Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)

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      Pelosi Bars Trump Loyalists From Jan. 6 Inquiry, Prompting a G.O.P. Boycott

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      Democrats said Representatives Jim Banks and Jim Jordan, who amplified Donald J. Trump’s lies of a stolen election and opposed investigating the assault, could not be trusted to scrutinize it.WASHINGTON — Speaker Nancy Pelosi moved on Wednesday to bar two of former President Donald J. Trump’s most vociferous Republican defenders in Congress from joining a select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, saying their conduct suggested they could not be trusted to participate.In an unusual move, Ms. Pelosi announced that she was rejecting Representatives Jim Banks of Indiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio, both of whom amplified Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud, joined their party’s efforts to challenge President Biden’s victory on Jan. 6 and have opposed efforts to investigate the assault on the Capitol by Trump supporters. She agreed to seat the other three Republicans who had been chosen for the panel.But Ms. Pelosi said she could not allow the pair to take part, based on their actions around the riot and comments they had made undercutting the investigation. Mr. Banks, who has equated the deadly attack to unrest during the racial justice protests last summer, said the Jan. 6 inquiry was created to “malign conservatives and to justify the left’s authoritarian agenda.” Mr. Jordan, one of the biggest cheerleaders of Mr. Trump’s attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 election, pressed Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud on the House floor as protesters breached the Capitol, and has called the select committee “impeachment Round 3.”The speaker’s decision drew an angry response from Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, who announced that Republicans would boycott the panel altogether. He seized on Ms. Pelosi’s intervention as confirmation of his charge that the investigation was nothing more than a political exercise to hurt the G.O.P.The partisan brawl, unfolding even before the select committee has begun its work, underscored the difficult task it faces in scrutinizing an attack on the lawmakers now charged with dissecting it. It was also the latest evidence of how poisonous relations have become between the two parties, especially in the House, in the aftermath of Mr. Trump’s defeat and the violent bid to block certification of the outcome.Many Democrats no longer wish to work with or hear from Republicans who helped spread Mr. Trump’s lie of a stolen election, especially those who led the effort and have sought to downplay the severity and significance of the assault that it inspired. Some said allowing two of the most prominent defenders to serve on a panel examining the attack was akin to allowing criminals to investigate their own crimes.In a statement, Ms. Pelosi said she had rejected Mr. Banks and Mr. Jordan “with respect for the integrity of the investigation, with an insistence on the truth and with concern about statements made and actions taken by these members.”“The unprecedented nature of Jan. 6 demands this unprecedented decision,” she added.A visibly agitated Mr. McCarthy hastily called a news conference to condemn Ms. Pelosi’s move and accuse her of excessive partisanship. He pledged to carry out a Republican-only investigation into the events of Jan. 6, focused on how Ms. Pelosi should have done more to protect the Capitol from a mob of Trump loyalists.“Why was the Capitol so ill-prepared for that day, when they knew on Dec. 14 that they had a problem?” Mr. McCarthy said, referring to Democrats. “Pelosi has created a sham process.”In a television studio on Capitol Hill, Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Banks and Mr. Jordan — appearing with the three other Republicans chosen to sit on the panel — sought to divert blame for the riot from Mr. Trump and their own political supporters who carried it out, instead faulting Democrats who they said had not adequately planned for the onslaught.Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, the chairman of the select committee, said he would “not be distracted by sideshows” and pledged to move forward with the panel’s work, including its first public hearing next week where Capitol and District of Columbia police officers are set to testify about how they fought off the mob.Ms. Pelosi had quietly debated her options with Democratic members of the panel, who had expressed reservations about allowing firebrands like Mr. Jordan and Mr. Banks to serve on the committee.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMs. Pelosi had quietly debated her options with Democratic members of the panel, who had expressed reservations about allowing firebrands like Mr. Jordan and Mr. Banks, so closely associated with Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the election, to serve alongside them.“There are people who want to derail and thwart an investigation and there are people who want to conduct an investigation,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the panel. “That’s the fault line here.”Democrats received high-profile backing from Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Mr. McCarthy’s former No. 3 whom Ms. Pelosi appointed to the committee after she was ousted from her leadership position in May for criticizing Mr. Trump.“The rhetoric that we have heard from the minority leader is disingenuous,” Ms. Cheney told reporters on the steps of the Capitol. “At every opportunity, the minority leader has attempted to prevent the American people from understanding what happened, to block this investigation.”She said Ms. Pelosi had been right to bar Mr. Jordan and Mr. Banks from the panel, saying that Mr. Jordan was a potential “material witness” and Mr. Banks had “disqualified himself” with recent comments disparaging the committee’s work.Mr. Banks has come under criticism for arranging a recent trip for House Republicans to join Mr. Trump at the southwestern border, in which a participant in the Capitol riot at times served as a translator. He had also released a combative statement Monday night in which he blamed the Biden administration for its response to the riot — which occurred during the final days of the Trump administration — and said he would not allow the committee “to be turned into a forum for condemning millions of Americans because of their political beliefs.”On Wednesday, both he and Mr. Jordan accused Ms. Pelosi of failing to secure the Capitol from the rioters, who stalked her through the corridors on Jan. 6, chanting “Nancy.”Congressional leaders do not oversee security in the Capitol, though they hire those who do. It is controlled by the Capitol Police Board, which includes the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms and the architect of the Capitol. At the time of the attack, the House sergeant-at-arms, Paul D. Irving, had been on the job since 2012, when he was hired under Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio. The Senate sergeant-at-arms at the time, Michael Stenger, was hired in 2018 when Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, led the chamber.Mr. Jordan, who has called the committee’s work a political attack on Mr. Trump, was among a group of House Republicans who met with the former president in December to help plan the effort to challenge Mr. Biden’s victory. Democratic members of the select committee were considering calling him as a witness in their investigation.Ms. Cheney reportedly clashed with Mr. Jordan on the House floor on Jan. 6, blaming him for the riot, according to a new book by two reporters for The Washington Post.Ms. Pelosi had said she would accept Mr. McCarthy’s three other nominees to the panel — Representative Rodney Davis of Illinois, Representative Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota and Representative Troy Nehls of Texas — and said she encouraged Mr. McCarthy to offer two new picks to replace Mr. Jordan and Mr. Banks.But following Mr. McCarthy’s lead, those three also said they would not participate.“I was certainly prepared to help this committee get to the truth,” said Mr. Nehls, brandishing a binder of research. “But unfortunately, Speaker Pelosi has shown she’s more interested in playing politics.” More

