for what they’ve done, if they are allowed to win the midterms with voter suppression based on the Big Lie, we risk dooming American democracy. They will try to steal the 2024 election and they will never allow another free and fair election again.

Democrats must now use 1/6 to destroy Republican schemes for rigging elections, and then the party itself. It is time to stop coddling violent fascists and protect this country from their depredations.

Read an excerpt from the latest Members Only article:

The Cold Secession Is Underway As Texas Passes Insane, Archaic Laws

It is not going to happen the way it did in 1861, but it is happening nevertheless.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

by Bob Cesca

WASHINGTON, DC -- For years now, I’ve hesitated to entertain the idea of another secession. The illegality of it was decided in the Civil War, and anyone who markets the idea during modern times clearly doesn’t understand the kind of horror show they’re tempting -- the bloodshed alone would make the elevator in The Shining look like a paper cut -- and, in the end, it’s quite likely the separatist states would be forced back into the Union.

Long story short, it’s just not going to happen the way it did in 1861. Oftentimes, superimposing past events onto modern situations can be enlightening, but more often than not, it can also be deceptive. For example: keeping an eye out for the next Adolf Hitler by watching for a guy in a weird mustache and a swastika arm-band goosestepping into Poland might force us to miss the unique way in which a modern despot, like Donald Trump, might subversively rise to power. Likewise, watching for secession the way South Carolina and the other Confederate states did it might force us to look at the wrong warning signs.

There’s another kind of secession taking place in America today that bears little resemblance to the pre-Civil War dissolution of the Union. Today, there’s a cold secession underway in which the hardcore red states appear to be forcing out anyone who hasn’t been indoctrinated into the far-right Red Hat cult, while also making life in those states more enticing for Republicans to migrate there from blue states. In other words, life in these conservative-controlled states is turning whiter and straighter as people of color and other oppressed groups are driven away by the fascist idiocracy winding its way through the various state legislatures.

Texas is the perfect example. As the state sneaks closer and closer to purple-state status in national elections, the laws are simultaneously growing more and more archaic…

This is an excerpt of today’s Members Only piece. Continue reading here and get a 2 month free trial on a Banter Membership!: