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      US Capitol attack report finds intelligence, military and police failings

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      A Senate investigation of the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol has uncovered broad government, military and law enforcement failings before the violent attack, including a breakdown within multiple intelligence agencies and a lack of training and preparation for Capitol police officers who were quickly overwhelmed by the rioters.The Senate report released on Tuesday is the first – and possibly the last – bipartisan review of how hundreds of supporters of the former president Donald Trump were able to violently push past security lines and break into the Capitol that day, interrupting the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.It includes new details about the police officers on the front lines who suffered chemical burns, brain injuries and broken bones and who told senators that they were left with no direction when command systems broke down. It recommends immediate changes to give the Capitol police chief more authority, to provide better planning and equipment for law enforcement and to streamline intelligence-gathering among federal agencies.As a bipartisan effort, the report does not delve into the root causes of the attack, including Trump’s role as he called for his supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn his election defeat that day. It does not call the attack an insurrection, even though it was. And it comes two weeks after Republicans blocked a bipartisan, independent commission that would investigate the insurrection more broadly.“This report is important in the fact that it allows us to make some immediate improvements to the security situation here in the Capitol,” said Michigan senator Gary Peters, the chairman of the homeland security and governmental affairs committee, which conducted the investigation along with the Senate rules committee. “But it does not answer some of the bigger questions that we need to face, quite frankly, as a country and as a democracy.”The House passed legislation in May to create a commission that would be modelled after a panel that investigated the 9/11 terrorist attack two decades ago. But it failed to get the 60 Senate votes needed to advance, with many Republicans pointing to the Senate report as sufficient.The top Republican on the rules panel, the Missouri senator Roy Blunt, has opposed the commission, arguing that investigation would take too long. He said the recommendations made in the Senate could be implemented faster, including legislation that he and the Minnesota Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar, the rules committee chair, intend to introduce soon that would give the chief of Capitol police more authority to request assistance from the National Guard.The Senate report recounts how the guard was delayed for hours on 6 January as officials in multiple agencies took bureaucratic steps to release the troops. It details hours of calls between officials in the Capitol and the Pentagon and as the then chief of the Capitol police, Steven Sund, desperately begged for help.It finds that the Pentagon spent hours “mission planning” and seeking layers of approvals as rioters were overwhelming and brutally beating Capitol police. It also states that the Department of Defense’s response was “informed by” criticism of its heavy-handed response to protests in the summer of 2020 after the death of George Floyd at the hands of police.The senators are heavily critical of the Capitol police board, a three-member panel that includes the heads of security for the House and Senate and the architect of the Capitol. The board is now required to approve requests by the police chief, even in urgent situations. The report recommends that its members “regularly review the policies and procedures” after senators found that none of the board members on 6 January understood their own authority or could detail the statutory requirements for requesting National Guard assistance.Two of the three members of the board, the House and Senate sergeants-at-arms, were pushed out in the days after the attack. Sund also resigned under pressure.Congress needed to change the law and give the police chief more authority “immediately”, Klobuchar said.The report recommends a consolidated intelligence unit within the Capitol police after widespread failures from multiple agencies that did not predict the attack even though insurrectionists were planning it openly on the internet. The police’s intelligence unit “knew about social media posts calling for violence at the Capitol on 6 January, including a plot to breach the Capitol, the online sharing of maps of the Capitol complex’s tunnel systems, and other specific threats of violence”, the report says, but agents did not properly inform leadership of everything they had found.The senators also criticise the FBI and the homeland security department for downplaying online threats and for not issuing formal intelligence bulletins that help law enforcement plan.In a response to the report, the Capitol police acknowledged the need for improvements, some of which they said they were already making. “Law enforcement agencies across the country rely on intelligence, and the quality of that intelligence can mean the difference between life and death,” the statement said.During the attack, the report says, Capitol police were heavily compromised by multiple failures – bad intelligence, poor planning, faulty equipment and a lack of leadership. The force’s incident command system “broke down during the attack”, leaving officers on the front lines without orders. There were no functional incident commanders, and some senior officers were fighting instead of giving orders. “USCP leadership never took control of the radio system to communicate orders to frontline officers,” the investigation found.“I was horrified that no deputy chief or above was on the radio or helping us,” one officer told the committee in an anonymous statement. “For hours the screams on the radio were horrific, the sights were unimaginable and there was a complete loss of control … For hours no chief or above took command and control. Officers were begging and pleading for help for medical triage.”The acting chief of police, Yogananda Pittman, who replaced Sund after his resignation, told the committees that the lack of communication resulted from “incident commanders being overwhelmed and engaging with rioters, rather than issuing orders over the radio”.The committee’s interviews with police officers detail what one officer said was “absolutely brutal” abuse from Trump’s supporters as they ran over them and broke into the building. They described hearing racial slurs and seeing Nazi salutes. One officer trying to evacuate the Senate said he had stopped several men in full tactical gear who said: “You better get out of our way, boy, or we’ll go through you to get [the Senators].’”The insurrectionists told police officers they would kill them, and then the members of Congress. One officer said he had a “tangible fear” that he might not make it home alive.At the same time, the senators acknowledge the officers’ bravery, noting that one officer told them: “The officers inside all behaved admirably and heroically and, even outnumbered, went on the offensive and took the Capitol back.” More