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      America Only Punishes a Certain Kind of Rebel

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      For two months after the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump fought to invalidate and overturn the results. When election administrators and judges refused to play ball, he urged his most loyal followers to march on Congress, to prevent final certification of the electoral vote. “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he told a crowd of thousands on Jan. 6. More

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      Book Review: ‘Landslide,’ by Michael Wolff

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      LANDSLIDEThe Final Days of the Trump White HouseBy Michael WolffForty-five years ago, when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “The Final Days” came out, it was a different world: There was no cable news, no internet and no social media, and the political establishment offered at least the illusion of being in control. The Watergate scandal, culminating in Richard Nixon’s resignation, presented a riveting series of public events — hearings, trials and so on — but that left it open to Woodward and Bernstein to tell the story of what had been going on behind the scenes.“Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump White House,” Michael Wolff’s third book about Donald Trump’s presidency, after “Fire and Fury” and “Siege,” faces a different challenge in recounting Trump’s political demise (for now). Penetrating a buttoned-up White House was not the issue, because Trump ran his administration as a public performance. Nixon spoke calmly in public and ranted and cursed to his aides. Trump put his self-pity, revenge fantasies and paranoia on full display at his rallies and in his tweets. He was indiscreet, and he surrounded himself with other indiscreet people, whom he often motivated to become especially indiscreet by humiliating or firing them. How can one lend an element of revelation to an account of the crazy, terrifying weeks between Election Day 2020 and President Biden’s inauguration?Wolff’s method is essentially the same as in “The Final Days” and many other inside stories about highest-level politics: He uses lots of detailed off-the-record interviews with aides to produce a tale told in a third-person omniscient voice, without conventional journalistic attribution. I noticed only a time or two when he seemed to have put something that somebody had told him between quotation marks, with the person’s name attached. In books like this, the author adopts his sources’ perspective — narrowly, in the sense that they are shown behaving honorably, and broadly, in the sense that their overall take on events animates the story.In an epilogue, Wolff interviews Trump himself, at Mar-a-Lago. It’s an artfully drawn scene of the king in exile, but the former president doesn’t really say anything he hasn’t said many times before — and indeed elsewhere in the book Wolff wisely chooses to quote several of Trump’s public speeches at length, because nothing else quite as fully captures his (to use Wolff’s term) “derangement.” Wolff’s main sources seem to be a group of aides at a second or third level of celebrity, people who see themselves as “political professionals.” Administration staff members like Jason Miller (communications adviser), Mark Meadows (White House chief of staff), Matthew Morgan (counsel to the re-election campaign) and Marc Short (Mike Pence’s chief of staff) appear often in Wolff’s accounts of White House meetings, usually attempting unsuccessfully to impose a measure of order and sanity. It seems safe to assume that it’s their collective point of view, and that of others like them, that we’re getting in “Landslide.”Books like this usually burst out of the gate with a few newsmaking anecdotes, and Wolff does provide some of these. Trump believed that the Democratic Party’s elders would pull Biden, sure to lose, at the last minute, and replace him with a ticket of Andrew Cuomo and Michelle Obama. He toyed with the idea of using the pandemic as a pretext for indefinitely postponing the election. The most notorious line in his speech to the incipient mob on Jan. 6 — “we’re going to walk down to the Capitol” — was an ad-lib, not in the text his staff had prepared. But the strength of “Landslide” comes less from these stories and more from a coherent argument that Wolff, in partnership with his sources, makes about how we should understand the period between Nov. 3 and Jan. 20. Most quickly produced books about political events don’t do that.Trump, in these pages, is self-obsessed, delusional and administratively incompetent. He has no interest in or understanding of the workings of government. He doesn’t read or listen to briefings. He spends vast amounts of time watching conservative television networks and chatting on the phone with cronies. The pandemic puts him at a special disadvantage; many of the people around him are either sick or afraid to come to work because that would entail complying with a regime of Covid noncompliance that Trump demands. If anybody tells him something he doesn’t want to hear, he marginalizes or fires that person and finds somebody else to listen to, who may or may not hold an official position. If Fox News becomes less than completely loyal, he’ll switch to Newsmax or One America News Network. He lives in a self-curated information environment that bears only a glancing relationship to reality.Before the belief that the election was stolen had taken full control of Trump’s mind, the idea was already there — because he chose to regard all forms of expanded access to voting, which tend to favor the Democrats, as stealing. He turned down entreaties from his staff to set up a Republican get-out-the-early-vote operation, just as he also turned down entreaties to endorse masking and social distancing during the height of the pandemic: off-brand. He was utterly disorganized, with endless firings and reshufflings of the key players. And during his second impeachment trial, Trump was represented by a comically incompetent, squabbling team of lawyers whom he had barely met.In the early hours of election night, when he was running well ahead of the pre-election polls, Trump decided he had won. After it became clear to everyone but him that he hadn’t, he empowered an alternate-reality team of advisers, headed by Rudy Giuliani and including people whom even Giuliani considered to be unacceptably out-there, like Sidney Powell, the freelancing lawyer, and Mike Lindell, the C.E.O. of MyPillow, and he embraced every available conspiracy theory and strategic fantasy about how he could change the result. To Trump, in Wolff’s telling, elections are roughly similar to the due dates for loans in his real-estate business — a place to start negotiating. Because he divides people into two categories, strong and weak, and because he has the deep cynicism of an unprincipled person, he chose to believe that he was not the first result-denying presidential candidate, only the first who was manly enough to challenge a typically corrupt outcome.Nobody holding official power in the White House or the Republican Party — in particular, Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell — took Trump’s ravings seriously, so the horrifying events of Jan. 6 came as a surprise, probably even to Trump himself. The various rallies that day had been organized by independent right-wing political entrepreneurs with businesses to promote, not by the White House, and it wasn’t yet clear to most Republicans in Washington how fully Trump’s followers had accepted his insistence that the election had been stolen. Almost nobody in the White House was actively trying to persuade members of Congress to vote for the election challenges that were before them on Jan. 6.One obvious question all this raises is: If Trump was so unrelievedly awful, not to mention dangerous, why were Wolff’s sources working for him? “In insider political circles,” Wolff writes, “almost all politicians are seen as difficult and even damaged people, necessarily tolerated in some civics class inversion because they were elected.” Over time the realization dawned that Trump was in a specially appalling category. After that, “You took it and put up with it and tried to make the best of it, not in spite of everything, but because this was what you did; this was the job you had.” Or you thought you could help by “keeping it from being so much worse than it otherwise might be.” Or you persuaded yourself that you were serving a larger cause, as in the case of Marc Short: “He detested the president but saw a tight-lipped tolerance, however painful, as the way to use Trump’s popularity to realize the conservative grail of remaking the federal courts and the federal bureaucracy.”More than all this, though, the quality of Trump’s that best explains what happened is that he commands a vast, enthusiastically loyal following that may represent as much as a quarter of the voting public, or even more, and a majority of the people who vote in Republican primaries. Nobody holding an appointed position has this, and very few elected officials do either. Wolff says the people around Trump believed he had “magical properties,” based on “a genius sense of how to satisfy the audience.” Everyone knew from firsthand observation how incompetent a chief executive he was: “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.” Therefore they assumed that his postelection lunacy would have no consequences, and that it was safe to avoid any public argument with the president that might arouse the Republican base. Essentially the only nefarious misdeed he was capable of pulling off was the one he did pull off, not entirely wittingly: the power to incite a violent, democracy-subverting mob of his devotees.Trump’s election, his term in office and the manner of his departure have reawakened a dormant debate about the essential health of the American political system. Are there too many barriers in the way of voting? Is the public misinformed? Do billionaires and other elites control the system? Do the Electoral College and the way congressional representation is apportioned overempower underpopulated rural areas? Wolff raises a more fundamental and frightening possibility: that the lesson of Trump is that in a democratic society, a malign and dangerous “crazy person,” especially one with a deep instinctive understanding of public opinion and the media, can become genuinely popular. Millions of Americans love Trump. As Wolff points out, after Jan. 6, his standing in the polls went up.This is not an abstract or theoretical concern. Wolff doesn’t make a direct prediction. But he leaves us with the strong impression that Trump will be running for president again in 2024. More

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      The Nation Needs a Reality-Based G.O.P. Only the Kook Caucus Is Stepping Up.

