House and Senate Republicans do not want an independent commission investigating the events that led up to the Jan. 6 insurrection, and the reasons remain the same as ever. It is clear that Donald Trump gathered a crowd that day for the purpose of halting the counting of electoral votes in Congress. It is clear that the insurrectionists were rallied by hoax claims of a “stolen” election peddled by propagandists working to undermine public confidence so as to pave the way for election nullification. It is clear that the majority—the majority!—of Republican lawmakers themselves either directly or indirectly promoted those same hoaxes. Republican Party officers helped promote the claims. Republican statehouses went wild with them.

The result was an attack on the Capitol, multiple deaths, and the first non-peaceful transition of power in this nation since the Civil War. Republican leadership intends to block any probe of the events leading up to the violence, bipartisan or not, that they can. It was an explicitly Republican insurrection, promoted as means of overturning the results of an American election. There will be no official report documenting it as such so long as Republicanism’s sedition-peddlers have a say in the matter. That is not something that Republicans will willingly put in the public eye before the next election, or before any election.

Sen. Joe Manchin may remain ever-baffled at why an insurrection-backing party objects to a probe of those that backed said insurrection, but few Americans not currently serving alongside the saboteurs are confused by Republican motives here.

The Washington Post's Aaron Blake notes that Republican lawmakers have been shifting their arguments for why a commission should not be seated throughout the process. Every time Democrats agree to changes to mitigate one Republican objection, Republican lawmakers suddenly remember a new one; no matter how “bipartisan” the commission becomes, Sen. Mitch McConnell, who was the most dishonest politician in Washington before Trump arrived and retains the trophy now, declares it to be unacceptably partisan.

There is nothing new here. This is quite literally the same ploy Republican leaders have used to stonewall every bit of critical legislation they do not want to see passed, from COVID-19 pandemic relief to a new infrastructure bill. Changes must be made, they say, dismissing the bills as atrociously partisan and/or something close to communism. After stonewalling Democrats for weeks on end, Democratic lawmakers cave to their demands and rewrite the portions being objected to. Republicans discover new reasons to object; the “process” repeats itself for another month or so; if at some point the bill makes it to an actual vote Republicans will unanimously or near-unanimously vote against it, even the Republicans who were doing the negotiating to begin with.

The current version of bipartisanship relies on Sen. Susan Collins, who immediately out of the gate launched new objections that suggested she hadn’t even bothered to be briefed on the bill she was panning.

Senate Republicans do not want a report documenting the extent to which their party specifically promoted hoaxes claiming the November 2020 elections were illegitimate because the incompetent Republican buffoon who killed off half a million Americans could not muster a second term of incompetent buffoonery, and there are no concessions Democratic lawmakers can make that will result in Sen. Mitch McConnell reversing himself and agreeing that a pro-Trump insurrection stoked by his own allies deserves a fraction of the attention spent on Hillary’s Emails or Something Benghazi. New Republicanism does not recognize non-Republican governance as legitimate. There is no infrastructure, no pandemic, no violence, no slouch toward fascism considered more urgent than removing the opposition party from office.

Republicanism now cannot stomach even the idea of funding roads and bridges, long considered the conservative low bar of government spending, as it runs increasingly afoul of Republicanism’s new obsession with reducing wealthy and corporate tax rates to a pittance. It is not that Republicans merely object to the details; through years of governance, the party has proven unable to even mount proposals to maintain the nation’s physical form. But, we are told, surely they will return to the table to discuss efforts to dismantle public trust in democracy even as their party uses the same hoaxes and propaganda to justify granting themselves new statehouse powers to erase election results the party objects to?

This will not happen. It will not happen in part because Donald Trump does not want it to happen, and Donald Trump retains sufficient power over Republicanism’s now-fascist base to inflict punishment on any Republican lawmaker unwilling to maintain his antidemocratic, strongman notions of election illegitimacy. But it will mostly not happen because Republican lawmakers are so tightly implicated in those same hoaxes that an independent commission report on the origins of insurrection will lay blame directly on top Republican officials. It will confirm, yet again, that it was a Republican insurrection, not a Trump insurrection.

We are at an impasse, and there is no obvious solution. We can rely on law enforcement to sweep up all the little cretins who acted out, after being told by Republican officers and statehouses that their votes had been somehow been “stolen,” to overturn a democratic election on fascist grounds. Civil lawsuits have proven to be the only even passable means of extracting penalties on propagandists and hoax-promoters who goaded them into the violence in the first place. The Senate is so hopelessly broken that it would be better off not existing, rather than acting as current bulwark protecting the nation’s most powerful men from the consequences of their incessant corruption. The House contains an entire Republican caucus dedicated toward hoaxes and “justified” sedition.

If no independent commission can exist, then the probe will fall on the House and Senate to conduct in their usual partisan ways. House and Senate Republicans who were able to protect Trump through an act of blatant international corruption and from official punishment for an attempted U.S. coup no doubt believe a sweating Jim Jordan and performatively outraged Lindsey Graham can once again provide enough chaff for the rest of Republicanism’s cowards and enablers to disappear into. They might be right. The more pressing problem is that conservative media is now pressing the same hoaxes with full force, pushing the base into incoherent but violent fascist notions that Republicanism’s myriad enemies are such a threat to the nation that elections can no longer suffice as means of reining them in. As Sen. Mitch McConnell acts as final saboteur to any attempt to bring the orchestrators of the Jan. 6 insurrection to account, Republican-led statehouses are issuing new rules to allow them to more easily undermine the November 2022 elections. Fox News personalities and other far-right propagandists are continuing to stoke the same hoaxes that Republican strategists seized upon to delegitimize Trump’s loss; the intent is to justify a new era in which the party simply rejects elections in which the vote count has not fallen out in their favor.