A few recent stories have suggested that there's trouble brewing inside the House Republican caucus when it comes to deciding what, exactly, ought to be done with the Jan. 6 committee if Republicans retake the House in the upcoming midterm elections.
While Republicans have regularly threatened the special committee's probe with promises to reshape it into a tool for subpoenaing Democrats and broadcasting crackpot theories about the "true" origins of the pro-Trump efforts to nullify a United States election, there won't be a special committee to corrupt in the next Congress—unless a theoretical Republican majority specifically votes to have one. The current special committee will expire at the end of the current Congress, whether they're done with their probe or not.
Two stories, from Politico and Axios, have popped up to report that despite the frothing promises of Team Treason—that is, of some of the House Republicans who have been most vocal in spreading hoaxes about the election's legitimacy and is threatening the two fellow Republicans who are assisting in the House probe in its attempt to investigate the true scope of the coup plans—the prospects of the Jan. 6 committee being repurposed remain slim.
Politico reports that many House Republicans want the whole thing to go away, correctly intuiting that the longer the nation talks about the day Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers attempted to topple the United States government, the worse it gets for every Republican candidate trying to pretend they're not on board with the whole lurch-to-fascism thing.
The Axios version of the story consists basically of Rep. Jim Banks—whose appointment to the Jan. 6 committee was vetoed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after Banks and Rep. Jim Jordan made it clear that they saw their appointments as a means to sabotage the probe—pushing out the House saboteurs' preferred talking points.
Banks, Jordan, and the other in-it-up-to-their-eyeballs Republicans want to turn the "investigation" into a probe targeting Capitol law enforcement and Democrats as the real evildoers of the day. Because, sure, a violent pro-Trump mob may have attacked at Trump's behest and prowled the halls looking for Trump's named political enemies, all of it an open attempt to overthrow the government and reinstate Trump as the nation's leader—but it’s Nancy Pelosi's fault for letting them.
That's the strategy the pro-sedition House Republicans have come up with to block subpoenas of Republican coup allies and refocus the whole probe back onto the people who attempted to stop their coup, and Banks is pressing it now perhaps as a direct response to other House Republicans admitting to reporters that they're getting cold feet.
In practice, this is all fairly pointless speculation. What House Republicans "want" on any given day is mostly irrelevant when it comes to what they might "want" one year later. By the time the Jan. 6 committee is disbanded, Banks will likely have moved on to new theories. Frothers like Rep. Troy Nehls will have convinced themselves that special agents dressed as construction workers were looking to spread critical race theory—possibly through peppy dance numbers.
As for how House leadership "wants" to address the Jan. 6 coup attempt, it matters approximately not at all. There has never been a case where House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has not buckled to the crazies of his party. If Banks, Jordan, and Trump's other top allies want to arrest Nancy Pelosi and hold a mock trial accusing her of being the "antifa" mastermind goading Republicans into acts of sedition, McCarthy will grump gently about it, resist it, get a call from Trump, and flip-flop into supporting the whole thing because that is what he has always done. Leadership has no control of the crackpot caucus, and the crackpot caucus has the support of the Dear Leader who attempted the coup in the first place.
The most likely outcome is that the current committee would be disbanded and immediately replaced by a half-dozen or more "separate" Benghazi-style investigations intended as vehicles for spreading preferred Republican conspiracy theories from the midterms right up to the next presidential election and whether that will damage the party or boost it doesn't much matter. The party will not act based on what is "best" for their election chances. The Republican Party has no such remaining control; it will choose the most extremist path and bank on an extremist base to respond.
For all the whining Republican politicians are doing about the extremist pro-Trump, coup-backing apologia from the Republican National Committee of late, there is no chance that the RNC, now purged fully of anyone who was seen as insufficiently loyal to any and all of Trump's most crackpot theories or corrupt schemes, will actually be reining things in. It is impossible. The party fully believes its own conspiracy theories; the penalty for not believing them is, as we have seen, censure or expulsion. It is a party of hoaxes. It was a party of hoaxes back when the same people insisted that "Benghazi" was a Hillary Clinton conspiracy but extorting a Ukrainian president to provide explicit reelection help is the Proper Way of Things.
The more pertinent question at the moment is whether Republicans with first-hand knowledge of Trump's actions on and before January 6 will be able to successfully sabotage the current January 6 probe by refusing to testify—an approach both minority leader McCarthy and the ever-frothing Rep. Jim Jordan are united on in every respect. The intent of every House Republican, save the two directly on the investigating committee, is to block investigation of how the crowd was assembled, whether Trump assembled it with the express purpose of interfering with Congress and delaying or scuttling the day's vote, and whether Trump or allies delayed responding to the violence in the hopes that it might work.
This is called "being a co-conspirator," and McCarthy and Jordan are two of the effort's most integral members. The real battle is not the premature planning as to just how Republicans will take revenge on House and federal investigators probing an act of violent insurrection, but to keep the current probes from gathering evidence that touches on any coup plotter other than those who were caught in actual violence. House Republicans are near-unanimous in their efforts to do that. Just as they sought to turn each one of the previous investigations of Trump-era corruption into retaliatory probes of whichever FBI agents, minor White House officials, journalists, whistleblowers, ambassadors, or other figures who dared testify against him.
It's the only response they have, and they will use it. But first, the people with direct knowledge of Trump's actions have to get away from the demands that tell us what they know, and that is what keeps the party awake at night.