The Democratic Party and Senator Mitch McConnell rarely see eye to eye on anything. But if Democrats hold the line in the elections on Tuesday and keep control of the Senate — and we still have a shot — it will come down to candidate quality.That’s the phrase that Mr. McConnell used this past summer alluding to his Republican Senate nominees.Going into Tuesday’s vote, Democrats face fierce headwinds like inflation and the typical pattern of losses in midterm elections for the party in power. But unlike some Republican candidates — a real-life island of misfit toys — many Democratic Senate candidates have been a source of comfort: the likable, pragmatic, low-drama Mark Kelly in Arizona and Raphael Warnock in Georgia, the heterodox populists John Fetterman (Pennsylvania) and Tim Ryan (Ohio). If the party can defy the odds and hold the Senate, there will be valuable lessons to take away.For many election analysts, the hopes of the summer —  that the Dobbs decision overturning Roe could help Democrats buck historical trends — look increasingly like a blue mirage, and Republicans seem likely to surf their way to a majority in the House.Yet the battle for the Senate is still raging, and largely on the strength of Mr. Kelly, Mr. Warnock, Mr. Ryan and Mr. Fetterman. Their races also offer insights that can help Democrats mitigate losses in the future and even undo some of the reputational damage that has rendered the party’s candidates unelectable in far too many places across the country.In a normal midterm year, Mr. Warnock and Mr. Kelly would be the low-hanging fruit of vulnerable Democrats, given that they eked out victories in 2020 and 2021 in purple states.But they bring to the table compelling biographies that resist caricature. Mr. Kelly is a former Navy combat pilot and astronaut whose parents were both cops. Mr. Warnock, the senior pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, quotes Scripture on the campaign trail and compares the act of voting to prayer.They’ve rejected the hair-on-fire, hyperpartisan campaign ads that endangered incumbents often rely on. Mr. Kelly’s ads highlight his bipartisanship and willingness to break with the Democratic Party on issues like border security — he supports, for example, filling in gaps in the wall on the border with Mexico.Mr. Warnock, too, has focused on local issues: His campaign has highlighted his efforts to secure funding for the Port of Savannah and his bipartisan work with Tommy Tuberville of Alabama to help Georgia’s peanut farmers. These ads will probably not go viral on Twitter, but they signal that Mr. Kelly and Mr. Warnock will fight harder for the folks at home than they will for the national Democratic agenda.In Ohio and Pennsylvania, Mr. Ryan and Mr. Fetterman have showed up in every county, red or blue, in their states. Democrats can’t just depend on driving up the margins in Democratic strongholds — they also need to drive down Republicans’ margins in their strongholds.Mr. Fetterman is holding to a slim lead in polls. Most analysts doubt Mr. Ryan can prevail in what is a tougher electoral environment for a Democrat, but even if he loses, he helped his peers by keeping his race competitive, and he did it without a dollar of help from the national party. He forced national Republicans to spend about $30 million in Ohio that could otherwise have gone to Senate races in Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania.Anything could happen on Tuesday. Politics, like football, is a game of inches. It’s still possible that Democrats could pick up a seat or two. It’s also plausible that Republicans could take seats in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and even New Hampshire.But when the dust settles on the election, Democrats need to do some real soul-searching about the future of our party. We look likely to lose in some places where Joe Biden won in 2020. And what’s worse, we could lose to candidates who have embraced bans on abortion and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, views shared by a minority of the American people. This outcome tells us as much about the Democratic brand as it does the Republican Party.Fair or not, Democrats have been painted as the party of out-of-touch, coastal elites — the party that tells voters worried about crime that it’s all in their heads and that, by the way, crime was higher in the 1990s; the party that sneers at voters disillusioned with bad trade deals and globalization and that labels their “economic anxiety” a convenient excuse for racism; the party that discounts shifts of Black and Hispanic voters toward the Republican Party as either outliers or a sign of internalized white supremacy.If Democrats are smart, they’ll take away an important lesson from this election: There is no one way, no right way to be a Democrat. To win or be competitive in tough years in places as varied as Arizona, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, we need to recruit and give support to the candidates who might not check the box of every national progressive litmus test but who do connect with the voters in their state.Mr. Fetterman and Mr. Ryan offer good examples. Both have been competitive in part because they broke