As Democrats and their mainstream media allies lathered up to commemorate last month’s anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol incursion like it was the firing on Fort Sumter, House Republicans were accusing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of deliberately stonewalling the release of information about her own role in the events of the day.
And with the Democrats’ hold on power in the House looking shaky ahead of this year’s midterm elections, Pelosi’s partisans should be getting nervous.
While the committee’s clear purpose is to smear former President Donald Trump and his supporters, the country might be getting a different view of how Pelosi and her party are actually operating.
In a letter released Jan. 3, Illinois Republican Rep. Rodney Davis, the ranking minority member of the House Administration Committee, called out Pelosi for refusing repeatedly over the past year to cooperate with their requests for information from House officers who answer directly to the speaker’s office.
New letter from @RodneyDavis and @HouseAdmnGOP. Give it a read. pic.twitter.com/6zVW0lE0Ni
— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) January 3, 2022
Meanwhile, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has been indicted by a federal grand jury on a contempt charge for defying subpoenas from Pelosi’s handpicked Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol.
And as CNN reported in December, the full House has voted largely along party lines to recommend a criminal contempt investigation by the Department of Justice into former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows for halting his cooperation with the committee.
The double standard is painfully obvious.
Democrats are determined to try to make Jan. 6 the equivalent of Pearl Harbor Day and 9/11 rolled into one, and take criminal action against political opponents who don’t cooperate with a sham committee investigating it, yet Pelosi feels free to withhold information about her own decisions related to the day.
“There is irony in the fact that at the same time House Democrats are holding witnesses in criminal contempt of Congress for raising genuine questions of legal privilege, you continue to obstruct Republican access to House records relating to the security preparedness of the Capitol complex,” Davis wrote.
“Irony” doesn’t seem to be quite the right word here, though Davis might have been trying to maintain a veneer of civility in the correspondence. “Arrogance” describes it much better. “Dishonesty,” “cynicism” and “naked abuse of power” fit the bill as well.
Essentially, Pelosi’s committee — made up mostly of Democrats, along with NeverTrump Republicans Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — is following the playbook of the modern Democratic Party and the progressive movement in general: Establish rules for opponents to follow, then feel free to disregard them whenever it’s politically or personally inconvenient.
Specifically, the Davis letter asks Pelosi what decisions she made with the House Sergeant at Arms and the Capitol Police leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, when Congress was to certify the votes of the Electoral College that made Joe Biden president; what Pelosi did that day; and why House officers she controls are withholding information Republicans are seeking.
“If you are truly interested in working with Republicans to improve the Capitol security posture, I demand that you direct all House officers immediately to stop obstructing our oversight,” Davis wrote.
The key there is that first clause: “If you are truly interested …”
The interest of Pelosi and her party in the Jan. 6 investigation is not motivated primarily by security — if security is even a factor at all.
It’s about using the committee and the slavish attention it gets from the mainstream media to continue the charade that it’s Trump and his supporters who are the danger to the American democratic republic.
In the first quarter of the 21st century, it’s Pelosi and her party that have been the danger to the country established by the Founding Fathers.
Democrats are the party of rampant abuse of executive power in the Barack Obama “pen and phone” presidency and its current, farcical iteration under President Joe Biden and his disastrous executive orders and unconstitutional mandates.
It was Democrats and their acolytes in the media who conducted the four-year de facto coup attempts of “Russia collusion” investigations and sham impeachments against Trump and his White House, or the current mania to destroy the Senate as a check on populist passions, or explode the legitimacy of the Supreme Court by turning it essentially into an unelected lawmaking body through court-packing.
It’s Democrats who are the real danger here. Those who can’t see that are simply blindly partisan, or fools.
And now, it’s Pelosi’s Democrats who are trying to use criminal prosecutions against political opponents for withholding supposedly vital information, while the speaker herself is engaging in the same conduct.
With a fingernail-thin majority in the House, and not even a majority in the tied Senate, Democrats have been behaving since January like a party with the full powers of a mandate from the people.
Those days are almost certain to be over after the November midterms — thanks to the failures of the Biden presidency and the repellent behavior of Democrats on Capitol Hill.
When that Democratic power is gone, Nancy Pelosi might be, too, but her partisans are still going to be in office.
The Davis letter is just another sign that there’s going to be a reckoning. Any Democrat who isn’t nervous about that has 10 months to think it over.
The date they’ve really got to worry about isn’t Jan. 6, 2021. It’s Nov. 8, 2022, when, if history holds and the good sense of the American voter returns, the long national nightmare of Democratic power in Congress will be over.
That’s a day every sane American should be looking forward to.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