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      Democratic splits grow as key senator Manchin says no to voting rights bill

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      Growing fissures in Democratic ranks were evident on Monday over West Virginia senator Joe Manchin’s public opposition to the For the People Act, a sweeping measure to protect voting rights that are under assault from Republicans in numerous states – and also his stance against scrapping the filibuster.The filibuster is the rule under which the Senate minority, currently the Republicans, has the power to thwart the majority’s will on most legislation.Manchin is a centrist Democrat, but one progressive congressman called him “the new Mitch McConnell”, for helping the Republican Senate leader in his quest to stop progress on the Democrats’ agenda at all costs.In a column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail on Sunday, Manchin said he opposed the For the People Act, or HR1, which currently has no Republican support in the Senate, because “partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy”.He also reiterated his support of the filibuster, under which 60 votes are needed to pass most legislation. The Senate is split 50-50 between the two parties and controlled by Democrats only through Kamala Harris’s casting vote as vice-president.Anger over Manchin’s stand was particularly fierce among African Americans, a key constituency in elections which gave Democrats control of the White House and Congress and subsequently a key target of Republican efforts to restrict ballot access in Florida, Georgia, Texas and elsewhere.Mondaire Jones, a New York congressman, referred to the era of racial segregation in the US south when he said: “Manchin’s op-ed might as well be titled, ‘Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow.’”The writer Jemele Hill elaborated: “This is so on brand for this country. Record number of black voters show up to save this democracy, only for white supremacy to be upheld by a cowardly, power-hungry white dude. Joe Manchin is a clown.”Speaking to CNN on Monday, congressman Jamaal Bowman of New York called Manchin “the new Mitch McConnell”.“Mitch McConnell during [Barack] Obama’s presidency said he would do everything in his power to stop Obama,” he said.“He’s also repeated that now, during the Biden presidency, by saying he would do everything in his power to stop President Biden. And now Joe Manchin is doing everything in his power to stop democracy and stop our work for the people, that work that the people sent us here to do.”Manchin has in fact voted with Biden most of the time so far, and has said he backs the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore ballot protections gutted by the US supreme court in 2013.Asked if it was fair to attack Manchin so stringently, Bowman said: “HR1 has popularity in West Virginia and across the country. Well over 65% of the American people support HR1, and well over 50% of Republicans support HR1.“The American people sent us to Washington to do a job. Just a few weeks ago, we had a bipartisan piece of legislation looking to form a commission to study the 6 January insurrection, the first attack on our Capitol since the War of 1812. It was a bipartisan piece of legislation, and it did not pass. Why? Because of the filibuster, and because the majority of Republicans are focused much more on obstruction.”A study by the Center for American Progress found that Republicans have used filibusters roughly twice as often as Democrats to stop legislation.Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader and New York Democrat, has said he will bring the For the People Act up for a vote this month. At the outset of a new legislative session on Monday, he appealed for Democrats to stick together.“I want to be clear that the next few weeks will be hard and will test our resolve as a Congress and a conference,” Schumer wrote to colleagues, as reported by the Hill. “The American people gave us a Democratic Senate to produce big and bold action on the major issues confronting us. And that is what we will do.”As the influential Punchbowl News put it on Monday morning, however: “Any legislative strategy that involves dumping the filibuster and then passing a bill is going to fail. That much is clear. If you don’t get that by now, we don’t know how to help you.”Unlike his fellow centrist and filibuster supporter, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Manchin voted for the 6 January commission, which would have investigated an event which Donald Trump incited in service of his lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” and he won, not Joe Biden.On Monday, Trump backed Manchin in his support for the filibuster, telling Fox Business: “It’s a very important thing. Otherwise you’re going to be packing the courts, you’re going to be doing all sorts of very bad things that were unthinkable.”The former president’s words were not without attendant irony.In July 2017, faced with the failure of attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Trump famously tweeted against the filibuster rule: “Republican Senate must get rid of 60 vote NOW! It is killing the R Party, allows 8 Dems to control country. 200 Bills sit in Senate. A JOKE!”McConnell, then Senate majority leader, refused to budge. Now that he is the Senate minority leader, McConnell is still immovable. More

