First GQP Filibuster Test Today: What Will Sens. Manchin and Sinema Do When They Learn There Are Not 10 Republican ‘Patriotic Senators’?

On Thursday, Senate Republicans are expected to filibuster the bill creating a bipartisan commission to investigate the MAGA/QAnon seditious insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, which left five dead and about 140 police officers injured, CNN reports.

Dana Milbank writes today, McConnell focuses ‘100 percent’ on blocking Biden — and zero percent on America:

It has long been obvious that Mitch McConnell puts party before country, but this week he actually admitted it.

The Senate minority leader told Republican colleagues that they should oppose the creation of a Jan. 6 commission, no matter how it is structured, because it “could hurt the party’s midterm election message,” as Politico’s Burgess Everett reported.

And so, as early as Thursday, McConnell will use the filibuster to thwart a bipartisan effort to prevent further attacks on the U.S. government by domestic terrorists — because he thinks it’s good politics for Republicans.

 CNN adds, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has reached out to certain Republican Senators and asked them to vote against the January 6 commission bill as “a personal favor.”

Aaron Blake at the Washington Post writes, The great capitulation on the Jan. 6 commission:

In case there was any doubt about the fate of the bipartisan proposal for a Jan. 6 commission, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) pretty much said it all Wednesday.

While describing his support for the proposal, he conceded that it would probably only get three or four votes from Republican senators, right now. That’s both far shy of the 10 GOP votes required and would mean the bill would get less bipartisan support in the Senate than in the House, which is unusual these days. One in 6 House Republicans voted for it — a proportion that, if transferred to the Senate, would put the bill on the cusp of passage — but Senate leaders have tried hard to kill it, and that looks to be what’s happening.

Members of Congress have made a habit of capitulating to partisanship in recent years. But it’s difficult to find a better example than this: failing to agree on how to investigate an attack on yourself.

[T]he true reason for the GOP opposition, of course, has become increasingly clear: They don’t want to relive this because it’s bad for them politically. Both McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) sharply criticized Trump for his actions vis-a-vis Jan. 6. But the broader party has since then signaled it will stand by the former president, and constantly rehashing Jan. 6 ahead of a potentially promising 2022 election would seem to work against their efforts to regain power in two very tightly split chambers. The Senate’s No. 2 Republican, John Thune (S.D.), essentially said as much publicly, and Politico reports McConnell made this very raw political case against the commission to GOP senators.

[L]astly is the role of Democrats in all of this. The party is united behind both the proposal and the idea that this was an unconscionable attack on the American government — one that both undermined democracy and must be dealt with in the name of preserving our system of government. Yet thus far that hasn’t been enough to change the calculus for those who have resisted changing the filibuster rules (and the 60-vote threshold it involves).

Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), the two biggest Democratic proponents of the filibuster, issued a statement Tuesday calling on Republicans to find a way to get to “yes” on the commission. They said the commission is “a critical step to ensuring our nation never has to endure an attack at the hands of our countrymen again.”

The Guardian reports today:

Senator Joe Manchin fiercely criticized his Republican colleagues for opposing the bill to form a bipartisan commission to study the Capitol insurrection. “There’s no excuse for any Republican to vote against this commission since Democrats have agreed to everything they asked for,” the Democratic senator said in a statement. But Manchin told reporters he is still unwilling to eliminate the Senate filibuster in order to get the commission bill passed.

My statement on the January 6th Commission: pic.twitter.com/ZfNhQfKzmh

— Senator Joe Manchin (@Sen_JoeManchin) May 27, 2021

Q. Would you be willing to break the filibuster in order to get this passed (1/6 commision)? 

Manchin: I’m not willing to destroy our government, no. I think we’ll come together. You have to have faith there’s 10 good people. pic.twitter.com/b0DhBjZsEv

— Alan He (@alanhe) May 27, 2021

Aaron Blake concludes:

What’s clear in just about all of this is that this was very likely something that would have passed rather easily shortly after Jan. 6. But Congress, over time, has apparently found a way to get to “no.” And it has somehow done so on something involving a historic attack not just on democracy, but one that endangered many of them and led to deaths in the place where they work.

Nathalie Baptiste explains at Mother Jones that The GOP Is Turning the January 6 Insurrection Into a New Lost Cause:

On January 6, the day Congress was scheduled to certify the electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election and declare Joe Biden the victor, thousands of supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol. They looted congressional offices, vandalized the building, and assaulted hundreds of law enforcement officials. The insurrection left five dead—including Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick—and marked a dark day in the history of the United States. Among the countless photos that went viral was one of a man flying a Confederate flag inside the Capitol. That such a symbol was still proudly waved in America only foreshadowed the egregious whitewashing to come.

Rewriting history is a staple of American mythology. Across the country, one can find people who sincerely believe that slavery wasn’t that bad, the Civil War was fought over states’ rights, and that, had he not been murdered by a racist, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would’ve been a Republican today. American exceptionalism requires recasting the particularly ugly parts of our past into rosier scenarios. And now, just a few months after the insurrection at the Capitol, the Republican Party has laid the groundwork for repeating this grand tradition, creating their own version of the Lost Cause narrative from the Civil War. 

