Two Thursday opinion pieces, one from The New York Times and the other from The Washington Post, torched the January 6th Committee as “wholly ineffective,” “tedious” and done only for the sake of politics.
The Washington Post opinion column likened the committee, which concluded it’s televised hearings Thursday, to an overlong church sermon still being preached while congregants are thinking about brunch or Sunday football.
The Times guest essay claimed the committee is not shifting views about former President Donald Trump’s behavior and has acted too partisan to convince people the committee is defending democracy.
WASHINGTON, DC – OCTOBER 13: An image of former President Donald Trump is displayed during a hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol in the Cannon House Office Building on October 13, 2022 in Washington, DC. The bipartisan committee, in possibly its final hearing, has been gathering evidence for almost a year related to the January 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol. On January 6, 2021, supporters of former President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol Building during an attempt to disrupt a congressional vote to confirm the electoral college win for President Joe Biden.
(Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Written by contributing columnist Gary Abernathy, The Post’s opinion column did not hold back in describing how bloated and overbearing the committee has become. His opening said, “There are few things as irritating as a preacher who just won’t end his sermon until someone, anyone, finally steps forward to confess and repent, regardless of how far most minds long ago drifted off to thoughts of football, afternoon naps and Sunday dinner.”
He added, “That’s what the tedious Jan. 6 committee feels like, with committee members determined to convince everyone, no matter how tired, uninterested or skeptical, that former president Donald Trump is evil incarnate, that his followers are dangerously wayward enablers, and that renouncing them both is the only road to salvation.”
Instead of praising the bombshell final hearing as others in the media have, Abernathy called it a “monotonous rehash of what committee members apparently felt was their most damning and convincing details.”
Of course, Abernathy acknowledged that Trump’s “refusal to participate in the peaceful transfer of power was unpatriotic, dishonorable and dangerous,” but he said, “we knew those truths on Jan. 6, 2021. No congressional committee was needed to reveal them.”
He then asked, “So now that the preacher seems finally out of breath, what was the point of it all?” And he answered his own question, writing, “Politics, of course, was the point, and from the Democrats’ point of view, that’s entirely understandable.”
The Times guest essay, published by contributing opinion writer Christopher Caldwell gave a little more credit to the committee members but still admitted they’re not convincing many new people with the hearings.
He wrote that the committee “has been assiduous in its research, artful in its cinematography and almost wholly ineffective in shifting views about the storming of the U.S. Capitol in 2021 by a pro-Trump crowd.”
Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming, arrives to a hearing of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol in Washington, D.C., US, on Thursday, July 21, 2022. Former President Donald Trump’s 187 minutes of inaction as an armed mob attacked the US Capitol will be the focus of the second prime-time hearing by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Caldwell cited a Monmouth University poll to reinforce this claim, saying the poll “taken this summer during the committee’s hiatus found public opinion largely unchanged — even calcified.”
To illustrate the point further, he added, “The 65 percent of Americans who in late June remembered Jan. 6 as a “riot” had become 64 percent a month later when the summer hearings ended. Twenty-nine percent thought Joe Biden had been fraudulently elected before, and 29 percent did after.”
The piece threw cold water on the notion, asserted by the committee, that Trump led a coup attempt on the government. Caldwell wrote, “It was not a coup attempt. And even if you believe it was, Mr. Trump was not leading it. For someone supposedly bent on overthrowing the government, Mr. Trump did an awful lot of television-watching and surprisingly little seizing of broadcast centers, mobilizing of commando units and issuing of emergency decrees.”
Yes, he noted Trump “certainly demeaned the office, embarrassed the country and behaved irresponsibly on Jan. 6. But to focus on that day distracts from his less dramatic but more consequential misdeeds.”
WASHINGTON, DC – SEPTEMBER 13: U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), Chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, speaks to reporters after a closed door meeting with committee members at the U.S. Capitol September 13, 2022 in Washington, DC. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol met behind closed doors on Tuesday to discuss next steps in their investigation.
(Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Caldwell then blasted the role the committee’s members have given themselves, writing, “They have set themselves up less as investigators than as defenders of America’s democracy. This is the wrong venue for such a mission. The committee has wound up too partisan to carry it out.”
He wrote, “the fact is the committee has seven Democrats and two Republicans, Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, both in open rebellion against their Trumpified party… The almost complete removal of oppositional checks leaves the committee ill suited to what is really a very delicate task.”
