Category: Congress

This week marked the beginning of the end of “The United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, more commonly known as the January 6th Committee.”

Congress has now adjourned until after the election, which Democrats will lose, and so, while we might see some further theatrics during the lame-duck sessions before the 118th Congress convenes in January, this was their big finale: “Let’s subpoena Trump!”

It so happened that I decided to switch my home-office TV to MSNBC on Friday (I watch MSNBC so you don’t have to), and on Morning Joe, they featured this interview with Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland):

 

“… the terrible violence … scrambling to get more police and military reinforcements on the scene … the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and insurrectionists … the attempted political coup and violent insurrection … the mobilizing of a domestic violent extremist movement …”

Listening to that, I was struck by how easily these hyperbolic phrases tumbled out of Raskin’s mouth, as evidence of how insulated inside the echo chamber Democrats have become and, of course, the “journalist” Willie Geist is part of that echo chamber. He is as objective about the J6 Committee as my teenage daughter is objective about Harry Styles.

The predicate of the J6 “investigation,” the fundamental tenet of the belief system in which the Capitol riot was an “attempted political coup,” is that there is no reason to believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent. If no reasonable person could suspect that the election was stolen, then what happened on J6 was an illegal “insurrection,” an attempt to overthrow the legitimate government. Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) are unwilling to hear the arguments made or to examine the evidence cited by those who claim that Biden was not legitimately elected. The bedrock assumption of Democrats is that Biden was elected in a landslide — 81 million votes! the most popular presidential candidate in history! — and thus they view any expression of doubt about Biden’s legitimacy as “insurrectionist” crazy-talk.

This is not how discourse in a democratic society is supposed to operate. Controversies over public policy would never occur, if we all shared the same set of beliefs, and so the fact that there is controversy about any subject (in this case, the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election) requires a public hearing of arguments on both sides of the dispute, so that the electorate may be fully informed. The J6 Committee deliberately avoided such a discussion. Indeed, the whole purpose of this committee (which, by the way, lacks legitimacy under the normal rules of House procedure) was to criminalize doubt about the 2020 election.

It is one thing, when partisans on either side of dispute are seeking to rally their supporters, to make a one-sided argument in favor of a particular policy. This is entirely normal in politics. Yet the proceedings of a congressional committee are not supposed to be partisan rallies. Pelosi’s charade of phony “bipartisanship” — handpicking Trump-haters Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger as “Republican” members of the select committee, over the objections of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — cannot disguise the one-sided nature of the J6 Committee’s business. At no time in the operations of this committee has there been any fair consideration of the views of 74 million Americans who voted to reelect President Trump, 77% of whom think cheating affected the 2020 election.

Now, it may be that, after hearing everything that election skeptics had to say on this subject, most Americans would still conclude that Biden was legitimately elected, and therefore would believe that the protest of the January 6 certification of Biden’s election — which is what the rally at the Capitol was supposed to be, a peaceful protest — was inspired by erroneous (but sincere) beliefs. There is a world of difference between a protest motivated by a sincere sense of grievance and an “attempted political coup,” and yet at no time did the J6 Committee ever allow any consideration of the election doubts that inspired the events of J6.

Furthermore, and this is equally crucial, Democrats and the media absolutely refuse to recognize that the outbreak of violence at the Capitol in January 2021 was clearly inspired by the months of “Black Lives Matter” riots that broke out in May 2020 — riots that the Democrats enthusiastically applauded. Many millions of dollars of damage were inflicted, and many people killed or injured, during the weeks of arson, vandalism and looting which CNN reporter Omar Jimenez infamously described as “fiery but most peaceful” protests.

CNN ran the chyron tonight: "FIERY BUT MOSTLY PEACEFUL PROTESTS AFTER POLICE SHOOTING" while a fire raged in the background. pic.twitter.com/nEIKhTrepE

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) August 27, 2020

By applauding this destruction, Democrats thereby legitimized violent “protests,” and if the Capitol rioters believed there would be no repercussions for their actions on January 6 — well, why shouldn’t they believe that? Antifa thugs and mobs of urban looters had gotten away with criminal activity which everybody saw happening live on television throughout the summer of 2020, and Democrats never objected to those “mostly peaceful” protests. Yet here was Jamie Raskin on MSNBC Friday morning, speaking of Republican voters as “a domestic violent extremist movement,” and Willie Geist did not object to this partisan smear.