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      Brace yourself, America. Next year’s midterms have the potential to stock the Republican Party at all levels with rabble-rousers that make the Gingrich revolutionaries of 1994 and the Tea Partiers of 2010 look like RINO squishes.Call it the Kook Caucus.Elections tend to reflect the political zeitgeist. Some coalesce around a hot policy topic: health care, immigration, jobs, crime. Others are fueled by bigger, broader themes: reforming democracy, reining in Big Government, healing partisan divisions, reviving the American dream.But under Donald Trump, the Republican Party set aside policy and principles to become a cult of personality. The driving concern of today’s candidates, with precious few exceptions, is to stay in the good graces of their exiled but still dangerous and vindictive leader. This requires embracing the fiction that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump and that MAGA loyalists are duty-bound to fight to right this wrong.That lie has spread like a rash across the Republican base, with a big boost from the conservative media. Half to two-thirds of the party’s voters believe that Joe Biden’s win was illegitimate. Over half believe that election audits will “probably” or “definitely” reverse the outcome, according to a Morning Consult poll from mid-June. (Spoiler alert: They won’t.) And a poll from early June found that 29 percent of Republicans consider it at least somewhat likely that Mr. Trump will be reinstated as president this year. (Not. Gonna. Happen.)Republican leaders are expected, at minimum, to play along with this toxic rubbish. Those who don’t are courting electoral grief. Big Lie promoters are leaping into races at all levels — from state legislator to governor, state attorney general to the U.S. Senate — and making the 2020 fraud myth Topic A.“Of the nearly 700 Republicans who have filed initial paperwork with the Federal Election Commission to run next year for either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives, at least a third have embraced Trump’s false claims about his defeat,” according to The Washington Post. This includes 136 incumbents who voted against certifying the election results on Jan. 6.Incumbents, insurgents, swing districts, safe districts — there is no escape. “Election integrity” has become the magic catchphrase for Republicans looking to juice the MAGA faithful.It’s not just those who have clashed one-on-one with Mr. Trump being targeted, such as Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming or Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state. (Though it bears noting that at least a half-dozen challengers are aiming to unseat Ms. Cheney for what they see as her betrayal of Mr. Trump.) Senator James Lankford, a solid Oklahoma conservative and Baptist minister, is being challenged by Jackson Lahmeyer, a Tulsa pastor outraged that, following the sacking of the Capitol, Mr. Lankford opted not to oppose the 2020 outcome.“I saw fear all over him on Jan. 6.,” Mr. Lahmeyer charged at the March event announcing his candidacy, at which he was joined by Michael Flynn, Mr. Trump’s disgraced national security adviser. “He caved in like an absolute coward, and that let me know he is not the man to represent our state in the fight our country is in right now.”More humiliating: Mr. Lahmeyer is being personally supported by the head of the Oklahoma Republican Party, John Bennett, who also regards Mr. Lankford as weak on 2020. A state party chairman working against one of his own incumbents, Mr. Lankford has noted, is an uncommon — and unsettling — development.The early tremors of this election trend are already being felt. Last month, a longtime Republican member of the Virginia House of Delegates was unseated in his primary by a political newbie who had worked on the failed Trump legal effort to overturn the election results in Wisconsin. The challenger, Wren Williams, slammed the incumbent for failing to fight the good fight.“He wasn’t doing anything — squat, diddly,” Mr. Williams told The Washington Post. “He wasn’t taking election integrity seriously. I’m sitting here fighting for election integrity in the courts, and he’s my elected representative who can legislate and he’s not.”Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist and MAGA guru, has declared 2020 denialism a “litmus test” for Republican office seekers. “There will not be a Republican that wins a primary for 2022 — not one — that doesn’t take the pledge to get to the bottom of Nov. 3,” he predicted to NBC in May.Certainly, not all the Kook Caucus aspirants will triumph — especially in purplish districts where their baseless fraud talk may not play so well in the generals. But every advance they make is a loss, not only for their constituents but for the nation.Ominously, this election cycle is not about moving the Republican Party in a more conservative or more moderate direction or about reshaping its policy views. It is about packing the party with conspiracy theorists and liars and people itching to advance Mr. Trump’s belligerent, apocalyptic, reality-resistant brand of politics. Some three dozen QAnon-friendly Republican congressional candidates are in the mix, according to Media Matters’s latest count.Already, there are far too many Republican officials willing, either cynically or genuinely, to advance Mr. Trump’s Big Lie. An election that installs more of them up and down the ticket could easily turn the acute reality crisis of the past few months into a lingering condition.A healthy democracy requires a functional, stable, sane opposition party. Right now, the Republican bandwagon appears to be speeding in precisely the opposite direction.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

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      Toyota to Stop Donating to Republicans Who Contested 2020 Results

