Democratic leaders are about to find out if they can use post-9/11 bipartisanship as a model to investigate an insurrection that took place 20 years — and 20 bitter political lifetimes — after the devastating 2001 attacks. If history is any guide, it won’t be easy.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi is conferring with former members of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, which took a year and a half to assemble a comprehensive report that became a best-seller, as she accelerates her push for a 2021 successor commission to probe the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol. Democrats could release legislation creating that commission as soon as this week, but any effort to recapture a post-9/11 sense of urgency and restore a sense of statesmanlike inquiry into the security failures of last month is bound to run into a familiar obstacle: Donald Trump, newly emboldened days after his Senate acquittal on charges of inciting the insurrection.
Leaders of the widely praised 9/11 Commission, whose exhaustive findings became the basis for government-wide reforms in response to Al Qaeda’s 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, told POLITICO in interviews that Congress’ only chance at a successful sequel is to keep hot-blooded partisanship out of it. But doing so in an age of supercharged disinformation and limitless fealty to Trump may complicate the equation, they say.
“The fact that we’re now even more polarized and toxic and partisan than we were when we created the 9/11 commission is true,” said Tim Roemer, who served as one of the panel’s five Democratic members.
The idea that “we can have people work together, accomplish the goals and make forward recommendations to heal the country and strengthen the country is even more important in many ways,” Roemer added, “given the depth of the division and the poisonous toxicity that exists today.”
Roemer is one of several 9/11 Commission veterans in touch with the speaker as she adapts the framework for last month’s insurrection. Former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, a Republican appointed by George W. Bush to chair the commission, along with co-chair Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman, are also advising her.
Pelosi has described the forthcoming proposal as a way to “get to the truth” of what happened on Jan. 6, and she is conferring with fellow senior Democrats on the proposal before seeking GOP input, according to multiple Democratic aides. While she steered Democrats to a lightning-quick second Trump impeachment last month, calling a vote one week after the insurrection, Pelosi insisted that the proposed commission “has nothing to do with President Trump.”
“It’s about the security. How did this happen? Where do we go from here?” she told reporters Friday. Among the issues the commission would probe, Pelosi added, are “white supremacy,” anti-Semitism and other factors identified as driving domestic extremism of the type on view at the insurrection.
The final commission legislation is expected to closely mirror the structure of the 9/11 Commission — a bipartisan 10-member panel given wide latitude and independence to pursue its investigation. But even as Democrats insist that they want the legislation to have strong bipartisan backing, multiple Republicans have privately complained they haven’t even been included in the drafting process.