Well, this will all be fading in our rearview mirror soon enough. Anyone who looks at the poll numbers can see that Democrats are going to get wiped out in the midterms, and the proceedings of the J6 Committee will be remembered as symptomatic of Orange Man Bad Syndrome.

All we have to do is Keep Calm and Vote Republican.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!

 

“A show trial is a mock or make-believe trial in which the guilt of the party is predetermined. The trial is just a form of theater. Lenin called them ‘model trials.’ The aim was not to discover the truth — which was supposedly already known — but to stage a propaganda exhibition.”
— Roger Kimball

What does Kimberly Guilfoyle’s speaking fee have to do with the alleged “threat to democracy” that the House Select Committee claims to be investigating? Nothing, so far as I can tell, and yet there’s the headline in the Washington Post (“Publix heiress paid Kimberly Guilfoyle’s $60,000 speaking fee on Jan. 6”) at the top of Memeorandum. An acquaintance who was subpoenaed by the J6 Committee described their requests for texts and emails as a “fishing expedition,” making broad categorical requests for communications in the apparent hope of finding something useful to embarrass or discredit either the subject of the subpoena or some other target of the investigation. Like the revelation of Guilfoyle’s speaking fee, these “fishing expedition” subpoenas show that the committee isn’t seeking to prove any actual crimes, but rather seeks more generally to smear Republicans. In terms of what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, this isn’t such a mystery that a congressional investigation is necessary. Most of us (by which I mean, people who pay attention to politics) watched the thing happen live, in real-time, streaming on video and social media. Yet the committee hearings — which so many people have compared to Soviet-era “show trials” — continue to generate headlines as if Benny Thompson and his comrades were actually making newsworthy discoveries.

In true Stalinist fashion, these hearings are utterly one-sided. All of the witnesses appearing live before the committee — e.g., the bloated has-been Chris Stirewalt — have been hand-picked to give testimony reinforcing the foregone conclusion that (a) there was no reason to doubt the result of the 2020 election and therefore (b) the protest against certification of the Electoral College vote was inherently illegitimate, a seditious “insurrection.” There is no cross-examination of these witnesses, no one at the hearings who represents the opposing viewpoint. Most importantly, there is no ranking Republican member of the committee. Nancy Pelosi rejected House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy’s choices for the committee, instead appointing anti-Trump Republicans of her own choosing, so that the composition of the Select Committee’s membership is a violation of House rules. “Norms, restored.”

At no time during the Select Committee’s proceedings is anyone going to mention why so many Republicans believed (and most GOP voters still believe) that Biden didn’t actually win the election. The election was effectively decided by the results in three states (Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin) with a combined 37 Electoral College votes (EV) in which Biden’s reported margin of victory was less than 1% of the total:

Georgia (16 EV)
Biden ….. 2,473,633 (49.5%)
Trump …. 2,461,854 (49.2%)
Margin …. 11,779 (0.236%)

Arizona (11 EV)
Biden ….. 1,672,143 (49.4%)
Trump …. 1,661,686 (49.1%)
Margin …. 10,457 (0.309%)

Wisconsin (10 EV)
Biden ….. 1,630,866 (49.5%)
Trump …. 1,610,184 (48.8%)
Margin …. 20,682 (0.627%)

Switch those 37 Electoral College votes from Biden to Trump, and the result would have been an Electoral College tie — 269 EVs for each. So about 43,000 votes in three states actually made the difference. It furthermore bears pointing out that Biden’s margin in two other states (Pennsylvania and Nevada) was also rather slender:

Pennsylvania (20 EV)
Biden ….. 3,458,229 (50.1%)
Trump …. 3,377,674 (48.8%)
Margin …. 80,555 (1.165%)

Nevada (6 EV)
Biden ….. 703,486 (50.1%)
Trump …. 669,890 (47.7%)
Margin …. 33,596 (2.391%)