with progressive orthodoxy on issues like fracking (in Pennsylvania, Mr. Fetterman was called the “enemy” by an environmentalist infuriated by his enthusiastic support for fracking and the jobs it creates) and trade deals (in Ohio, Mr. Ryan has bragged about how he “voted with Trump on trade”).It also means lifting up more candidates with nontraditional résumés who defy political stereotypes and can’t be ridiculed as down-the-line partisans: veterans, nurses, law enforcement officers and entrepreneurs and executives from the private sector.In some states, the best candidates will be economic populists who play down social issues. In others, it will be economic moderates who play up their progressive social views. And in a lot of swing states, it will be candidates who just play it down the middle all around.It might also mean engaging with unfriendly media outlets. Most Democrats have turned up their noses at Fox News even though it is the highest-rated cable news channel, but Mr. Ryan has made appearances and even put on air a highlight reel of conservative hosts like Tucker Carlson praising him as a voice of moderation and reason in the Democratic Party. In the frenzied final days of the campaign, Mr. Fetterman wrote an opinion essay for FoxNews.com.This year we still might avoid losing the Senate. And Democrats can avoid catastrophe in future elections. It all comes down to two words: “candidate quality.”Lis Smith (@Lis_Smith), a Democratic communications strategist, was a senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign and is the author of the memoir “Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

Many Israelis fear that with Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power at the head of Israel’s most right-wing government, his family members will play an outsize role in his decision making.JERUSALEM — When voters in Israel chose to return Benjamin Netanyahu to power they also elevated two people they didn’t elect: his wife Sara and his son Yair, who have long been intertwined with his political career.Ms. Netanyahu and Yair, 31, have helped shape Mr. Netanyahu’s election campaigns and rallied his base. But they have also been accused by critics of wielding undue influence over Mr. Netanyahu by pressuring him over policy issues, weighing in on political appointments and, in his son’s case, even meddling in matters of national security.Their habitual appearances in both the news media, in often sensational and lurid stories, and the Israeli courts have also added to the reality show-like atmosphere around the family.Now, with Mr. Netanyahu, 73, in power again as prime minister of Israel’s most right-wing and religiously conservative government, even as he is standing trial on corruption charges, many Israelis fear that the unelected members of the family will play an outsize role in his political life and decision making.“They set the tone. Completely,” Ben Caspit, an Israeli political commentator for Al-Monitor, a news site, and a biographer of Mr. Netanyahu, said of the presence of Ms. Netanyahu and the couple’s son on the political stage.A retired general testified in court on Jan. 1 that a decade ago, Ms. Netanyahu, 64, an educational psychologist, interviewed him for 45 minutes for a job as her husband’s military secretary after Mr. Netanyahu left the room.Yair Netanyahu caused an uproar last month after publicly leveling treason accusations against the police and state prosecutors who he said had “framed” his father and suggesting that the proscribed punishment for that was execution.“It’s serious, and it’s not good,” Ariel Saad, 37, an advertising manager in Tel Aviv, said of the presence of Mr. Netanyahu’s family so close to the center of power. “Netanyahu is very pliable,” he added, expressing a common perception in Israel. “How can you run the country under such circumstances?”Ms. Netanyahu, center, arriving at the Magistrate’s Court in 2018 in Jerusalem.Amit Shabi/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Netanyahus and their backers say that the Israeli media has been nursing an obsession with the family that borders on persecution since the 1990s, during Mr. Netanyahu’s first term in office, when Ms. Netanyahu fired a nanny for burning soup.“I could stand here till tomorrow morning, your honor, and tell you what the news media has done to me,” Ms. Netanyahu told a judge last year in court during another defamation case. “But let’s save the time,” she said.What to Know About Israel’s New GovernmentNetanyahu’s Return: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, returned to power at the helm of the most right-wing administration in Israeli history.The Far Right’s Rise: To win election, Mr. Netanyahu and his far-right allies harnessed perceived threats to Israel’s Jewish identity after ethnic unrest and the subsequent inclusion of Arab lawmakers in the government.Ultra-Orthodox Parties: To preserve his new government, Mr. Netanyahu has made a string of promises to Israel’s ultra-Orthodox parties. Their push for greater autonomy has potentially broad-ranging implications.A Provocative Visit: In one of his first acts as Israel’s minister of national security, the ultranationalist Itamar Ben-Gvir toured a volatile holy site in Jerusalem, drawing a furious reaction from Palestinian leaders.