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      Joe Manchin opposes For the People Act in blow to Democrats’ voting rights push

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      In a huge blow to Democrats’ hopes of passing sweeping voting rights protections, the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin said on Sunday he would not support his party’s flagship bill – because of Republican opposition to it.The West Virginia senator is considered a key vote to pass the For the People Act, which would ensure automatic and same-day registration, place limits on gerrymandering and restore voting rights for felons.Many Democrats see the bill as essential to counter efforts by Republicans in state government to restrict access to the ballot and to make it more easy to overturn election results.It would also present voters with a forceful answer to Donald Trump’s continued lies about electoral fraud, which the former president rehearsed in a speech in North Carolina on Saturday.In a column for the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin said: “I believe that partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy, and for that reason, I will vote against the For the People Act.”Manchin’s opposition to the bill also known as HR1 could prove crucial in the evenly split Senate. His argument against the legislation focused on Republican opposition to the bill and did not specify any issues with its contents.Manchin instead endorsed the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, a measure named for the late Georgia Democratic congressman and campaigner which would reauthorize voting protections established in the civil rights era but eliminated by the supreme court in 2013.Manchin’s op-ed might as well be titled, Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim CrowManchin also reiterated his support for the filibuster, which gives 41 of 100 senators the ability to block action by the majority.Democrats are seeking to abolish the filibuster, arguing that Republicans have repeatedly abused it to support minority positions on issues like gun control and, just last month, to block the establishment of an independent commission to investigate the attack on the US Capitol.Republicans have used the filibuster roughly twice as often as Democrats to prevent the other party from passing legislation, according to a study by the Center for American Progress.“I have always said, ‘If I can’t go home and explain it, I can’t vote for it,’” Manchin wrote. “And I cannot explain strictly partisan election reform or blowing up the Senate rules to expedite one party’s agenda.”In a sign of growing frustration within Manchin’s own party, Mondaire Jones, a progressive congressman from New York, tweeted that his op-ed “might as well be titled, ‘Why I’ll vote to preserve Jim Crow.’”Jim Crow was the name given to the system of legalised segregation which dominated southern states between the end of the civil war in 1865 and the civil rights era of the 1960s.On the Sunday talk shows, hosts pressed Manchin on whether his expectations of a bipartisan solution on voting rights were realistic in such a divided Congress, and with a Republican party firmly in thrall to Donald Trump.Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace told him that if he were to threaten to vote against the filibuster, it could incentivize Republicans to negotiate on legislation.“Haven’t you empowered Republicans to be obstructionists?” Wallace asked.“I don’t think so,” Manchin said. “Because we have seven brave Republicans that continue to vote for what they know is right and the facts as they see them, not worrying about the political consequences.”Seven Republican defections from the pro-Trump party line is not enough to beat the filibuster, even if all 50 Democrats remain united. Manchin said he was hopeful other Republicans would “rise to the occasion”.Wallace asked if he was being “naive”, noting that the Republican Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said in May: “One hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration.”“I’m not being naive,” Manchin said. “I think he’s 100% wrong in trying to block all the good things that we’re trying to do for America. It would be a lot better if we had participation and we’re getting participation.”With the Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, Manchin has emerged as one of the most powerful figures in Washington, by virtue of his centrist views in a Senate split on starkly partisan lines. In Tulsa this week, in a remark that risked angering Manchin, Biden said the two senators “vote more with my Republican friends”, though their voting record does not actually reflect this.On CBS’s Face the Nation, host John Dickerson asked Manchin if his bipartisan ideals were outdated.Dickerson noted that since the 2020 election put Democrats in control of Washington, Republicans in the states have introduced more than 300 bills featuring voting restrictions. Furthermore, Republicans who embraced baseless claims about the election being stolen are now running to be chief elections officials in several states.Dickerson asked: “Why would Republicans, when they’re making all these gains in the statehouses and achieving their goals in the states, why would they vote for a bill someday in the Senate that’s going to take away all the things they’re achieving right now in those statehouses?”Manchin said those state-level successes could ultimately damage Republicans.“The bottom line is the fundamental purpose of our democracy is the freedom of our elections,” Manchin said. “If we can’t come to an agreement on that, God help us.” More