Now, while the numerical margin was larger in Pennsylvania, it was statistically closer, percentage-wise, than Nevada. And in both states, Republicans were suspicious of “shenanigans” in major Democrat-controlled cities. Pennsylvania Republicans pointed to Philadelphia, where Joe Biden got more than 600,000 votes, while Nevada Republicans pointed to Clark County (Las Vegas) where Biden got more than 500,000 votes. As to exactly how such “shenanigans” happened, some of my friends who are obsessed with the topic could lecture you for hours on the details, but the subject bores me to tears, and I’ll just summarize my general impression that this involved “ballot harvesting” of the mail-in ballots which were mandated as an emergency COVID-19 measure. My point is not to argue about such details, but rather to say that it’s not really a far-fetched “conspiracy theory” to suspect that the 2020 election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. Far be it from me to claim it is proven as a fact that Democrats stole the election, but neither am I inclined to argue with anyone who believes it was stolen.

All of this is relevant to the J6 “Stop the Steal” rally which led to the so-called “insurrection” that Nancy Pelosi’s Select Committee claims to be investigating in this show trial. Tens of thousands of Trump supporters showed up for the rally at the Ellipse — peaceably assembling to express their grievances, just as the First Amendment says — in an effort to make it clear to Congress that they didn’t think Biden won the election, and thus hoping to prevent certification of the Electoral College vote. This was not illegal, nor was this protest manufactured by “Trump’s big lie,” as Democrats have insisted. That is to say, there were (and still are) millions of Republican voters who watched the returns on Election Night, gathering the impression that Trump was on the verge of winning re-election, only to wake up the next day and be told that Biden had won, and at that moment became instantly convinced they were the victims of a massive election fraud. They decided this on their own, independently of any claim made by Trump. So a central assumption of the J6 Committee investigation — i.e., that the crowd who gathered for the “Stop the Steal” rally were “manipulated” and “incited” by Trump — is flatly false. Those people didn’t need any incitement from anybody to be mad as hell about the election, and if a few hundred of them got so mad that they broke the law by knocking over police barricades and storming the Capitol — well, they were “mostly peaceful” protesters, eh?

The actual purpose of Nancy Pelosi’s J6 Committee is not to “investigate” what happened during the riot, since we all saw what happened with our own eyes, but rather to scapegoat and smear Republicans as part of the propaganda operation aimed at shifting votes in this fall’s midterm elections. They intend, furthermore, to intimidate anyone who might raise questions about the fairness of future close elections that Democrats win, and beyond that, to promote the impression that any Republicans who complain too much are potential “domestic terrorists.”

In September 1936 [Nikolai] Yezhov replaced [Genrikh] Yagoda as the head of the NKVD. More than any other police chief, Yezhov was prepared to indulge Stalin’s paranoic fantasies by fabricating evidence of ‘counter-revolutionary conspiracies’ and ‘spy rings’ everywhere. He had curried Stalin’s favour by uncovering the Kremlin Affair in 1935.
For several years, Yezhov had promoted the theory that, on Trotsky’s orders from abroad, Zinoviev and Kamenev had been plotting to murder Stalin and other members of the Party leadership, including Kirov. On this basis, Stalin reopened the Kirov investigation. In August 1936, Zinoviev, Kamenev and fourteen other Party leaders were put on trial for treason. All of them were sentenced to death, along with 160 other people arrested in connection with the trial.
This was the first of several ‘show trials’ during 1936-38. Their aim was to expose a coordinated ring of ‘spies’ and ‘terrorists’ organized by former oppositionists. It was not enough to convict and punish them: the aim of the show trials was to prove the existence of these ‘conspiracies’ beyond doubt by having the accused confess their guilt before the Party and the world (unaware of the torture used to extract their confession). In NKVD circles the confession was regarded as the highest form of proof. There was no other evidence.

The larger purpose of the “show trials” was to consolidate Stalin’s power by eliminating potential rivals while, at the same time, creating a justification for more repressive measures by the Communist dictatorship. And this was all helpful as a distraction from the increasingly obvious economic failures of the Soviet experiment. At the same time Zinoviev and other former Bolshevik leaders were being purged and subjected to “show trials,” the collectivization of Soviet agriculture was reaching the 90% level, and far from providing the bountiful harvest the Communists had promised, hunger was widespread. Millions had died in the Ukraine terror famine, and many tens of thousands of peasants had been executed or sentenced to prison labor camps — the population of the gulags was nearly 2 million by 1938.