“I think that the media hides all the wonderful things that I do,” she added.But over the past year, a number of people once close to Mr. Netanyahu have lifted a veil on some of the family’s inner dealings, speaking openly on television and in court, under oath, about episodes that have raised alarms.Ms. Netanyahu has garnered many sensational headlines over the years after getting in trouble over household expenses and getting sued by domestic staff for abusive behavior. Now the perceived growing influence of Yair Netanyahu over his father and his strident voice on radio and social media are getting increased attention.In November, Yair Netanyahu joined a right-wing Twitter campaign berating the army’s top brass for suspending two soldiers from operational activity for physically and verbally abusing left-wing Israeli activists in the occupied West Bank.In October, within hours of a television report saying that Israel and Lebanon were near an agreement to demarcate their maritime economic border, he tweeted or retweeted almost 80 posts slamming the deal, reached by the last government, as a shameful surrender to Lebanon — a message that his father, as the opposition leader, quickly incorporated into his campaign.In June, Yair Netanyahu wrote a column for ICE, an Israeli online publication, detailing the various rulers and conquests of the Holy Land, starting from biblical times, concluding that the Jews were the sole rightful owners. His father made a similar case in his autobiography, “Bibi: My Story,” that was published this fall, and the new government’s guidelines began with a declaration of the Jewish people’s “exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel.”The younger Mr. Netanyahu has no official role in his father’s office and says he earns money as a right-wing radio and podcast host and as a social media influencer. A spokesman for the family declined a request to interview Ms. Netanyahu and Yair Netanyahu and a request for comment from the prime minister.A person close to the family, who was not authorized to speak about them publicly, said Yair Netanyahu acted independently and there was no coordination between father and son.Yair Netanyahu, center, during a Likud party campaign event in 2019 in Tel Aviv.Abir Sultan/EPA-EFE, via ShutterstockFormer and current aides to Mr. Netanyahu say the family is a loving and tight-knit one, and that Ms. Netanyahu and Yair Netanyahu provide critical support for the prime minister. A younger son, Avner, 28, appears less involved in politics but has openly expressed his admiration for his father. (Mr. Netanyahu’s daughter from a previous marriage remains in the background.)The staunch domestic support has contributed to Mr. Netanyahu’s political longevity and success, experts say.“Those are the people Bibi most trusts; they adore him,” said Mazal Mualem, also an Israeli political commentator for Al-Monitor and the author of a recent biography of Mr. Netanyahu, “Cracking the Netanyahu Code,” referring to him by his nickname.Mr. Netanyahu does not always go along with their demands, Ms. Mualem said, and often must juggle things at home.“But there’s no doubt they are influential,” she added of Sara and Yair Netanyahu, “for better and for worse.”Mr. Netanyahu’s corruption trial has also highlighted unflattering accusations about the family, with key witnesses testifying about demands made by the household to wealthy businesspeople for deliveries of crates of champagne, luxury cigars and jewelry.Mr. Netanyahu denies all wrongdoing and says the cases against him are collapsing in court.Some of the most sensational accounts of goings-on in the household and interference in decision-making came out during a libel suit that the Netanyahu family brought against Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister, after he described them as being “mentally ill.”Called to testify by the defense, Nir Hefetz, a former Netanyahu confidant and, from 2014 to 2018, a spokesman for the family who later turned state’s witness in the corruption trial, told the court that Yair Netanyahu once burst into a meeting that his father was holding with officials including Moshe Kahlon, the finance minister, about a plan to turn Israel’s broadcasting authority into a corporation.Nir Hefetz, a former Netanyahu confidant, in 2021 outside a Jerusalem courthouse.Pool photo by Jack Guez“Then begins a show that if I wasn’t up here on the witness stand, your honor, you would not believe,” Mr. Hefetz told the judge, describing how the younger Mr. Netanyahu got down on all fours, impersonating a dog, and crudely berated his father for listening to Mr. Kahlon. At some point, Mr. Hefetz added, Ms. Netanyahu came in and backed up her son’s demand to scrap the plan.Mr. Hefetz also described how Mr. Netanyahu considered canceling an official visit to India in 2017 after Yair Netanyahu had stopped eating, according to Ms. Netanyahu, because he was not being consulted about policy decisions.But the person close to the Netanyahu family said he had personally seen Mr. Netanyahu clear all non-relevant people, including his son, out of the room when he needed