House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) indicated she is willing to create a select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol if efforts to establish a 9/11-style commission prove to be unsuccessful.
During an interview with USA Today, Pelosi said, “It’s always an option. It’s not my preference in any way. My preference would be to have a commission.”
Last month, Pelosi told MSNBC disagreements about the commission are “on the scope,” as IJR previously reported.
“The disagreements that we’re having about having a bipartisan commission, and it must be bipartisan, is on the scope,” Pelosi said.
She added, “They are, the other side, they don’t want any findings included in how we go. They don’t want… they want to treat something like Black Lives Matter peaceful demonstrations in a similar manner as they would do January 6th.”
Pelosi made it clear it needs to be bipartisan and “it cannot be bipartisan if the scope of it is to not draw any conclusion about what happened that day as the premise for how we would go forward and investigate it.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced his opposition to the proposed commission in February, as IJR previously reported.
“If Congress is going to attempt some broader analysis of toxic political violence across this country, then in that case, we cannot have artificial cherry-picking of which terrible behavior does and does not deserve scrutiny,” McConnell said.
He continued, “We could do something narrow that looks at the Capitol, or we could potentially do something broader to analyze the full scope of the political violence problem in this country.”
During the USA Today interview, Pelosi also shared what she would have done if she encountered Capitol protesters on Jan. 6.
“Well, I’m pretty tough. I’m a street fighter,” Pelosi said. “They would have had a battle on their hands.”
