On Monday, writing for The Washington Post, columnists Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent emphasized that in order for the January 6 Committee's hearings to be successful, it must directly highlight the Republican Party's "complicity" in the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the subsequent attack on the U.S. Capitol.
This comes amid reports that Republicans are preparing to gear up a PR offensive against the legitimacy of the committee's work — and former President Donald Trump himself is considering a public appearance of his own to pre-empt the proceedings.
"Democrats need a strategy to push back. Whatever they do should foreground a simple truth: Many Republicans were either complicit in Trump’s effort to destroy our constitutional order to remain in power illegitimately, have since worked hard to cover it up or both," they wrote. "So Republicans have zero credibility on these matters, and they should be granted zero standing to address them. Democrats need to say this clearly and forcefully."
This is necessary, they argued, to disarm the media's natural impulse to hold both sides culpable.
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"We already know the media’s both-sidesing instincts are vulnerable to this kind of Republican manipulation, because we’ve seen it," they wrote. "Recall that, early on, there was talk of creating a bipartisan commission to examine Jan. 6. Republicans balked at the very idea that the commission should primarily examine the violent insurrection attempt, demanding that it also look at leftist violence, an absurdly transparent effort to muddy the waters. Then, after that commission died and Democrats set up the current select committee, McCarthy tried to appoint Trumpist arsonists such as Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Jim Banks (R-Ind.). That was nothing more than a transparent effort to sabotage the committee’s work from within."
Ultimately, they argued, the whole GOP has to be put on trial.
"These Republicans, of course, have the right to make their case. But they don’t have a right to have their inevitably fantastical, bad-faith-saturated claims passed on to readers and viewers uncritically," they concluded. "Nor do they have the right to equal time. The committee will present the results of months of evidence-gathering, which will include extensive document examination and thousands of hours of interviews. Republicans rolling out bogus 'investigations' that are expressly designed to muddy the waters around legitimate congressional fact-finding into an effort to destroy our democracy don’t deserve the same volume of attention."
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