The republic itself

What we have learned from the January 6 committee, thus far

I don’t think it is possible to exaggerate the importance of the work of the so-called January 6 committee (the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the Attack on the U.S. Capitol).

The work of the committee’s members has been careful, sober and, for the most part, above partisanship.

The guiding attitude has been what committee member Jamie Raskin calls “constitutional patriotism.” That is, when representative or republican democracy itself is at stake, and when the Constitution itself is at stake, politicians and public servants must rise above party and personal ambition and serve the good of the country, even at personal cost. Members of Congress take an oath to do so.

And the guiding light of the committee has often been someone who has practiced constitutional patriotism. That person is Liz Cheney -- a conservative Republican from Wyoming. I expect she will pay a price. She will likely lose her seat in Congress for doing her duty.

Indeed, the most important critics of former President Donald Trump, and what his movement has become, are conservative Republicans. And I think it is vital that this continues to be so, for a reason I will explain.

But, from George F. Will to former federal Judge J. Michael Luttig, some of the most eloquent and perceptive critics of Trump and his actions since losing the 2020 election have been conservatives.

Let’s look at what the committee has done so far. We must be provisional, for the committee has not finished its work or even come near to doing so.

But the committee has tried very hard to help the country to understand what happened on January 6 and what was at stake.

We have learned some surprising facts. For instance, that the then-president knew that some of the mob on January 6 was armed; that he wanted to join them at the Capitol; that wild schemes -- like confiscating voting machines and installing a hack Trump loyalist to head the Department of Justice -- were seriously considered.

We learned that a few people at Justice and on the president’s staff stood up to the president.

We learned that the president’s own daughter tried to get him to intervene to stop the violence on that day and to condemn it the next and he refused her entreaties.

We learned that the president was not, in fact, bothered by the violence, even when it threatened the life of his vice president, and that Mike Pence’s Secret Service detail feared for their own as well as the vice president’s life.

Most significant of all, we learned that the president’s pressure on Mr. Pence to refuse to certify the election, and the plan to muddy the electoral college with alternative electors, was not a hair-brained last- minute Hail Mary, but a seriously thought-out plot to overturn the election, which, after all, was not close. Several states had to be overturned to reverse the outcome. Or, chaos and confusion having been achieved, the election would go to the House, where Mr. Trump would win. The very people who cried “stolen election,” intended to steal an election.

We learned all this.

Some Americans felt they knew much or all of it for a long time.

The committee has left no doubt on these matters.

But I think we have learned some larger, darker truths as well.

•       We have learned the extent of the violence on January 6, and how it could have easily been far worse.

If things had broken differently, a member or members of Congress might have been killed, including the Speaker of the House. Pence might have been killed. Given this possibility, the semantic debate about “insurrection” or “riot,” seems pretty silly. And the president’s indifference and inaction utterly beyond the pale.

The mob turned to violence to insist on a different electoral result. The president of the United States, of all people, was fine with that.

Give that any name you like. It was our darkest day since 9/11 or Pearl Harbor.

And we did it to ourselves. 

•      We have learned the assumptions that are the underpinnings of the violence -- that violent rebellion and violence in the face of unwelcome or unaccepted electoral results is justified in the minds of many Americans.

This is fascism, not populism.

If millions of Americans believe that violence against the government, and fellow Americans, over politics, is justifiable, our civil and constitutional order is already torn.

•      We have learned that the former president is both a cause and a symptom of this destructive impulse toward the republic. Not just the Capitol, which symbolizes the republic, but the republic itself.

It has not been proven that Donald Trump intended violence. That goes to intent and mindset. But it has been proven that he fomented the violence and did nothing to stop it and was not offended by it. This is appalling, unacceptable and unforgivable.

I have no desire to see an ex–president behind bars. And I leave the legal parsing to the lawyers. But Donald Trump is demonstrably unfit for high office. His temperament is unfit. He does not understand, or indeed believe in, our system of government. He does not understand the office he held. And his love for the country, even his own people, whom he equates with the country, is insufficient.

The country and its citizens exist for him, not the other way around.

Who knows whether he is deluded or a sly and sociopathic chancer. It does not matter. He must never be near the Oval Office again.

Trump was willing to do anything to hang on to power. Anything. No matter the harm done to the nation.

The committee has firmly established that.

Now, Republicans and conservatives need to continue to step up.

But it is very important that people who in 2016 and 2017 thought Trump deserved a chance to be heard, and once elected, to govern, and that he might have something to give the nation, vulgarian though he clearly was -- that THEY stand up. I am one. I thought, in the early days, that he represented something real and that he might not be the worst president in American history. I was dead wrong on both counts.

For I do not believe that most people who voted for Trump in 2016 or 2020 want the nation’s laws, customs, or institutions trashed. They do not want the Capitol or our representatives attacked. They do not want civil unrest.

They want limited government and cultural conservatism, not fascism.

• Finally, the committee has shown how close we were to a full-blown constitutional crisis. Judge Luttig has said that if Mike Pence had done Donald Trump’s bidding and thrown the election into question, we would have been “… plunged into a revolution within a paralyzing constitutional crisis.”

This, from one of the most astute, but also most conservative, legal minds we have.

It is imperative that we fix the Electoral Count Act of 1887 and eliminate any possibility of fraud and mischief in the Electoral College.

The other imperative is that the Republican Party embrace democracy and constitutional patriotism -- of the kind that Richard Nixon exhibited when he accepted the election of 1960 or that Gerald Ford exhibited when he pardoned Nixon in 1973.

The Republican Party must purge itself of any taint of white nationalism, or fascism. And it must purge itself of Donald Trump.

If it cannot do that, conservatives must start a new conservative party that will defend the rule of law and the republic itself.