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      Toyota said on Thursday that it would stop donating to Republicans who disputed the 2020 presidential vote after being the focus of an ad campaign by the Lincoln Project, a group that was founded to antagonize President Donald J. Trump with viral video criticisms.The automaker said in a statement that its support of the politicians had “troubled some stakeholders.”“At this time, we have decided to stop contributing to those members of Congress who contested the certification of certain states in the 2020 election,” the company said. It added that it was “committed to supporting and promoting actions that further our democracy” through its PAC and “has longstanding relationships with members of Congress across the political spectrum.”The Lincoln Project had released an ad directed at Toyota, which it accused of donating $55,000 to 37 Republicans in Congress who pushed back against President Biden’s victory.The Lincoln Project, known for its scathing anti-Trump videos and memes during the 2020 campaign, said the ad was part of a broader project aimed at decreasing funding for Republicans who resisted the results of the vote and played down the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. The group said it planned to release more ads in the following weeks naming companies that “have broken their pledges to withhold campaign funds to members of Congress who enabled, empowered and emboldened former President Trump and the insurrectionists.”A report last month from the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington listed many other companies who continued donating to the 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the election results, including Boeing, Walmart and PNC Bank.The Lincoln Project’s spot about Toyota includes footage of a vehicle crash test interspersed with images of the Jan. 6 riot. A narrator warns Toyota executives that “if they don’t reconsider where they send their money, Americans will reconsider where we send ours.”The Lincoln Project said the ad would no longer run after Thursday. It was set to appear online in the same markets as Toyota’s top 20 dealerships and locally on Fox Business and CNBC in New York and in Plano, Texas, where Toyota’s American operations are based. The Lincoln Project said Comcast had refused to air the commercial in Washington; Comcast did not immediately provide a comment.“Toyota made the right choice today,” the Lincoln Project said in a statement. “They put democracy ahead of transactional politics. We hope that the rest of corporate America will follow their lead — we’ll be there to make sure of it.”Founded by Republican consultants opposed to Mr. Trump, the group started as a super PAC in 2019. Later, the founders sought to parlay the Lincoln Project’s popularity into a broader media enterprise, setting off internal disputes as it experimented with a new tone for the Biden administration.The campaign targeting Toyota and other companies could offer the group a way to rebrand itself. Earlier this year, the Lincoln Project grappled with allegations that John Weaver, a co-founder, had harassed young men with sexually provocative messages for years. In June, the Lincoln Project said an independent investigation had found that its leadership was unaware of the accusations against Mr. Weaver until they were made public. More

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      In Michigan, Pro-Impeachment Republicans Face Voters’ Wrath