Publicly punishing “enemies of the revolution” supplied Stalin with ready-made scapegoats for his regime’s failures. If the wheat harvest fell short, or if the meat ration was reduced, the conspiracy of Stalin’s enemies was to blame — hadn’t they confessed to counter-revolutionary actions, after all? A similar propaganda function is served by Pelosi’s J6 show trials. Demonizing the opposition in public spectacles serves not only to distract public attention from the economic failures of the Biden administration, it also serves to discourage dissenters from speaking out, since they can see what kind of punishment the Democrats are willing to mete out to their opponents. Comparing it to The Great Terror may be hyperbolic, but the fact is that Democrats are essentially totalitarian in believing that they deserve a monopoly on political power, and that opposition should be repressed. Their totalitarian beliefs are the inspiration for their totalitarian tactics. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

 

Tristan Justice at The Federalist calls attention to a Washington Post article which admits that the committee “investigating” the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot is not actually an investigation, but is instead “a key part of the Democrats midterm strategy.” Because some of my acquaintances have been targets of this witch hunt, I can vouch for one main point that Tristan Justice is making, namely that the committee is pursuing “severe retribution against those involved with a constitutionally protected rally” — i.e., the “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse, in front of the White House, which is nearly 2 miles from the Capitol — “as opposed to perpetrators of the Capitol riot.”

In addition to this dishonest conflation of the legal, peaceful “Stop the Steal” rally with the riot at the Capitol, the Jan. 6 witch hunt committee is an effort to smear everybody who thinks the 2020 election wasn’t on the up-and-up as a dangerous menace — a threat to “Our Democracy.”

In a larger sense, what the Jan. 6 witch hunt is about is making Donald Trump an issue in the midterms, to distract from the glaring failures of the Biden administration by ginning up fear and hatred to motivate Democratic voters still afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome. The committee has kept up the scare by feeding leaks to the media, giving MSNBC and CNN an excuse to run stories about who has been subpoenaed, and various tidbits of who said what to who on the day of the riot, as if these details add anything useful to our understanding of what happened that day. There is no actual evidence that the organizers of the “Stop the Steal” rally were in cahoots with the separate group of people who breached security at the Capitol; there are no allegations of criminal activity by the rally organizers, yet they have had their phone records seized as part of the committee’s “investigation.”

Intelligent and honest people can see this witch hunt for what it is, but there are enough stupid and dishonest people out there to create an audience for the Democrats’ midterm message, which the media will amplify as loudly as possible in the lead-up to the November elections.

 

This is Day Three of Insurrection Anniversary Week, brought to you by Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) who have latched onto the Jan. 6 Capitol riot (“J6”) as their permanent campaign strategy:

House Democrats introduced a bill to erect a permanent “Attack On The Capitol” exhibit on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.
Co-sponsored by nearly 20 Democrats, the bill, dubbed the Capitol Remembrance Act, would “direct the Architect of the Capitol to design and install in the United States Capitol an exhibit that depicts the attack on the Capitol that occurred on January 6, 2021.”
The bill specifies that the project must be installed in a “prominent location” and retain a “permanent” status. Property “damaged during the attack,” photographs, and a plaque honoring the “sacrifice of heroes, including United States Capitol Police Officers Brian Sicknick” are among the exhibit requirements. Officer Sicknick, however, died of natural causes according to D.C.’s Chief Medical Examiner.
“The Architect may include artwork created to depict the attack on the Capitol,” the bill adds.
The legislation adds to the Democratic party’s continued exploitation of the events on January 6th, epitomized by President Biden, who recently referred to the event as “worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who professed she thought she “was going to die” when Trump supporters entered the U.S. Capitol despite the fact the congresswoman was in an entirely different building at the time of the attack.

In a related development, “Republican” Rep. Liz Cheney told CBS that “the single most important thing” about the Select House Committee investigation of J6 “is to ensure that Donald Trump is not the Republican nominee and that he certainly is not anywhere close to the Oval Office ever again.” She actually said that. In an interview. On television.

Cheney probably thinks we are too stupid to notice her clumsy admission of the real purpose of Nancy Pelosi’s witch hunt “investigation.”

(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

Democrats have become obsessed with the “insurrection” narrative because they think it will help them win elections; therefore, it will continue until Democrats lose elections. Act accordingly.