to make decisions.Mr. Hefetz is suing Yair Netanyahu in another case for an alleged breach of his privacy in several social media posts. Mr. Hefetz also sold his diaries and hours of tape recordings, including private conversations with Ms. Netanyahu, to an Israeli TV network, Channel 13, and gave a lengthy interview that ran before the election.He recounted how he was called by an aide of Mr. Netanyahu’s to intervene in 2017 when his son had urged him, against the advice of the security services, not to remove metal detectors at the entrances of the Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem that had been the source of days of violent protests. That advice was ultimately ignored, and the detectors were removed.Mr. Hefetz also said that Yair Netanyahu persuaded his father to give a hero’s welcome to an Israeli security guard who had been involved in a confrontation at the Israeli Embassy in Amman, Jordan, that led to the deaths of two Jordanians, exacerbating a diplomatic crisis with the country.Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party responded to the Channel 13 program in a statement saying, “How many more times will we have to hear this recycled nonsense?” and describing it as biased and based on “old, moldy rumors and false gossip.”Mr. Netanyahu, his wife and their son Yair at a polling station in Jerusalem during the general election in 2013.Uriel Sinai/Getty ImagesYair Netanyahu is now involved in another defamation case in which he and a former left-wing lawmaker, Stav Shaffir, are suing each other. The younger Mr. Netanyahu was temporarily removed from the courtroom during a late-November hearing because of his constant interruptions and muttered a sexist slur against Ms. Shaffir on his way out, according to court reporters.“I thought nobody would hear,” Yair Netanyahu wrote in a subsequent Twitter thread, blaming the acoustics and complaining of “character assassination” by the news media. More

This month, the first crop of books about the end of Donald Trump’s administration has prompted speculation: Was the president plotting to remain in power through some kind of coup?The question has arisen because the Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report in their book “I Alone Can Fix It” that Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, saw the president’s postelection maneuverings in that light.General Milley had no direct evidence of a coup plot. But in the days after Mr. Trump’s electoral defeat, as the president filled top military and intelligence posts with people the general considered loyal mediocrities, General Milley got nervous. “They may try,” but they would not succeed with any kind of plot, he told his aides, according to the book. “You can’t do this without the military,” he went on. “You can’t do this without the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. We’re the guys with the guns.”While some might greet such comments with relief, General Milley’s musings should give us pause. Americans have not usually looked to the military for help in regulating their civilian politics. And there is something grandiose about General Milley’s conception of his place in government. He told aides that a “retired military buddy” had called him on election night to say, “You represent the stability of this republic.” If there was not a coup underway, then General Milley’s comments may be cause more for worry than for relief.Were we really that close to a coup? The most dramatic and disruptive episode of Mr. Trump’s resistance to the election was Jan. 6, and that day’s events are ambiguous.On the one hand, it is hard to think of a more serious assault on democracy than a violent entry into a nation’s capitol to reverse the election of its chief executive. Five people died. Chanting protesters urged the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence, who had refused Mr. Trump’s call that he reject certain electoral votes cast for Joe Biden.On the other hand, Jan. 6 was something familiar: a political protest that got out of control. Contesting the fairness of an election, rightly or wrongly, is not absurd grounds for a public assembly. For a newly defeated president to call an election a “steal” is certainly irresponsible. But for a group of citizens to use the term was merely hyperbolic, perhaps no more so than calling suboptimal employment and health laws a “war on women.” Nor did the eventual violence necessarily discredit the demonstrators’ cause, any more than the July 2016 killing of five police officers at a rally in Dallas against police violence, for instance, invalidated the concerns of those marchers.The stability of the republic never truly seemed at risk. As Michael Wolff writes of Mr. Trump in his new book, “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency,” “Beyond his immediate desires and pronouncements, there was no ability — or structure, or chain of command, or procedures, or expertise, or actual person to call — to make anything happen.” Mr. Trump ended his presidency as unfamiliar with its powers as with its responsibilities. That is, in a way, reassuring.The problem is that Mr. Trump’s unfocused theory of a stolen election had a distilling effect, concentrating