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      ‘Real compromise’ possible on Biden infrastructure plan, key Republican says

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      Negotiations with Joe Biden over a potentially massive infrastructure investment package are inching forward even though disagreements remain over the size and scope of such legislation, Republican senator Shelley Moore Capito said on Sunday.“I think we can get to real compromise, absolutely, because we’re both still in the game,” Capito told Fox News Sunday.Capito leads a group of six Republicans in regular contact with Biden and White House aides over a bill the administration wants to move through Congress promptly.The Republicans have proposed $928bn to improve roads, bridges and other traditional infrastructure projects. Much of the funding would come from money already enacted into law for other purposes.The administration’s latest offer in negotiations is for $1.7tn and would include spending on projects that go beyond traditional infrastructure, such as homecare for the elderly.The transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, told ABC’s This Week: “There’s movement in the right direction, but a lot of concern … We need to make investments over and above what would have happened anyway.” He also highlighted the need for using the infrastructure bill to address climate change and indicated opposition to shifting Covid-19 relief money to infrastructure accounts.Capito said that following a White House meeting which Republicans viewed as productive, Biden aides stepped away from some ideas Republicans pushed.“We have had some back and forth with the staff that sort of pulled back a little bit but I think we’re smoothing out those edges,” said the West Virginia senator, whose state stands to benefit significantly from infrastructure investment.Republicans continued to balk at raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations to help finance the projects.“I’m not going to vote to overturn those,” Capito said when asked about rolling back some tax cuts enacted during the Trump administration.She also held the line against including new funding for projects that go beyond physical infrastructure, saying those could be considered in other measures.Talks are expected to continue this week even though Congress is on a break, with the Senate returning on 7 June. When lawmakers return to Washington, Biden will be under pressure from Democrats to sidestep Republicans if talks do not show signs of significant progress.Buttigieg told CNN’s State of the Union there needed to be a clear direction on the infrastructure bill. “The president keeps saying ‘Inaction is not an option’ and time is not unlimited here,” he said.The New York Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand told CNN: “I think waiting any longer for Republicans to do the right thing is a misstep … I would go forward.”The Senate could use the “reconciliation” process that requires only a simple majority to advance legislation, instead of the usual 60-vote threshold. The Senate is split 50-50 with Vice-President Kamala Harris having the power to break deadlocks.It is not clear if all Democrats would go along with such a process. More

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      How Mitch McConnell killed the US Capitol attack commission

