A Few Thoughts on the Hearings

I wanted to share a few quick thoughts with you before tonight's hearings.

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One very minor point is that for some time I've heard complaints to the effect of, "what has the committee been doing all this time? Most of what we've found out about January 6th has been from the media." This is mostly a misunderstanding. The great majority of reporting you've seen over the last six months revealing texts and other material about the insurrection originated with the committee's investigation. So this isn't an either/or. The committee investigation has almost certainly been the primary generator of new information even though very little of it has come officially from the investigation.

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The other issue is whether the committee can live up to the hype. Many Americans are convinced that none of this really matters. No one will face consequences no matter what is revealed. But precisely since many of the fruits of the investigation have already emerged in the press, is there a lot still to be learned? Is there enough game-changing information to sustain interest? I have no way of knowing the answer to this. But it has been striking to me that the top members of the committee have gone out of their way to say that there are lot of bombshells to come. We'll see.

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Finally, what is the goal of all this? I would say there are two goals. One is simply that when there's an armed insurrection aimed at overthrowing the government, you should compile a detailed record of what happened. You should do that regardless of whether it has any immediate effect on anything. The more practical goal of the hearings should be to put the country back in the mode it was in in the hours and days just after the insurrection. At the time the country overwhelmingly saw what happened as totally unacceptable and an effort whose leaders should either be prosecuted or at least written out of legitimate politics going forward.

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You get a feel for that in the recording two New York Times reporters released last night from the immediate aftermath of the insurrection in which Kevin McCarthy told his GOP colleagues that Republicans couldn't "sweep this under the rug." It's a piercing, telling revelation since McCarthy quickly steadied himself and then spent the next 18 months sweeping the whole matter under the rug. But having that comment preserved does capture the shock and realism of those initial days.

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It is worth remembering that though I think there was always little chance of it happening in the 48 hours following the insurrection Vice President Pence found it necessary to release a statement stating explicitly that he had decided he would not seek to remove Trump from office by means of the 25th amendment. It was really a crazy thought since that was really never what the 25th amendment was intended for. But for a brief moment the possibility seemed very real. Real enough that Pence initially wouldn't say what he would do and then felt the need to address it directly.

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This was all before the establishment GOP decided that the insurrection was, if not good, then at least completely fine. Once Republicans became functionally pro-insurrection, to many observers of American politics the whole matter became just another squabble between the two political parties. Just more politics.

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You'll never get back to that original moment. The shock is gone. Too many people have spent too much time building stories which justify and minimize what happened. But that is or should be the goal: getting back as much as possible to that initial moment when the gravity and seditious nature of what happened was too clear to be ignored.

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