In the Spring of 2004, I was a newly minted college sophomore studying political science at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. In between classes, a part-time job in the now-defunct B. Dalton Union Station bookstore and attempting to unsuccessfully sneak into D.C. bars underage, I also spent that semester as an intern in the offices of U.S. Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.). The internship coincided with the core hearings and work of the 9/11 Commission that had started in March 2003 and concluded the following summer in 2004, with the report being published on July 22.
Sen. Carper’s offices were located on the fifth floor of the Hart Senate Office Building, just three floors above the large hearing room made famous by the work of the commission and previous and subsequent Supreme Court appointment hearings. During each of the hearings that spring, I would make a point of slipping into the back of the massive hearing room to listen to the testimony of Bush administration officials, terrorism and national security experts, and our nation’s key military and intelligence leaders. At the front of the room was the expansive dais, a place usually reserved for the senators themselves, but for these hearings, the chairs were occupied by commission members — five Democrats and five Republicans.
The 9/11 attack had been so breathtaking in its devastation and horrifying in its simplicity that congressional leaders from both parties came together to pass legislation establishing the commission with overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate as part of that year’s Intelligence Authorization Act (2013, H.R. 4628). At the time, both chambers were under united Republican control, and President George W. Bush signed the authorization bill on Nov. 27, 2002. During the signing ceremony, President Bush declared, “As a nation, we’re working every day to build a future that is peaceful and secure. To reach this goal, we must learn all about the past that we can. So with this commission we have formed today, America will learn more about the evil that was done to us, and the understanding we will gain will serve us for years to come.”
The attack on our homeland 20 years ago was conceived overseas with foreign-born al Qaeda terrorists utilizing our domestic infrastructure to wreak maximum havoc and death. For a brief time in our nation’s history, we were mostly united as a people; facing a common enemy abroad and sharing a sense of grief and horror at home spurred popular action overseas to root out terrorist networks and destroy their capabilities.
Unlike the attack on 9/11, the violent mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 this year was made up of fellow American citizens, spurred on to try to prevent then-President Elect Biden’s vote certification. The violent mob targeted both elected Republicans and Democrats. It chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” in coordination with a makeshift gallows erected on the Capitol grounds and “Nancy! Oh Nancy! We’re looking for you!” before it broke down the doors to the Speaker’s office in the building.
And — for a very brief moment — elected Republicans and Democrats were united in their condemnation of the violent mob and the president who in many ways inspired the attack, according to leading elected Republicans at the time. It is worth recalling House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) own words just one week after the Capitol insurrection: “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters.” Similarly, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) denounced the former president’s actions, calling his behavior a “disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty.”
Despite these early condemnations, both GOP leaders resisted holding the former president accountable through the impeachment process, with McCarthy focusing on mostly process arguments, saying, “No investigations have been completed. No hearings have been held. Most Americans want neither inaction nor retribution. They want durable, bipartisan justice.”
Out of that desire for “bipartisan justice” came the push by House leadership to construct a body similar to the 9/11 Commission to thoroughly investigate the events surrounding Jan. 6. Initially, partisan lenses derailed the negotiations, but — strangely enough for modern Washington expectations — a truly bipartisan agreement negotiated by House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and ranking member John Katko (R-N.Y.) was announced on May 14. Both men worked in good faith, and as Rep. Katko’s colleague Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) told CNN’s Manu Raju, the Democrats “basically gave us what we wanted.”
Back in 1985, New York Times columnist Les Gelb wrote a column in praise of the 40th president’s political skills, instincts and intuition. In illustrating that point clearly, Gelb quoted President Reagan from an Oval Office interview he had given that year: “Die-hard conservatives thought that if I couldn’t get everything I asked for, I should jump off the cliff with the flag flying — go down in flames. No, if I can get 70 or 80 percent of what it is I’m trying to get, yes I’ll take that and then continue to try to get the rest in the future. And maybe it’s easier to get it as they see that this works. And this was what they were critical of. They couldn’t stand it that I would compromise and settle for less than I’d ask.”
As Rep. Bacon noted, Republicans got nearly everything they wanted as part of the commission negotiation — far more than the 70 or 80 percent that President Reagan considered a win.
While 35 GOP members did, in the end, buck their party’s whip operation and voted for the bill to create a 1/6 Commission, it is likely dead on arrival in the Senate.
If that is ultimately the bipartisan commission’s fate, then it is even more evident that bipartisanship is truly dead in the nation’s Capitol.
Kevin Walling (@kevinpwalling) is a Democratic strategist, vice president at HGCreative, co-founder of Celtic Strategies, and a regular guest on Fox News, Fox Business and Bloomberg TV and Radio.