Where are the hearings?
It’s been eight weeks since Liz Cheney, the top Republican on the House select committee investigating the attack of on the U.S. Capitol of Jan. 6, 2021, promised “multiple weeks of public hearings” to detail everything the committee has learned about the riot and former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn an election he lost. Not only do we have no hearings yet, but we still have no idea when they will begin.
The one-year anniversary of the attacks has come and gone. Legislation to address some of the procedural weaknesses that Trump tried to exploit is moving ahead in the Senate before the committee reveals any of the evidence it has compiled. Eight weeks ago, the select committee was already slower than initial investigations of Watergate, Iran-contra, and the Trump-Ukraine scandals.
Each week, the committee’s case that it is investigating an urgent threat to the republic is harder to make. Every week, it becomes easier for Trump and his allies to argue that the insurrection is ancient news, and that Democrats are just digging it up now to embarrass Republicans before the midterm elections in November.
The threat is indeed urgent, and Democrats – and the two committee Republicans – are quite right to want to accumulate every detail of what happened. Doing so is not partisan; it’s patriotic. But the longer the lawmakers wait, the harder it will be to convince anyone open to convincing. And there aren’t all that many of those folks to begin with.