By John J. Duncan Jr.
During my 30 years in the U.S. House, and probably throughout the entire history of the U.S. Congress, political parties have been allowed to choose their members of the various committees.
The number of members a party has on each committee is roughly the same as the percentage that party has in the whole House or Senate.
The committee investigating the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2022, is the first committee I know of in which the Speaker of the House has refused to seat the members chosen by the minority party.
Nancy Pelosi obviously did not want anyone on that committee who would have asked her uncomfortable questions about what she did or did not do on that day.
She obviously did not want anyone on that committee who would have shown that what happened at the Capitol that day was not nearly as horrendous as the Democrats, for very partisan political purposes, need it to be.
Speaker Pelosi cherry-picked the two Republicans – and possibly the only two – who hated Trump with a passion not equaled even by most Trump critics.
Adam Kinzinger was censured by Republicans for voting to impeach Trump.
As for Liz Cheney, columnist Roger Simon summed it up best: “Donald Trump said mean things about her father, blaming him for the Iraq War… but Liz Cheney reacted to Trump with a level of hate out of all proportion to the situation.”
He added: “She (Cheney) made an alliance with people whose views she considered anathema for all of her previous life, just to get Trump. It was hate then to the nth degree.”
Ms. Cheney has received over $10 million from Democrats and Trump haters all over the country for her primary election on August 16.
But the last poll taken by the Casper, WY daily newspaper showed her 22 points behind the woman who Trump has endorsed to replace her. Thus, she will be out of Congress at the end of this year unless Democrats cross over and vote in the Republican Primary, which is allowed in Wyoming as it is in Tennessee.
Columnist Simon wrote of the Jan. 6th Committee Democrats: “Themselves also permeated with the most obvious hate – have failed miserably at their endeavor and now have abruptly postponed their third ‘show trial’ telecast. The previous telecasts were a rating disaster, and in some cases, they got caught lying.”
The Jan. 6th Committee is the closest we have ever come to a biased, one-sided Kangaroo Court in the U.S. Congress.
Wikipedia defines a Kangaroo Court as “a court that ignores recognized standards of law or justice, carries little or no official standing (and) may ignore due process and come to a predetermined conclusion.”
Over 800 people have been arrested for what they did at the Capitol on Jan. 6th, and many of them should be punished. But this is a small percentage of the 25,000 to 30,000 who attended the Trump speech that day.
Some of those who were arrested were denied bail, held in solitary confinement, and treated worse than we normally treat some of the worst criminals.
My friend Earl Sharp sent me a video showing that many of those who went into the Capitol that day walked through doors held open by Capitol police and did nothing other than just peacefully walk through taking a tour like 7 or 8 million do each year.
The only person killed that day was a woman Air Force veteran who was shot in the back by a trigger-happy Capitol policeman as she was attempting to climb through a window and was absolutely no danger to him at all.
Much worse was done by those who rioted, burned buildings, destroyed businesses, and harmed many people in the more than 500 demonstrations led by Black Lives Matter and Antifa, and almost nothing has been done to them.
The Democrats have been desperate to get peoples’ minds off of inflation, high gas prices, crime, problems at the Southern border, and the recession so they have greatly exaggerated the Jan. 6th events at the Capitol.
They seem to be fooling no one except for hardcore, partisan Trump haters.
