The Republican stinking, disgusting, scum-sucking, cowardly cover-up

Fuck bi-partisanship. It's time to take the gloves off.

A “regular tourist visit” at the Capitol

Reporters stopped West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin in the hallway of his senate offices yesterday and asked him if he was willing to vote to kill the filibuster in order to pass the bill establishing a bi-partisan commission to investigate the insurrection on January 6.  “I’m not willing to destroy our government, no,” Manchin said as he attempted to push his way through the scrum of reporters.  “I think we'll come together. You have to have faith there's ten good people."

There aren’t 10 “good people” in the entire Republican Party you drooling fool.  It wasn’t folly to expect that Republicans would vote to move the bill forward this morning.  It was idiocy.  They’ve been lying about what happened on January 6 since the early hours of the morning of January 7, and they’re going to keep lying that the assault on the Capitol was “like a regular tourist visit” as long as they feel they can get away with it.  This is Republican politics 101.  There are quite literally hours of videos of thousands of Trump supporters invading the Capitol, hours of videos of them attacking Capitol police officers with pipes and “bear spray” and flag poles and riot shields and everything else, hours of videos of raging white supremacist lunatics rifling the desks of senators inside the senate chamber, and these Republicans are going to lie every time a microphone is pointed at them about what happened.  They do it reflexively.  It’s the way they do business.  It’s who they are. 

And Manchin expected 10 of these “good people” to vote with Democrats to set up a commission that would expose the truth of what Republicans did on January 6, that might cause some of them to testify under oath about what they did that day, that would doubtlessly go a long way to tie their putative “leader,” Donald Trump, to the fomenting of the riot?

Fuck bi-partisanship.  It’s time to do exactly what the party that gave birth to the movement that caused the insurrection does every single day.  It’s time to take the gloves off and fight.

Nancy Pelosi shouldn’t even wait until the end of this holiday weekend to announce her intention to empanel a select committee of the House to investigate the insurrection.  She should come right out and say it’s not going to be a bi-partisan committee.  It’s going to be chaired by a Democrat.  There will be more Democrats than Republicans on the committee.  The committee will have subpoena powers that can be exercised by the Democratic chairman, or by a majority vote of the committee.  The committee will hold televised hearings that will make the Trump impeachment hearings look like an exercise in comity.   

Democrats tried the bi-partisan route.  They agreed to every change the Republicans demanded to the bill establishing the bi-partisan commission.  Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy even said he would support the commission…until he took a phone call from Mar a Lago or something and decided he wouldn’t support it.

So fuck Kevin McCarthy.  Fuck Mitch McConnell and his “do me a favor and vote no” to his fellow Republican poodles.  And most of all, fuck the man that caused the whole damn thing, Donald Trump, and his continuous barrage of lies about the “rigged” election and how he “won by a landslide.”  Everyone knows it’s all bullshit.  Every single House Republican, every single Senate Republican.  They all know what happened on January 6 because they were there!  They were terrified!  That’s on video, too! 

They all know Trump lost the election by seven million votes.  Every one of them knows that the Capitol of the United States was never under assault, not even during the Civil War, in the way it was on the day that Donald Trump incited his white supremacist terrorist mob to break down its doors and send the entire House of Representatives and the entire Senate scuttling away to hide in basement rooms and cower in fear that Trump’s terrorists would breach their defenses and beat them or kill them.

Nancy Pelosi should come right out and make it clear that in the absence of a bi-partisan commission, her select committee isn’t going to stop until it has exposed every conspiracy that led to the events of January 6.  It’s not going to stop until it exposes every crime committed that day, no matter who committed them – rioters, congressional staff, members of congress, Capitol police, nobody will be spared. 

Republicans thought they could drag Hillary Clinton through the mud with their Benghazi committee?  How about dragging these recalcitrant Republicans through some facts.  Pelosi should put Democrats on the select committee who will make Trey Gowdy look like Howdy Doody.  Put some former prosecutors on there.  Appoint some Democrats with teeth who aren’t afraid to use them.  She should appoint a committee that will kick some ass and take some names, that will dominate the news cycle with its hearings, that will drive the Republican Party absolutely insane.

They actually thought they could stage an assault on the United States Capitol and overturn the results of the election of 2020 and install Donald Trump as president in defiance of the vote of the people.  If only a few things had gone differently, if only a few Capitol police hadn’t held the line as long as they did, it could have turned out much, much worse.  They were after, among others, Nancy Pelosi herself.  She might have been among those who were killed. 

Let’s show them that Democrats can play for keeps, because the sad thing is, that’s what it’s going to take if we want to win. If we don’t act to save our democracy, it is going to die.