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      Representative Peter Meijer, a Republican who voted to impeach Donald J. Trump, seeks “decency and humility” in Western Michigan, but has found anger, fear and misinformation.GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Representative Peter Meijer cites Gerald R. Ford as his inspiration these days, not because the former president held his House seat for 24 years or because his name is all over this city — from its airport to its freeway to its arena — but because in Mr. Ford, the freshman congressman sees virtues lost to his political party.Ford took control after a president resigned rather than be impeached for abusing his power in an attempt to manipulate the outcome of an election.“It was a period of turmoil,” said Mr. Meijer, who was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald J. Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Ford’s greatest asset, he added, was “offering — this word is becoming too loaded of late — a sense of morals, moral leadership, a sense of value and centering decency and humility.”“Sometimes when you’re surrounded by cacophony, it helps to have someone sitting there who isn’t adding another screaming voice onto the pile,” Mr. Meijer added.Six months after the Capitol attack and 53 miles southeast of Grand Rapids, on John Parish’s farm in the hamlet of Vermontville, Mr. Meijer’s problems sat on folding chairs on the Fourth of July. They ate hot dogs, listened to bellicose speakers and espoused their own beliefs that reflected how, even at age 33, Mr. Meijer may represent the Republican Party’s past more than its future.The stars of the “Festival of Truth” on Sunday were adding their screaming voices onto the pile, and the 100 or so West Michiganders in the audience were enthusiastically soaking it up. Many of them inhabited an alternative reality in which Mr. Trump was re-elected, their votes were stolen, the deadly Jan. 6 mob was peaceful, coronavirus vaccines were dangerous and conservatives were oppressed.“God is forgiving, and — I don’t know — we’re forgiving people,” Geri Nichols, 79, of nearby Hastings, said as she spoke of her disappointment in Mr. Meijer. “But he did wrong. He didn’t support our president like he should have.”Under an unseasonably warm sun, her boyfriend, Gary Munson, 80, shook his head, agreeing: “He doesn’t appear to be what he says he is.”Representative Peter Meijer, a freshman member of Congress, was one of 10 House Republicans to vote for former President Donald J. Trump’s impeachment.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesFor all its political eccentricities, Michigan is not unique. Dozens of congressional candidates planning challenges next year are promoting the false claims of election fraud pressed by Mr. Trump. But Western Michigan does have one distinction: It is home to 20 percent of the House Republicans who voted to impeach Mr. Trump — that is, two of 10.The other one, Representative Fred Upton, 68, took office in an adjacent district west and south of here the year before Mr. Meijer was born, 1987. But the two find themselves in similar political straits. Both will face multiple primary challengers next year who accuse them of disloyalty — or worse, treason — for holding Mr. Trump responsible for the riot that raged as they met to formalize the election results for the victor, President Biden.Both men followed their impeachment votes with votes to create a bipartisan commission to examine the Capitol riot, two of 35 House Republicans to do so. Both face a backlash from Republican voters who are enraged by what they allege are an effort by the F.B.I. to hunt down peaceful protesters, a news media silencing conservative voices, a governor who has taken away their livelihoods with overzealous pandemic restrictions and a Democratic secretary of state who has stolen their votes.Many of their grievances have less to do with Mr. Trump himself than the false claims that he promoted, which have taken root with voters who now look past him.“People think people who support Trump are like ‘Trump is our God,’” said Audra Johnson, one of Mr. Meijer’s Republican challengers, explaining why she refuses to get inoculated against the coronavirus with a vaccine the Trump administration helped create. “No, he’s not.”Audra Johnson, a pro-Trump activist, is one of many challengers to Mr. Meijer in the Republican primary next year.Emily Elconin for The New York Times“People are terrified,” Ms. Johnson added over grilled cheese and tomato soup at Crow’s Nest Restaurant in Kalamazoo. She added, “We’re heading toward a civil war, if we’re not already in a cold civil war.”In June, a Republican-led State Senate inquiry into Michigan’s 2020 vote count affirmed Mr. Biden’s Michigan victory by more than 154,000 votes, nearly 3 percentage points, and found “no evidence” of “either significant acts of fraud” or “an organized, wide-scale effort to commit fraudulent activity.”“The committee strongly recommends citizens use a critical eye and ear toward those who have pushed demonstrably false theories for their own personal gain,” it concluded.The Meijer name graces grocery stores that are a regional staple — founded in 1934 by the congressman’s great-grandfather, Hendrik Meijer, a Dutch immigrant — and a popular botanical garden and sculpture park, established by his grandfather, Frederik, that is one of Grand Rapids’ biggest attractions. His father, Hank, and his uncle, Doug, took over the Meijer chain in 1990 as Forbes-listed billionaires.Peter Meijer’s pedigree is matched by his résumé: a year at West Point, a degree from Columbia University, eight years in the Army Reserve, including a deployment to Iraq as an intelligence adviser, and an M.B.A. from New York University.But these days in some circles, “Meijer” is less synonymous with groceries, gardens and prestige than with the impeachment of Mr. Trump.