It’s not quite right to say that the Republican Party is living in an alternate reality. They actually experienced the reality that they have now chosen to completely reframe. At a House oversight committee hearing last week, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) sought to dramatically downplay the severity of the attack on January 6, comparing an armed mob to a “normal” visit by tourists. “As one of the members who stayed in the Capitol and on the House floor, and who with other Republican colleagues helped barricade the door until almost 3 p.m. that day from the mob who tried to enter,” he said, remaining grounded in reality thus far, “I can tell you, the House floor was never breached, and it was not an insurrection.”

It’s quite an imaginative leap to be one of the lawmakers (above) forced to barricade a door while a violent mob attempted to break through and still claim that the mob’s actions did not constitute an insurrection. But he was far from alone in this new appraisal of the event. As impressive as his mind-bending argument was—smashing windows and beating cops with flag poles was just another day at the American parliament—the GOP’s nearly unanimous attempts to engage in massive historical revisionism has one familiar precedent. If 156 years after the Civil War, millions of people believe that the Southern states were fighting for “states’ rights,” then surely today’s GOP can also convince them that the January 6 insurrection was just another protest.

Technically, the Confederacy only lasted four years, but in practice white supremacists have kept the dream of a pro-slavery state alive through the collective myth known as the Lost Cause. There are a few components to this cherished dogma. First is the racist belief that the Southern states that seceded from the Union in the run-up to the Civil War were righteous and justified and did so not to preserve slavery as an institution but as an assertion of constitutionally guaranteed state’s rights. This belief was further buttressed by the fact that Reconstruction—which was an attempt to reunite the country after the war and end discrimination against the newly freed people—was largely a failure. The failure of Reconstruction then further legitimized the fantasy that in the end the South was sort of right all along. 

After the Civil War, former Confederate states were readmitted fairly quickly, a ban on former Confederate soldiers serving in the government was short-lived, and white vigilantes and paramilitary groups wreaked havoc across the states. Their approach was to violently overtake governments and kill Black people and any white people politically aligned with them, all the while passing laws that made it impossible for Black people to exercise their civil rights. For the Southerners who continued to champion the myth of the Lost Cause, this era, which was marked by unspeakably horrific violence against Black people, was often conveniently ignored.

Reconstruction expert and historian Eric Foner describes the myth as advancing the proposition that “Reconstruction was a vindictive effort by Northerners to punish white Southerners, that Black people were incapable of taking part intelligently in a democratic government. And therefore, the overthrow of Reconstruction was legitimate.”

Fast-forward to the weeks and months after the insurrection, during which hundreds of people were charged with crimes ranging from entering a restricted building to assaulting law enforcement officials in connection with the insurrection. For some Republicans, however, the suspects are the real victims. “Where is the outrage about young people being unfairly treated?” Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) asked at the same hearing. “Joe Biden’s Justice Department is criminalizing political protest.” This is rich coming from the political party that has dozens of proposed bills that stifle free speech and criminalize protest. It’s also the first of what I assume will be a deluge of attempts to rewrite history. 

Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) also believes the insurrectionists are the real victims. “Outright propaganda and lies are being used to unleash the national security state against law-abiding US citizens—especially Trump voters,” he said at the hearing. “The FBI is fishing through homes of veterans and citizens with no criminal record and restricting the liberties of individuals that have never been accused of a crime.”

One possible strategy to set the record straight would be for Congress to form a commission to investigate what happened on January 6. Democrats are in favor of doing this and advanced legislation to create such a body. Unsurprisingly, the majority of Republicans, many of whom still believe Donald Trump won the election, are against it. A factual record would directly contradict the lies they’ve already told and will continue to churn out. House minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) opposed the idea of focusing only on what happened on January 6, because he disingenuously argued that the commission should look into “left-wing” violence like Black Lives Matter or other antiracist groups. “Given the political misdirections that have marred this process, given the now duplicative and potentially counterproductive nature of this effort, and given the Speaker’s shortsighted scope that does not examine interrelated forms of political violence in America, I cannot support this legislation,” he said in a statement.

Obviously, there is no reason to investigate liberal groups; the January 6 attackers had just come from a Trump rally during which the ex-president encouraged them to go to the Capitol. They were wearing Trump hats and waving Trump flags. But in order to reshape the history of what happened that day, the GOP wants to downplay it or even outright deny that it was an insurrection. It’s in this denial that the parallels between Reconstruction and the Capitol attacks are most worrisome. If Republicans succeed the way the South did during the Reconstruction era, the future story of January 6 will not be that it was a violent white supremacist attack on democracy, but rather that it was a heroic tale, a venerated Lost Cause for modern times.

The Neo-Confederate and crypto-fascist white nationalist Republicans in the Party of Trump are engaged in a slow-motion insurrection that is continuing and ongoing. Their goal is to complete their filed coup d’etat and end American democracy, and to create a GQP authoritarian banana republic, in which white minority rule forever maintains a tyranny of the minority.

Do Senators Manchin and Sinema really want to enable this tyranny? History will condemn them.