radical tendencies — first in his staff members and later in his followers nationwide. Rational voices exited his inner circle. After Attorney General William Barr told reporters that he knew of no evidence of widespread voter fraud, he was out. Rudolph Giuliani was in, along with a shifting cast of less stable freelancers, including the lawyer Sidney Powell, with her theories of vote-switching ballot machines and Venezuelan stratagems. Now the president was not only thinking poorly; he was also doing so with poorer information. That was the first distillation.The effect of the president’s theory on disappointed voters was more complicated. Republicans had — and still have — legitimate grievances about how the last election was run. Pandemic conditions produced an electoral system more favorable to Democrats. Without the Covid-era advantage of expanded mail-in voting, Democrats might well have lost more elections at every level, including the presidential. Mr. Wolff writes that, as Republicans saw it, Democrats “were saved by this lucky emphasis; that was all they were saved by.”Nor was it just luck; it was an advantage that, in certain places, Democrats manipulated the system to obtain. The majority-Democratic Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled in favor of a Democratic Party lawsuit to extend the date for accepting mail-in ballots beyond Election Day.Whether the country ought now to return to pre-Covid voting rules is a legitimate matter for debate. But Mr. Trump’s conspiracy thinking produced another “distillation,” this time among supporters of the perfectly rational proposition that election laws had been improperly altered to favor Democrats. (To say that the proposition is rational is not to say that it is incontestably correct.) Those who held this idea in a temperate way appear to have steadily disaffiliated from Mr. Trump. By Jan. 6, the grounds for skepticism about the election were unchanged. But they were being advanced by an infuriated and highly unrepresentative hard core.The result was not a coup. It was, instead, mayhem on behalf of what had started as a legitimate political position. Such mixtures of the defensible and indefensible occur in democracies more often than we care to admit. The question is whom we trust to untangle such ambiguities when they arise.For all Mr. Trump’s admiration of military officers, they wound up especially disinclined to accommodate his disorderly governing style. General Milley was not alone. One thinks back to such retired generals as the national security adviser H.R. McMaster and the defense secretary James Mattis, both of whom broke with Mr. Trump earlier in his term.We might be grateful for that. But our gratitude should not extend to giving military leaders any kind of role in judging civilian ones.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

The Pennsylvania lawmaker joins the Washington establishment. Sort of.John Fetterman has a new suit. On Jan. 3, the junior senator from Pennsylvania, whose penchant for Carhartt sweatshirts, Dickies and baggy shorts was as much a part of his political brand as any stump speech, was sworn in as part of the 118th Congress wearing a relatively tailored, previously unseen light gray two-button number. This is a big deal, in part because during his time as lieutenant governor, Mr. Fetterman had made a point of stating that he had only one dark suit. On a day notable for the chaos around the election of Speaker of the House, that suit, as well as the light blue striped tie and polished black lace-ups Mr. Fetterman also wore, may have been the biggest political fashion statement of the incoming class. It was more symbolic even than Nancy Pelosi’s bright pink passing-of-the-baton outfit, or the smattering of suffragist white worn by some women in the House, or even J.D. Vance’s Trumpian uniform of navy suit, white shirt and glowing red tie. And it confirms Mr. Fetterman as one of the more unexpected image makers in Washington. It’s not that he dresses particularly well, though the new suit was a step up. It’s that he dresses with purpose.Indeed, Mr. Fetterman’s new suit was as notable as any of the fashion statements made by various members of Congress since clothes began to play a bigger role in electoral communications. To wit: January 2019, when a large group of women of the newly elected 116th Congress wore white to their swearing-in in honor of their suffragist predecessors (and as a counterstrike to the image-making focus of the Trump administration).Or, for that matter, almost every State of the Union and major public event since then — most recently in December, when a number of lawmakers wore yellow and blue to Volodymyr Zelensky’s congressional speech. If there’s a photo op involved, there’s generally a fashion decision aforethought.The silent communication that comes via clothing has become a standard part of the political toolbox. It’s wielded with increasing dexterity by, for example, elected officials like Kyrsten Sinema, who used her kooky wardrobe of sleeveless tops, colored wigs and the occasional denim vest to telegraph her independence from political norms long before she officially became an independent. Also Jim