“Last time, the problem was we were running against Peter Meijer,” said Tom Norton, who lost to Mr. Meijer in the 2020 primary and is challenging him again in 2022. “The advantage this time is we’re running against Peter Meijer. It’s a complete flip.”In his Capitol Hill office, Mr. Meijer said that in one-on-one discussions with some of his constituents, he could make headway explaining his votes and how dangerous the lies of a stolen presidential election had become for the future of American democracy.“The challenge is if you believe that Nov. 3 was a landslide victory for Donald Trump that was stolen, and Jan. 6 was the day to stop that steal,” he said. “I can’t come to an understanding with somebody when we’re dealing with completely separate sets of facts and realities.”At a recent event, he said, a woman informed Mr. Meijer that he would shortly be arrested for treason and hauled before a military tribunal, presumably to be shot.“People are willing to kill and die over these alternative realities,” he said.Representative Fred Upton, another Republican impeachment voter, has been in office since 1987.Anna Moneymaker/The New York TimesYet at least one of his primary challengers is amplifying that alternative reality. Ms. Johnson, a pro-Trump activist, splashed onto the scene in 2019 as the “MAGA bride,” when she appeared at her wedding reception over the July 4 weekend in a Make America Great Again dress.She helped organize armed protests of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s pandemic restrictions at the State Capitol in Lansing and traveled with a convoy of buses to Washington for Mr. Trump’s Jan. 6 protest against election certification.While she said she did not enter the Capitol that day, she said she knew people who knew people who did — peacefully, she insists.“Honestly, they’re terrified that the F.B.I. is going to come knock on their door,” Ms. Johnson said.Mr. Norton, who jousted with Mr. Meijer at the Northview Fourth of July parade in a middle-class Grand Rapids neighborhood, said afterward that he was sure there was election fraud in 2020 and was pushing for an Arizona-style “forensic audit” that would go even deeper than the audit already conducted.One of Mr. Upton’s challengers, state Representative Steve Carra, has introduced legislation to force such an audit in Michigan, even though he conceded that he had only skimmed the June report, which not only concluded that there was no fraud but called for those making such false claims to be referred for prosecution.“To say that there’s no evidence of widespread fraud I think is wrong,” said Mr. Carra, who was elected to his first term in November, at age 32.He sees a golden opportunity to finally unseat Mr. Upton, who has been in Congress since before Mr. Carra was born. Redistricting could bring a new cache of voters from neighboring Battle Creek who have not spent decades pulling the lever for the incumbent. Mr. Upton’s challengers are bringing his moderate voting record to primary voters’ attention.But above all, there is Mr. Upton’s impeachment vote.“When Fred Upton voted to impeach President Trump, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me,” Mr. Carra said, sitting on a park bench in Three Rivers, Mich.Jon Rocha, another of Mr. Upton’s challengers, spoke in measured tones to a reporter about his rival’s vote to impeach. Mr. Upton had been acting out of emotion, said the former Marine, who is Mexican American and a political newcomer, and had failed to consider Mr. Trump’s due process or take the time to investigate.But onstage in front of the crowd at the Festival of Truth, Mr. Rocha’s tone darkened.“This country is under attack,” he thundered. “Our children are being indoctrinated to hate the color of their skin, to hate this country and to believe this country is systemically racist and meant to oppress anybody with a different skin pigment. I can attest to you, as an American Mexican, that is not the case.”Jon Rocha, who spoke at the festival in Vermontville, is challenging Mr. Upton in the Republican primary.Emily Elconin for The New York TimesOppression is a theme: Ms. Johnson said she understood — though, she hastened to add, did not condone — violence by beleaguered conservatives. Mr. Norton suggested that transgender women were driven by mental illness to lop off body parts, and yet it was only those who objected who were ridiculed. Larry Eberly, the organizer of the Festival of Truth, warned the crowd that “we’re being manipulated” into accepting coronavirus vaccines, bellowing to cheers, “I will die first before they shove that needle into my arm.”In the end, none of this may matter to the composition of Congress. The anti-incumbent vote may be badly split, allowing Representatives Meijer and Upton to survive their primaries and sail to re-election.Mr. Meijer’s district had been held for a decade by Justin Amash, a libertarian-leaning iconoclast who was fiercely critical of Mr. Trump and was the first House Republican to call for his impeachment. Amid the backlash, Mr. Amash left the Republican Party in 2019 to try to run as a libertarian. Then, when Mr. Amash found no quarter, he retired.But Mr. Meijer will have his name, the support of the Republican apparatus and a formidable money advantage.The question vexing him is not so much his own future, but his party’s. That is where he looks wistfully to Ford.“Was he necessarily the leader on moving the Republican Party in a direction? I can’t speak to what his internal conversations were,” Mr. Meijer said. “But in terms of giving confidence to the country that Republican leadership could be ethical and honest and sincere, I think he hit it out of the park.” More

