After months of negotiations in the House resulted in a bipartisan deal on the January 6 commission, several Republicans on Monday night expressed doubts about whether the Senate will find 60 votes to approve the deal.
Bottom line, the Senate GOP can demand changes or bottle up the legislation altogether.
“They’re going to have to broaden the inquiry in order to get 60 votes,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). “There’s more things wrong in this country than just [what] happened on January 6th.”
Speaker Pelosi had scheduled a vote this week on the deal put forth with GOP Rep John Katko of New York that established a 10 member bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection with subpoena power.
“I sense resistance on it,” said Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), when asked to gauge the level of support among his Republican colleagues. “But we shouldn’t have any hesitancy to put a spotlight on [Jan. 6], because we don’t want that to ever happen again…We shouldn’t feel defensive.”
McConnell remains silent and noncommittal. McCarthy has not endorsed the deal either.
GOP Missouri Senator Roy Blunt thought the commission could slow down the inquiry about the Capitol Police response and said, “I’ll look at what they do but I’m no fan of the commission, which on this topic I think will slow down getting to the decisions that we all know we need to make.”
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who led the GOP’s challenge to the 2020 election in the Senate, said he’d like to see any commission look into the killing of a Capitol Police officer in April and “rioting on federal properties in 2020,” a reference to other unrelated protests. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said there shouldn’t be any “artificial constraint” to what the commission should look at. And Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he’s “not real nuts that congressional leadership would be selecting the commissioners.”
There were some Republicans saying more positive things including John Thune (S.D.), Mitt Romney (Utah), Peter Meijer (MI), and Liz Cheney (WY).
At Politico
