House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said on June 24 that Democrats will move forward with creating a select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol incident, coming after their efforts to form an independent commission were stymied earlier this year.
Last month, Senate Republicans blocked legislation to establish the Jan. 6 commission, which was backed by nearly all Democrats and a small number of congressional Republicans. It marked the first time GOP senators have used the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to overcome, against a Democrat-backed bill during this congressional session.
Without going into details, Pelosi said: “The select committee will investigate and report on the facts and the causes of the attack, and it will report recommendations for the prevention of any future attack.”
The speaker said she isn’t worried that the select committee will be derided by Republicans as political in nature. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said on June 23 that he'd hope for a Senate committee to investigate the attack, accusing Pelosi of engaging in partisan politics with the panel.
“I don’t worry about that at all,” Pelosi said. “I have no intention of walking away from our responsibility.”
The announcement came after McCarthy told reporters that with the commission, Pelosi “has always played politics with this time and again,” and has “never once talked to me about it.”
It’s unclear how large her planned Jan. 6 commission will be or how the seats will be distributed. It’s also unclear how long the investigation will take or who will lead the panel.
Pelosi told reporters on June 24 that it “will be as long as it takes for them ... the time they need to do the investigation of the causes of this.”
And as for who would lead the commission, she said, “I will make those announcements later.
“There are two actual paths. One is about the root causes of it—the white supremacy, the anti-Semitism, the Islamophobia, all the rest of it that was so evident.”
Pelosi didn’t give a reason for her suggestion that the Jan. 6 participants were motivated by white supremacy or animus towards Jewish people or Muslims.
The other path will look into “the security of the Capitol and what it means to be ready for such an insurrection,” Pelosi said.
