Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Republicans offer a vile new excuse for opposing a Jan. 6 commission
With Republicans gearing up to kill a commission to examine the Jan. 6 insurrection, they have offered a barrage of comically weak excuses. They say the commission is “slanted,” that its work will overlap with other investigations, that its mission fails to target left-wing “political violence” and that Democrats are driven only by politics.
Now, with debate beginning in the Senate over the bill creating a commission that passed the House late Wednesday, Republicans are offering a vile new excuse. It somehow manages to be both candid and evasive at the same time.
Yet this excuse also reveals how deep flaws in our public discussion of this whole matter — by neutral media and Democrats alike — unwittingly enable GOP spin.
The new excuse is that we shouldn’t be wasting our time re-litigating the 2020 election.
Perry Bacon Jr/WaPo:
American democracy is in even worse shape than you think
We have four huge problems. I don’t see solutions to any of them.
By far the biggest problem is the Republican Party. Presented with a clear chance to move on from Trumpism after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, the GOP has instead continued its drift toward anti-democratic action and white grievance. The future looks scary. A Republican-controlled House could attempt to impeach Biden in 2023 and 2024 on basically any pretext, as payback for Trump’s two impeachments. If Republicans win the governorships of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin next year, taking total control in those key swing states, they could impose all kinds of electoral barriers for the next presidential election. The Republicans are laying the groundwork to refuse to certify a 2024 Democratic presidential victory should the GOP hold a House majority.
David Frum/Atlantic:
The Pro-Trump Culture War on American Scientists
Some are trying to turn the lab-leak theory into a potent political weapon.
Two questions have dominated politics throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Democrats and public-health experts have asked: What should we do? Former President Donald Trump, for his part, minimized the need to act. He instead spoke incessantly about a very different question: Whom should we blame?
...
In November 2020, a solid majority of American voters decided that the first of the two questions—What should we do?—was more urgent, and that Biden and his party offered the better answer.
But now that Biden’s administration is succeeding at bringing the pandemic under control within the United States, Trump’s preferred alternative question—Whom should we blame?—is reclaiming attention.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Republicans are likely to kill the Jan. 6 commission. But we have other options.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is set to hold a vote Wednesday on the bipartisan deal reached in the lower chamber to create a commission. That compromise was very fair and made concessions to both Republicans and Democrats.
But with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) opposed as well, it’s unlikely to get the stampede of support from House Republicans that might forestall a GOP filibuster in the Senate.
Congressional scholar Norman Ornstein is well positioned to explain this moment and where we go from here. That’s because he was an early and very prescient observer of the GOP’s radicalization against democracy who also happens to be an expert on congressional procedure.
Politico:
GOP defections over Jan. 6 commission deliver rebuke to McCarthy
The big bipartisan vote was a major rebuke to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who worked hard to minimize the brewing rebellion in his ranks over the commission. During the vote, McCarthy huddled in the back of the chamber with his staff, watching the vote tally tick upward as Republican after Republican registered their “yes” vote.
McCarthy’s handling of his party's internal divisions this week has revealed potential weaknesses in his leadership style — and offered a preview of how the California Republican might run the House one day.
Ed Yong/Atlantic:
What Happens When Americans Can Finally Exhale
The pandemic’s mental wounds are still wide open.
But there is another crucial difference between May 2020 and May 2021: People have now lived through 14 months of pandemic life. Millions have endured a year of grief, anxiety, isolation, and rolling trauma. Some will recover uneventfully, but for others, the quiet moments after adrenaline fades and normalcy resumes may be unexpectedly punishing. When they finally get a chance to exhale, their breaths may emerge as sighs. “People put their heads down and do what they have to do, but suddenly, when there’s an opening, all these feelings come up,” Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, the founder and director of the Trauma Stewardship Institute, told me. Lipsky has spent decades helping people navigate the consequences of natural disasters, mass shootings, and other crises. “As hard as the initial trauma is,” she said, “it’s the aftermath that destroys people.”
Dana Stevens/Slate:
Excuse Me If I’m Not Ready to Unmask
Early on in the pandemic, I vowed to set a high standard for COVID-19 avoidance.
Now that the reins of government have been taken by a president and a party that, whatever you think of their policy positions, at least appear united in their belief that mass death is a bad thing, much of the confusion and day-to-day terror of that first year has subsided. The speed and competency of the vaccine rollout has been nothing short of a miracle, the public-health achievement of the young century; we should all feel infinitely grateful to the research scientists, health-care workers, and public-health officials who have made it feasible to vaccinate millions of people in just a few months.
But excuse me if I, like many of the people I see around me, am not yet quite ready to expose my lower face. Early on in the pandemic, I made a vow with my family that we would set a high standard for COVID-19 avoidance. Not only were we not getting this virus ourselves, if we could help it, but we were taking no chances of inadvertently spreading it to anyone else, even if that did make for a long and lonely year without indoor gatherings and travel to see family and friends. I didn’t want to go to my grave thinking that I was a link in some chain of human interaction leading to someone else’s serious illness or death.
Dareh Gregorian/NBC News:
What the new criminal probe could mean for the Trump Organization
Legal experts say the New York attorney general's decision to team up with Manhattan prosecutors doesn't bode well for the former president's company.
Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner, a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, agreed that the two offices' teaming up was bad news for the Trump company.
"Two prosecutorial heads are better than one. To have that sort of synergy, that's bad for the target of the investigation. How bad? We just don't know," Kirschner said.