Senate Republicans pushed the vote on a commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol from Thursday afternoon to … sometime Friday, probably, thanks to a series of temper tantrums staged by some Republicans over a separate bill on Thursday.

On Thursday, the Senate was voting on a bill intended to promote competitiveness with China, the rare bill that Republicans were expected to allow to pass on a bipartisan basis rather than obstructing as part of their strategy to break the government and drag down Joe Biden’s presidency. But, angered that his amendments didn’t make it into the package, Sen. Ron Johnson threw up a roadblock. This happened despite more than a dozen amendments that did get added, many of which came from Republicans having gotten the votes—in fact, the vote on the China bill had already been held up once earlier on Thursday as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer worked out a deal on an amendment with Republican Sen. Mike Crapo. Before Johnson’s maneuvering, Republicans had been complimentary, with Sen. Mike Rounds describing the China bill’s process as “the way that the Senate was supposed to work where you join together and you find a bipartisan approach.”

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            Friday, May 28, 2021 ·  3:22:53 PM +00:00

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      Laura Clawson
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    The Senate has tabled the China bill until after the Memorial Day recess and will be voting on the January 6 commission around midday.

But Johnson, backed by some of his buddies, was committed to delay. Sen. Rick Scott’s effort to put off the vote until after the weeklong Memorial Day recess failed, but Johnson and Scott were joined by Sens. John Kennedy, Mike Lee, and Rand Paul in demanding more time on a vote that had taken up the Senate’s time through much of the day Thursday. They and other Republicans eventually won an hour apiece to speak, with three of them using their hours before the Senate adjourned at nearly 3 AM ET. Five more are expected to take up the Senate’s time with this nonsense on Friday before a series of procedural votes that could drag out even more. And then—and by this time it may be the early hours of Saturday, if Thursday night and Friday morning are any guide—the Jan. 6 commission vote can be held.

At that point, Republicans will filibuster.

They will filibuster because they don’t want the public to know what led up to the deadly attack on the Capitol, because they don’t want the public to know who is responsible and what those people did to encourage the insurrection, and because they remain loyal to Donald Trump above democracy or truth. They’re looking to ride Trump’s Big Lie to wins in 2022, and if they can’t win, they’re looking to use it to undermine or even overturn elections to seize more power. And it’s not expected that there will be 10 Republican senators out of 50 who will vote to go ahead with a commission on which Democrats have conceded everything Republicans initially asked for. 

Republicans are currently claiming that they oppose the bill because Democrats need to make the concession to allow Republicans greater control over staff hiring decisions, but come on. We’ve watched Democrats give Republicans the things they asked for, but Republicans still oppose it and, when he’s behind closed doors, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been clear that the problem is not with the details of how a commission would be run but with its very existence. McConnell even called in “a personal favor” to lock down votes against the commission after the family of fallen Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick joined with officers traumatized and wounded in the attack in urging Republicans to vote yes.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, one of the very few Republicans expected to vote to move forward on the commission, is acting befuddled about why her party is behaving as it is: “To be making a decision for the short-term political gain at the expense of understanding and acknowledging what was in front of us on January 6, I think we need to look at that critically. Is that really what this is about, one election cycle after another?”

Can she be serious? She has, after all, met McConnell. She’s worked with him for years, and short-term political gain has always been his goal. (Long-term political gain, also.)

“Truth is hard stuff, but we’ve got a responsibility to it,” she added. “We just can’t pretend that nothing bad happened, or that people just got too excitable. Something bad happened. And it’s important to lay that out.” Yeah, and it’s exactly because truth is hard stuff and it’s not just the people got too excitable that your fellow Republicans don’t want a commission. 

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, too, suggested that he’s driven by naïveté—in his case, his defense of the filibuster. “You have to have faith there’s ten good people,” Manchin said while insisting that even when there are not 10 good people, he will not change the requirement that those 10 good people have to exist for the Senate to function.

Republicans have long had the goal of breaking the government so they could run on the message that government doesn’t work. They’re doing a bang-up job of it.