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      Cheney to Join Jan. 6 Inquiry, Drawing Threats of G.O.P. Retribution

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      Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to offer a slot to the Wyoming Republican was an effort to bring a veneer of bipartisanship to an investigation the G.O.P. has denounced as one-sided.Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday named Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming to a newly created special committee to investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, choosing a Republican who has blamed former President Donald J. Trump for fomenting the assault to help conduct an inquiry that the rest of her party has fought to block at every turn.The appointment drew an angry response from the top House Republican, who suggested that Ms. Cheney — already ousted from party leadership for her insistence on calling out Mr. Trump’s election lies — could face fresh retribution for agreeing to help Democrats investigate the deadliest attack on Congress in centuries.The reaction was the latest bid by Republican leaders to turn public attention away from the assault on the Capitol and punish those who insist on scrutinizing the riot. It came as a fuller picture is emerging of how violent extremists, taking their cues from Mr. Trump, infiltrated the seat of American democracy just as Congress was meeting to validate President Biden’s election.A New York Times visual investigation published this week revealed in vivid detail how members of extremist groups incited others to riot and assault police officers, and underscored how the former president’s words resonated with the mob in real time as it staged the attack.Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California and the minority leader, responded angrily to Ms. Cheney’s decision to accept the post, calling it “shocking” and implying that she could lose her seat on the Armed Services Committee as payback.“I don’t know in history where someone would get their committee assignments from the speaker and then expect to get them from the conference as well,” Mr. McCarthy said.Should he follow through with the threat, it would be a striking move for Mr. McCarthy, who has declined to penalize Republicans who have made anti-Semitic comments, called for the imprisoning of their Democratic colleagues or spread false conspiracy theories about the origins of the assault on the Capitol.It would also be the second time in two months that Mr. McCarthy punished Ms. Cheney for insisting that Congress should scrutinize the attack and Mr. Trump’s role in spreading the falsehoods about voting fraud that inspired it. In May, Mr. McCarthy led the charge to oust Ms. Cheney from her post as the No. 3 House Republican, saying her criticisms of Mr. Trump and efforts to sound the alarm about the riot were undermining party unity and hurting its chances of reclaiming the House in the 2022 elections.“My oath, my duty is to the Constitution, and that will always be above politics,” Ms. Cheney told reporters in the Capitol on Thursday, appearing alongside the seven Democrats Ms. Pelosi had selected for the 13-member panel.According to its rules, Mr. McCarthy has the right to offer five recommendations for Republican members, but he declined on Thursday to say whether he would do so.The select committee was established at Ms. Pelosi’s behest after Senate Republicans blocked the formation of a bipartisan commission to scrutinize the riot. It will investigate what its organizing resolution calls “the facts, circumstances and causes relating to the Jan. 6, 2021, domestic terrorist attack.” The committee is also charged with reporting its findings, conclusions and recommendations for preventing such attacks in the future.The panel’s creation comes as some far-right House Republicans have stepped up their efforts to deny or distort the riot, including by spreading misinformation about it. They have sought to portray it as a mostly peaceful event and voted against honoring police officers who responded. One House Republican accused a U.S. Capitol Police officer of “lying in wait” to carry out an “execution” of a rioter. Another compared the events of that day to a “normal tourist visit” to the Capitol. Still others have amplified the baseless theory that the F.B.I. was secretly behind the siege.Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, called Ms. Cheney’s decision to accept the post “shocking.”Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesOn Thursday, Mr. Trump amplified those narratives, releasing a one-sentence statement questioning the killing of Ashli Babbitt. Ms. Babbitt was shot as she tried to break into an area off the House floor where several lawmakers were taking cover, and her death has become a rallying cry of the far right.In taking the unusual step of giving one of her seats on the panel to a member of the opposing party, Ms. Pelosi was making a tactical move that appeared intended to drive a wedge among Republicans while putting a veneer of bipartisanship on an investigation that most of them have already dismissed as politically motivated and one-sided.The selection also all but ensures that Ms. Cheney, a prominent conservative from a storied Republican family, remains a high-profile voice countering her party’s attempts to downplay and deny the horrors of the attack, risking her political career to do so.For weeks, Republican leaders have tried to silence and ostracize Ms. Cheney, but she has remained undeterred. On Thursday, said she was “honored” to serve on the committee.