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      Days before the Senate voted down the creation of a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Capitol attack, the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, was adamant: he would oppose the bill, regardless of any amendments – and he expected his colleagues to follow suit.The commission that would have likely found Donald Trump and some Republicans responsible for the insurrection posed an existential threat to the GOP ahead of the midterms, he said, and would complicate efforts to regain the majority in Congress.McConnell’s sharp warning at a closed-door meeting had the desired effect on Friday, when Senate Republicans largely opted to stick with the Senate minority leader. All but six of them voted to block the commission and prevent a full accounting into the events of 6 January.But it also underscored the alarm that gripped McConnell and Senate Republican leadership in the fraught political moments leading up to the vote, and how they exploited fears within the GOP of crossing a mercurial former president to galvanize opposition to the commission.The story of how Republicans undermined an inquiry into one of the darkest days for American democracy – five people died as a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol and sought to hang Mike Pence – is informed by eight House and Senate aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.The prospect of a commission unravelsSurrounded by shards of broken glass in the Capitol on the night of 6 January, and as House Democrats drew up draft articles of impeachment against Trump, Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, made her first outreach to canvas the prospect of a commission to investigate the attack.In the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, Pelosi had reason to be hopeful. Spurred on by the threat felt by many Republicans to their personal safety, a swelling group of lawmakers had started to agitate for an inquiry to reveal how Trump did nothing to stop the riot.But what was once heralded as a necessary step to “investigate and report” on the attack and interference in election proceedings unravelled soon after, with the commission swiftly reduced to an acrimonious point of partisan contention in a deeply divided Capitol.The main objection from House and Senate Republicans, at first, centered on the lopsided structure of Pelosi’s initial proposal, that would have seen a majority of members appointed by Democrats, who would have also held unilateral subpoena power.And only weeks after the riot, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, was already advancing the complaint for his ultimate opposition: that the scope of the commission did not include unrelated far-left violence from last summer, a political priority that stalled talks.With little progress three months after the Capitol attack, Pelosi made a renewed effort to establish a commission on 16 April, floating a revised proposal that mirrored the original 9/11 commission with the panel evenly split between Democrats and Republicans.Pelosi briefed her leadership team that included the House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, the House majority whip, Jim Clyburn, the assistant speaker, Katherine Clark, and notably, the chair of the House homeland security committee, Bennie Thompson, about the proposal the following Monday.During that meeting, Hoyer first raised the prospect of also extending equal subpoena power to Republicans – a concession that would allow Democrats to meet all of Republicans’ demands about the structure of the commission – which Pelosi adopted a few days later.By the penultimate week of April, Pelosi had deputized Thompson to lead talks as she felt the homeland security committee was an appropriate venue, and because the top Republican on the committee, John Katko, was one of only three House GOP members to impeach Trump.With the House on recess, Thompson made enough progress in negotiations to brief Pelosi and her leadership team on 8 May that he secured a tentative deal on the commission, though Katko wanted to wait on an announcement until Liz Cheney was ousted as GOP conference chair.Tensions within the House Republican conference had reached new highs the previous week after Cheney continued her months-long criticism of Trump’s lies about a stolen election at a party retreat in Florida, and Katko was wary of injecting the commission into the charged moment.“As soon as the vote on Liz Cheney is taken, he will be prepared to do a joint statement,” Thompson said in remarks first reported by CNN.Minutes after House Republicans elevated Elise Stefanik to become the new GOP conference chair on 14 May, Thompson and Katko unveiled their proposal for a bipartisan 9/11-style commission.McConnell cracks down on the billThe ouster of Cheney solidified Tump’s outsize influence on the Republican party, and set the scene for the weeks to come.McCarthy almost immediately sought to distance himself from the commission and was non-committal about offering his endorsement. Asked whether he had signed off on the deal, McCarthy was direct: “No, no, no,” he told reporters in the basement of the Capitol.By the following Tuesday, top House Republicans were urging their colleagues to oppose the commission bill, with McCarthy positioned against an inquiry on the basis that its scope focused narrowly on the Capitol attack.As Hoyer had anticipated when he suggested that Pelosi also offer equal subpoena power to Republicans, McCarthy struggled to demonize the commission, and several House Republicans told the Guardian that they found his complaints about the scope unconvincing.The Senate minority leader, meanwhile, had until then denounced Trump, who he faulted for inciting the insurrection, and publicly seemed open to a commission. But as it became clear the scores of House Republicans would vote for the bill, his calculus quickly changed.Two days after the Senate returned for votes on 17 May McConnell informed Senate Republicans at a private breakfast event that he was opposed to the commission as envisioned by the House, and made clear that he would embark on a concerted campaign to sink the bill.Underpinning McConnell’s alarm was the fact that Democrats needed 10 Senate Republicans to vote in favor of the commission, and seven had already voted to impeach Trump during his second Senate trial – a far more controversial vote than supporting an inquiry into 6 January.Cognizant that Senate Democrats may find three or four more allies in uncertain Republicans, McConnell cracked down.After announcing at the breakfast event that he would oppose the commission, McConnell railed against the bill as being “slanted and unbalanced” on the Senate floor, in biting remarks that represented a clear warning as to his expectations.He kept up the pressure all afternoon on that Wednesday, so that by the evening, McConnell had a major victory when Senator Richard Burr, who voted to impeach Trump only four months before, abruptly reversed course to say that he would reject the commission.In the end, only six Senate Republicans – Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Bill Cassidy, Rob Portman, Lisa Murkowski and Ben Sasse – voted to move forward on the commission.As the final vote hurtled towards its expected finale, the Senate minority whip, John Thune, who also switched his position to side with McConnell, acknowledged McConnell’s arguments about a commission jeopardising Republican chances to retake majorities in the House and Senate.Summarising his concerns, Thune said: “Anything that gets us rehashing the 2020 elections I think is a day lost on being able to draw a contrast between us and the Democrats’ very radical leftwing agenda.” More

