The Daily Escape:
Sunset, Seal Rock, OR – May 2022 photo by Mitch Schreiber
The House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol will hold six public hearings starting on June 9 and running for two weeks. TPM reports that some sessions will be aired during prime time, and others during the day. The televised hearings aim to give us a more complete story of what happened the day of the Capitol riot and what led up to it. They should dominate the national conversation right up to Novemberâs midterm elections.
Six hearings. The Senate Watergate committee held 51 public hearings, over six months. And they began hearings within a year of the June 1972 arrests for the Watergate burglary. The Senate created the committee in February of that year; the hearings began in May. President Nixon resigned on Aug. 8, 1974.
Are these hearings similar to Watergate? Margret Sullivan in the WaPo doesnât think so:
âThe nation that came together to force a corrupt president from office and send many of his co-conspirator aides to prison is a nation that no longer exists.â
She goes on to say that the Select Committeeâs June hearings wonât be all that visible:
âIâm willing to believe that the hearings will be dramatic. They might even change some peopleâs minds. But the amount of public attention they get will be minuscule compared with what happened when the folksy Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC) presided over the Senate Watergate Committee.â
Martin Longman compares today with Watergate: (brackets by Wrongo)
â…more than two years elapsed between the discovery of the [Watergate] break-in and Nixonâs fall from grace. It has now been almost a year and a half since the failed coup attempt of January 6, 2021. Weâre a bit behind schedule because the televised Watergate hearings began a mere 11 months after the initial arrests were made.â
Another difference was that in 1972, people went to the polls less than five months after the Watergate burglary was discovered. And Nixon was reelected in a landslide over George McGovern. This time around, itâs 18 months after the Jan. 6 event, and we still havenât had national elections.
When people went back to the polls in November 1974 after Nixon had been run out of office, the Democrats netted four US Senate seats and 49 seats in the House. This time around, before they vote, people should have a very clear idea of what led up to Jan. 6, as well as what happened on the fateful day.
We need to remember that Watergate showed us that evidence of criminality wasnât enough to turn the public decisively against a presidential contender. The criminality must be proven and demonstrated in a high-profile way in order to overcome the more general political considerations of the electorate.
Nixonâs lies were eventually exposed and the Republicans paid a hefty price. But only after the public Watergate hearings.
This means that thereâs a lot of pressure on the Jan. 6 Committee. And their job is harder because most Americans no longer watch television. Itâs likely that a small percentage of voters will watch the hearings, while a substantially higher percentage will see the most explosive parts in viral clips on the internet.
Finally, our political environment has changed for the worse in the past 48 years. While most Republicans defended Nixon at the start of the Watergate investigations, they accepted the legitimacy of the investigatory committee, and ultimately, turned against Nixon when the facts were clear.
This time, Republicans are attacking the committee as illegitimate and partisan. That means the evidence wonât be broadly accepted in their Party. In 1974, there came a time when Republicans would no longer defend Nixon.
If the current Select Committee does its job well, accusations that it is partisan will not be meaningful either to Independents, or to 10%-20% of Republicans who see the Jan. 6 coup attempt for what it was.
The stakes are high: The crimes of Jan. 6 are more serious than the Watergate crimes. An effort to overturn an election is more serious than an effort to cheat during an election. And most importantly, Trump, unlike Nixon, could run for president again (Nixon had already been elected twice).
While the Committee will eventually publish a report laying out their findings, they should immediately recommend that the DOJ pursue criminal cases and provide the DOJ with all relevant evidence.
As with Watergate, indictments should be doing the talking about the Jan. 6 crimes. In January, AG Merrick Garland said that the department âremains committed to holding all Jan. 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law.â Remember that the DOJ has a policy of not bringing indictments prior to an election, so time is of the essence for Americaâs phantom AG.
Itâs critical to act now. The American people need a clear picture of what happened and who is responsible.
That will give us a stark choice in the mid-term elections.
