On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell threw cold water on a proposed bipartisan commission to investigate the attack on Capitol Hill on January 6th, slamming the proposal as “partisan by design.”
The Kentucky Republican rejected a draft version of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s proposed commission, saying that any large-scale review of the insurrection must also include an analysis of broader political violence — a nod to GOP complaints about a wave of protests across the country last summer that followed the death of George Floyd at the hands of police.
“If Congress is going to attempt some broader analysis of toxic political violence across this country,” McConnell said, according to Politico. “Then, in that case, we cannot have artificial cherry-picking of which terrible behavior does and does not deserve scrutiny,” he added.
McConnell also indicated that he would be open to a commission narrowly focused on security on the Hill.
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“We could do something narrow that looks at the Capitol, or we could potentially do something broader to analyze the full scope of the political violence problem in this country,” McConnell added. “We cannot land at some artificial, politicized halfway point.”
McConnell’s remarks come as two Senate committees are pressing on with a joint bipartisan investigation into the security failures that allowed a pro-Trump mob to breach the Capitol while lawmakers were certifying Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.
Democrats hope — as Pelosi suggests — to recreate the spirit of the 9/11 Commission, a bipartisan review of the 2001 terrorist attacks that’s considered a model for intensive after-action reviews of nationally significant moments.