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      Joe Biden seeks Republican buy-in but how long before patience snaps?

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      It’s become a familiar process in the Joe Biden era.Biden and Democrats say they will work with Republicans. Republicans say they want a seat at the negotiating table. Then the prospect of Democrats going alone begins to hover over the negotiations.As Biden tries to pass an ambitious and transformative agenda as part of America’s recovery from the pandemic, he has repeatedly said he wants to bring Republicans over to his side. Yet at the same time he has tried to draw a line in the sand beyond which compromise is impossible.It has been like that on how the Biden administration has approached tackling a coronavirus relief package. It’s been like that on confirming some of Biden’s cabinet secretaries. And it’s how Biden has approached his next set of major initiatives, which range from upgrading roads and bridges to helping Americans with childcare.The jury on whether the White House’s political strategy will work is still out. Biden and his team have not yet walked away from talks with Republicans on major legislative proposals. But they have also actively kept the go-it-alone option alive.Case in point: on Thursday the Republican group charged with negotiating an infrastructure deal with the Biden administration rolled out its latest counter offer, a $928bn plan with about $257bn in new spending.When those Republican senators unveiled their latest proposal the divide between the White House’s new infrastructure spending and Republicans’ was about $1.4tn. It’s a gap that would seem like the last straw.Less than a week before this latest proposal, Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, the lead Republican negotiator, left a meeting at the White House and released a statement from her team saying “the groups seem further apart after two meetings with White House staff than they were after one meeting with President Biden.”But on the day Capito’s team revealed the newest offer, the senator was optimistic. She briefly spoke with Biden later on Thursday. She described the call as “very positive”.But if there was any agreement on Thursday it was that these discussions would not last endlessly.“He’s said this consistently and I think I feel this way too – you don’t want to drag this on for ever,” Capito added.Biden himself said as much the same day.“We’re going to have to close this down soon,” he said.At stake is hundreds of billions of dollars for not just the common types of improvements an infrastructure bill would cover – like roads and bridges – but also incentives for setting up a national grid for electric vehicles, significant investments in the education system, updating research and development and improving the US supply chain.But the sense of urgency is not unique to infrastructure negotiations. Even with Democrats controlling the presidency, Senate and the House of Representatives they have to grapple with the filibuster legislative mechanism in the Senate and slim majorities in both chambers.As a result, there’s always a threat. With infrastructure, Democrats have allowed the possibility of passing some kind of package through a budgetary maneuver called reconciliation. And with other priorities, like a voting rights overhaul or setting up a bipartisan commission to investigate the 6 January attack on the Capitol, Democrats have increasingly shaken their fists and said something must be done if Republicans won’t compromise.On Thursday Republicans showed just how far their interest in compromising went. The Senate failed to move forward on the 6 January commission after the bipartisan panel fell short of the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold, with just six Republican senators joining Democrats in a 54-35 vote.Some Republicans had argued that a commission was unnecessary. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, said on Thursday that while he supported investigations into the 6 January mob attack, he saw no reason for the type of committee Democrats have been pushing.Democrats have argued that congressional gridlock on the commission and a voting rights bill could lead even the final filibuster reform holdouts to throw up their hands.Democrats have argued that the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold is too often impossible to achieve and effectively stalls almost all legislating in the Senate.“There is no excuse for any Republican to vote against this commission since Democrats have agreed to everything they’ve asked for,” the Democratic senator Joe Manchin said on Thursday. “Mitch McConnell has made this his political position, thinking it will help his 2022 elections. They do not believe the truth will set you free, so they continue to live in fear.”On infrastructure, Biden and his advisers have signaled a willingness to keep negotiating with Republicans for a few more weeks, longer than they had previously said. But Democrats’ patience is dwindling.On Wednesday Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia stressed the importance of passing some kind of voting rights bill soon.“I think we’ve got to get something done in time to do something about voter suppression bills that have already passed,” Warnock said. More

