“Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s bid to create a broad bipartisan review of the Jan. 6 insurrection is in peril after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell slammed the proposal on Wednesday as ‘partisan by design.’ McConnell rejected a draft version of Pelosi’s proposed commission that would give Democrats a 7-4 majority on the panel, and he said any large-scale review of the insurrection must also include an analysis of broader political violence – a nod to GOP complaints about a wave of riots across the country last summer that followed the death of George Floyd at the hands of police. Expanding the commission’s mandate that way would likely spark significant Democratic resistance. ‘If Congress is going to attempt some broader analysis of toxic political violence across this country,’ the Kentucky Republican said, ‘then in that case, we cannot have artificial cherry-picking of which terrible behavior does and does not deserve scrutiny.'”

“McConnell indicated that he would be open to a commission narrowly focused on security on the Hill. ‘We could do something narrow that looks at the Capitol, or we could potentially do something broader to analyze the full scope of the political violence problem in this country,’ McConnell added. ‘We cannot land at some artificial, politicized halfway point.’ McConnell’s comments underscore the steep challenge Democrats face if they hope – as Pelosi suggests – to recreate the spirit of the 9/11 Commission, a bipartisan review of the 2001 terrorist attacks that’s considered a model for intensive after-action reviews of nationally significant moments. Lawmakers have proposed similar ‘9/11 commissions’ for the onset of Covid in America” – Politico.