Jordan, who symbolized his willingness to fight during committee hearings by abandoning his jackets and rolling up his shirt sleeves. The Washington wardrobe is so standardized that any deviation from the norm stands out, especially on TV.Unless, of course, your default position is deviation from the norm — in which case a return to business as usual becomes the surprise. As Mr. Fetterman well knows.Before heading off to the Capitol for his swearing-in, he tweeted, “For those of you asking, yes, there will be a Fetterman in shorts today, but it’s not me.” (It was one of his sons, gamely continuing the family campaign to free the knee.) Rather than deny the idea that he thinks about what he wears, or having his staff deny it for him, Mr. Fetterman long ago turned his wardrobe into an asset: the subject of self-deprecating funny asides, social media jokes and pretty potent public appeal.He has blogged that he can’t roll up his sleeves because he only wears short sleeves. He has tweeted that his outfits are “Western PA business casual” and celebrated his new “Formal Hoodie.” (His wife, Gisele, has made fun of him for it; political couples — they’re just like us.) He was never exactly a working man — he was a mayor with a master’s degree from Harvard — but he dressed like one, and it helped humanize him, get him recognized and make a name for himself that resonated beyond the borders of Pennsylvania and into the realm of late-night TV even before he won his election. Arguably it helped win the election.And it meant that when he showed up on Capitol Hill in November for his orientation in a dark suit and blue tie, he got the sort of excited attention not normally bestowed on a senator-elect making a drive-by visit to his new workplace. Rather he resembled some sort of semi-celebrity, even as his willingness to play by Senate dress code rules and fit into the institution can’t have escaped his new colleagues.Nor, probably, could the sleight of hand that managed to make wearing a conservative suit look like a radical move. And they can expect more where this came from: According to his office, the new suit is one of three Mr. Fetterman has purchased, along with six — count ’em — ties. More

With all but two Republicans voting no, the House created a select committee, controlled by Democrats, to scrutinize the security failures and root causes that contributed to the Capitol riot.WASHINGTON — The House voted mostly along party lines on Wednesday to create a select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, pushing ahead over near-unanimous Republican opposition with a broad inquiry controlled by Democrats into the deadliest attack on Congress in centuries.The panel, established at the behest of Speaker Nancy Pelosi after Senate Republicans blocked the formation of a bipartisan independent commission to scrutinize the assault, will investigate what its organizing resolution calls “the facts, circumstances and causes relating to the Jan. 6, 2021, domestic terrorist attack.”The 13-member panel, which has subpoena power, will have eight members named by the majority party and five with input from Republicans, and is meant to examine President Donald J. Trump’s role in inspiring the riot. While the measure creating it does not mention him, it charges the committee with looking at the law enforcement and government response to the storming of the Capitol and “the influencing factors that fomented such an attack on American representative democracy while engaged in a constitutional process.”It passed by a vote of 222 to 190, with only two Republicans joining Democrats to support it.“We have a duty to the Constitution and to the American people to find the truth of Jan. 6 and to ensure that such an assault on our democracy can never happen again,” Ms. Pelosi said, calling Jan. 6 “one of the darkest days of our history.”“The sheer scale of the violence of that day is shocking,” she added. “But what is just as shocking is remembering why this violence occurred: to block the certification of an election and the peaceful transfer of power that is the cornerstone of our democracy.”Several officers who responded to the riot that day were on hand to watch the vote from Ms. Pelosi’s box in the House gallery. They included Harry Dunn of the Capitol Police and two District of Columbia police officers, Michael Fanone, who has lobbied Republicans to support an investigation, and Daniel Hodges, who was crushed in a door during the rampage. Relatives of Brian D. Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer who died after clashing with the rioters, joined them.While the measure says that five members of the panel are to be named “after consultation with the minority leader,” Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, he has not said whether he will recommend anyone. Last week, he told Mr. Fanone and Mr. Dunn in a private meeting that he would take the appointment process seriously, even as he declined to publicly denounce members of his party who have sought to downplay or spread lies about the riot.Ms. Pelosi is considering picking a Republican who has acknowledged the gravity of the attack for one of her eight slots, according to an aide. But her options are exceedingly slim.Shortly after the breach, many Republicans expressed outrage and vowed to hold the perpetrators accountable. But their support for an investigation has eroded steadily in the months since, and all but evaporated after Mr. Trump issued a statement in May calling the idea of an independent inquiry a “Democrat trap.”Many have speculated that Ms. Pelosi might select Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who was removed from her House leadership post after she pushed Republicans to hold themselves and Mr. Trump responsible for fomenting the riot with the lie that the 2020 election had been stolen.Ms. Cheney, one of only 35 House Republicans who voted to create the independent commission, which was to be modeled after the one that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, also broke with her party on Wednesday to vote in favor of forming the panel.“I believe this select committee is our only remaining option,” she said in a statement. “The committee should issue and enforce subpoenas promptly, hire skilled counsel, and do its job thoroughly and expeditiously.”Ms. Pelosi, center, embracing officers who responded to the riot, including Harry Dunn, right, of the Capitol Police, and Michael Fanone, left, of the District of Columbia police. Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesOnly one other Republican, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump, supported the move.Few Republicans spoke during the debate and about two dozen missed the vote altogether to fly to the southern border to attend an event with Mr. Trump, who praised some of them by name.But whether in person or remotely, the party lined up in opposition to the panel, which their leaders insisted would be a one-sided forum for Democrats to censure Mr. Trump and try to kneecap Republicans in the 2022 elections.Representative Michelle Fischbach, Republican of Minnesota, argued that the committee would duplicate existing investigations and engage in “partisan, divisive politics.”“We gave you bipartisan,” Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, responded, referring to the proposed independent inquiry, which would have had an equal number of Democrat- and Republican-appointed members. “Give me a break. This is clear: They don’t want to get to the truth.”In particular, the select committee is charged with investigating failures in law enforcement, such as intelligence gathering, and the root causes that influenced so many to turn violent, scrutinizing online platforms and any potential “malign foreign influence operations.”During the debate on Wednesday, several Democrats spoke of the emotional toll Jan. 6 had taken on them. Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California — who was shot in 1978 on a remote airstrip in Guyana during the Jonestown massacre, which killed her boss at the time, Representative Leo J. Ryan, Democrat of California, and four others — recalled being trapped in the House chamber and hearing a gunshot outside.“My heart is racing right now and I’m trembling,” she said, thinking back on Jan. 6. “I thought at that moment, ‘My God, I survived Guyana. But I’m not going to survive this in the house of democracy.’ ”Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the Oversight and Reform Committee, called the riot, which unfolded as Congress officially tallied electoral votes to formalize President Biden’s victory, “one of the most shattering times of my life — to see the work of our government violated and stopped by an insurrection.”“I don’t know what would have happened if they had captured the vice president,” Ms. Maloney said, referring the mob’s threats to hang Mike Pence, for whom they built a gallows outside the Capitol. “His life would have been in danger, no question.”Nearly 140 police officers were injured in the attack and at least seven people died in connection with it, including two officers who were on duty on Jan. 6 and later took their own lives.Several investigations into the assault are already underway, but none have a mandate to look comprehensively at the event similar to the fact-finding commissions that scrutinized Sept. 11, the attack of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.The F.B.I. has arrested nearly 500 people involved in the Jan. 6 breach, and is pursuing potentially hundreds more, the agency’s director told Congress. Several congressional committees are conducting their own investigations, including two Senate panels that outlined large-scale failures that contributed to the assault. And several inspectors general have begun their own inquiries, finding lapses and miscalculations around the most violent attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812.The select committee is similar in design to the panel the Republican-controlled House formed in 2014 to investigate an attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, which Democrats denounced as intended to damage the presidential prospects of Hillary Clinton, who had been secretary of state at the time. It ultimately became one of the longest, costliest and most bitterly partisan congressional investigations in history.That panel was made up of seven Republicans and five Democrats. More