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      Republicans’ blocking of the Capitol commission shows how deep the rot is

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      The question now is not so much whether the Republican party can be saved any time in the foreseeable future. It is what Joe Biden and the Democrats should do when faced with a party determined to subvert democracy through any means necessary, including violence.On Friday Republicans in the Senate torpedoed an effort to create a bipartisan commission to investigate the deadly insurrection by Donald Trump’s supporters at the US Capitol on 6 January, deploying the procedural move known as the filibuster to stop it even being debated.Fearful perhaps of what such a commission might uncover about their own role as co-conspirators, most brushed aside personal pleas by Gladys Sicknick, the mother of a police officer who was that day sprayed with a chemical, collapsed and later had a stroke and died.“A country that cannot even agree to investigate an assault on its Capitol is in big trouble, indeed,” observed Susan Glasser in the New Yorker magazine.Tellingly Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who previously condemned Trump’s role in the riot, reportedly asked senators to nix the commission as a “personal favour”. It was a sign that the rot now goes deeper than a cult of personality into the foundations of the Grand Old Party (GOP).It is a party that still has room for Matt Gaetz, a Florida congressman under investigation over sex trafficking allegations, who this week appeared to incite supporters to take up arms. “We have a second amendment in this country, and I think we have an obligation to use it,” he said.Gaetz was speaking in Georgia on his “America First” tour alongside local congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who recently compared coronavirus mask mandates to the Holocaust. The pair of mini-Trumps are taking his playbook of attention-grabbing outrage to new extremes.Bill Kristol, director of the Defending Democracy Together advocacy organisation, tweeted on Friday morning: “Marjorie Taylor Greene bragged yesterday that she and Matt Gaetz are taking over the GOP. Today Senate Republicans are set to block a January 6th commission that could make that somewhat more difficult. Violence and authoritarianism has enablers as well as instigators.”One of America’s two major parties now falls outside the democratic mainstream – think “far right” in European terms. But are Democrats taking the existential threat sufficiently seriously or sleepwalking towards disaster in the next election cycle?Joe Manchin, a moderate senator from West Virginia, had said Republicans have “no excuse” to oppose the commission. Yet he also repeated his refusal to contemplate abolishing the filibuster, effectively giving Republicans carte blanche to block infrastructure spending, voting rights legislation, statehood for the District of Columbia and more.Minutes after Friday’s vote, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, seemed to get it, arguing that Republicans acted out of “out of fear or fealty” to Trump and made his false claim of a stolen election their official policy. “Trump’s big lie is now the defining principle of what was once the party of Lincoln,” Schumer said. “Republican state legislatures, seizing on the big lie, are conducting the greatest assault on voting rights since the beginning of Jim Crow.”But national voting rights legislation that would counter such steps is in deep trouble on Capitol Hill. Biden’s deadline for a police reform law named after George Floyd has come and gone due to Republican objections. His ambitious infrastructure investment is stalling as Republicans seek to shave billions off.Whatever the president’s head tells him, his heart has always favoured bipartisan compromise. He may also feel obliged to make a show of reaching across the aisle to satisfy moderates such as Manchin. Yet Democratic majorities are painfully narrow and each day brings the midterm elections closer.Fred Wellman, a military veteran who is executive director of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, tweeted: “We need to fight for our Republic. I don’t understand at all what the Democratic leadership is thinking. Stop fucking around. Stop letting McConnell walk all over you. For God’s sake act like you are the majority. We are all out here fighting. Where are you?”That question just became even more urgent and the case for abolishing the filibuster, passing Biden’s agenda and acknowledging that the Republican party has gone rogue just became stronger. More