Following the Senate GOP’s filibuster of a Jan. 6 commission bill, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia lamented the outcome by claiming that enough Republican senators would have voted to advance the bill if Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hadn’t gotten in the way.
"It was an awful lot of Republicans that would have supported it if it hadn't been for [McConnell’s] personal intervention,” Manchin told reporters, suggesting that some 13 or 14 had favored the commission but for McConnell’s personal appeal to block it. Instead, just six Senate Republicans voted to proceed. "To see fear take over is truly disheartening," Manchin noted.
Presumably, Manchin intended to suggest that, yes, reasonable Republicans exist and more than a dozen of them would have patriotically voted for an investigation into a failed coup attempt if only McConnell hadn’t meddled in the outcome. Instead, what Manchin highlighted was exactly how self-defeating it is to negotiate with Senate Republicans. Mitch McConnell effectively has veto power over every vote, and he has stated repeatedly and relentlessly that his sole objective is dooming President Joe Biden’s agenda.
"100% of my focus is on stopping this new administration,” McConnell told reporters earlier this month in no uncertain terms. He also proceeded to claim “total unity” within the caucus around that effort, from political opportunists like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas to supposed moderates like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.
So, for instance, even as lead GOP negotiator Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia assures everyone that Senate Republicans are making a good-faith effort to cut a deal with the White House on Biden’s jobs plan, it’s all a ridiculous charade. No matter what Capito’s true intentions are, McConnell will nix it, and he hasn’t been the least bit shy about admitting it. In fact, it’s a clearly stated badge of honor for him.
Killing a bipartisan Jan. 6 commission is just the latest feather in McConnell’s cap. And if he can supposedly convince his caucus to kill an investigation into “the greatest assault since the Civil War on the Capitol,” as Biden put it, then he will gleefully snuff out every other measure on which Democrats seek bipartisan agreement.
Following the Senate vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed to move ahead with an investigation “to find the truth” that will now clearly be led by Democrats and will just as clearly be decried by Republicans as a partisan sham. But Democrats—who live in the real world—having control over that inquiry may turn out to be a better scenario in the long run, anyway. The fact remains, however, that Pelosi effectively met every one of the GOP’s demands for the commission and then Republicans still muzzled the effort. One question that will hang over the probe for its entirety is: What do Republicans have to hide?
Manchin said as much on Thursday. “Democrats have basically given everything they’ve asked for,” he told reporters, adding that “there is no reason” to oppose the commission now “unless you just don’t want to hear the truth.”
A day later, following the failed vote, Manchin issued a statement calling Republicans’ filibuster of the commission a “betrayal of the oath we each take” and saying he was “sorry that my Republican colleagues and friends let political fear prevent them from doing what they know in their hearts to be right.”
It’s unclear that Manchin’s whip count of how many of his GOP “colleagues and friends” would have voted for the bill is accurate, but the point is: It doesn’t matter. Whatever Manchin thinks lies in the hearts of GOP senators is merely a hostage of McConnell’s legislative terrorism. That’s a simple fact. And the more time Joe Manchin spends dithering, the more he jeopardizes everything Biden is trying to achieve with the precious little time in which Democrats have to achieve it.