“Those who are responsible for the attack need to be held accountable, and this select committee will fulfill that responsibility in a professional, expeditious and nonpartisan manner,” she said.Ms. Pelosi called Ms. Cheney personally on Thursday morning to offer her the post, and Ms. Cheney accepted on the spot, according to aides to both lawmakers. The two had not spoken previously about the prospect, the aides said, although Ms. Pelosi had let it be known this week that she was weighing naming a Republican to her side of the panel.Ms. Cheney’s selection was announced during Ms. Pelosi’s Thursday morning news conference, when she laid out a list of powerful lawmakers who would carry out the inquiry. The panel is to be led by Representative Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat who is the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. It includes two other committee leaders, Representatives Adam B. Schiff of the Intelligence Committee and Zoe Lofgren of the Administration Committee, both of California.Speaker Nancy Pelosi also selected, from left, Representatives Adam B. Schiff, Zoe Lofgren and Bennie Thompson to serve on the committee.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesAlso included are Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and the lead prosecutor in the impeachment case against Mr. Trump for “incitement of insurrection,” and Representative Pete Aguilar of California, a member of the party leadership. Ms. Pelosi also chose two moderate Democrats, Representative Elaine Luria of Virginia and Representative Stephanie Murphy of Florida, the leader of the centrist Blue Dog Coalition..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-16ed7iq{width:100%;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-box-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;justify-content:center;padding:10px 0;background-color:white;}.css-pmm6ed{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}.css-pmm6ed > :not(:first-child){margin-left:5px;}.css-5gimkt{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.8125rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-letter-spacing:0.03em;-moz-letter-spacing:0.03em;-ms-letter-spacing:0.03em;letter-spacing:0.03em;text-transform:uppercase;color:#333;}.css-5gimkt:after{content:’Collapse’;}.css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;-webkit-transform:rotate(180deg);-ms-transform:rotate(180deg);transform:rotate(180deg);}.css-eb027h{max-height:5000px;-webkit-transition:max-height 0.5s ease;transition:max-height 0.5s ease;}.css-6mllg9{-webkit-transition:all 0.5s ease;transition:all 0.5s ease;position:relative;opacity:0;}.css-6mllg9:before{content:”;background-image:linear-gradient(180deg,transparent,#ffffff);background-image:-webkit-linear-gradient(270deg,rgba(255,255,255,0),#ffffff);height:80px;width:100%;position:absolute;bottom:0px;pointer-events:none;}.css-1jiwgt1{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;margin-bottom:1.25rem;}.css-8o2i8v{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-8o2i8v p{margin-bottom:0;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-1rh1sk1{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-1rh1sk1 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-1rh1sk1 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1rh1sk1 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;text-decoration-color:#ccd9e3;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#ccc;text-decoration-color:#ccc;}.css-1rh1sk1 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Mr. Thompson pledged to deliver “a definitive accounting of the attack — an undertaking so vital to guarding against future attacks.”“We have to get to the bottom of finding out all the things that went wrong on Jan. 6,” he said.He also said the panel would hold a hearing in which “Capitol Police officers themselves could be able to testify about their experiences” during the attack.Several congressional investigations into the assault are already underway, but none have a mandate to look comprehensively at the event similar to how fact-finding commissions scrutinized the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; the bombing 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 Capitol breach and is pursuing potentially hundreds more. Two Senate panels carrying out a joint investigation into the riot produced a report outlining 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.But those inquiries, which have mostly focused on security failures, are no substitute for a select committee that can focus solely on investigating the attack and its root causes, Ms. Lofgren said.“It’s not a substitute for finding out what happened here,” Ms. Lofgren said. “What caused a mob of Americans to think they were somehow supporting the Constitution when they tried to disrupt the constitutional process of counting the Electoral College votes? Who paid for it? How was it organized? We need to find that out to keep the country safe.”The measure that created the panel was adopted on Wednesday over the opposition of nearly every Republican. Only Ms. Cheney and one other Republican, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, supported it.“We cannot ignore what happened on January 6th; we cannot ignore what caused it,” Mr. Kinzinger wrote Thursday on Twitter, appending the hashtag “TheBigLie.” He pointed to the visual investigation The Times published on Wednesday, which provided the most complete picture to date of how supporters of Mr. Trump planned and carried out the deadly assault.Mr. McCarthy faces a challenge in deciding whom to recommend for the panel. Republicans, many of whom initially called for a full investigation, have long since lost their appetite for scrutinizing the assault, following Mr. Trump’s lead.Even without Mr. McCarthy’s appointments, however, the committee would have enough members to proceed with its work.Mr. McCarthy initially denied on Thursday that he would penalize any Republican for accepting an appointment to the panel from Ms. Pelosi, saying he was “not making any threats” on the matter.But he then appeared to do just that, saying that no Republican should expect to keep committee posts granted by the G.O.P. after accepting an appointment from the other party. He noted with displeasure that Ms. Cheney had not talked to him before taking Ms. Pelosi’s offer.“Maybe she’s closer to her than us,” Mr. McCarthy said. More

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      House Opens Jan. 6 Investigation Over Republican Opposition

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      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