Raw Story: Exclusive: All 50 Senate Republicans weigh in on Jan. 6 hearings – only 8 are watching
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Pundits and political reporters continue to compare the Jan. 6 select committee hearings to the Watergate hearings. There’s a fatal flaw with the analogy though. Back in the Nixon years, Senate Republicans showed up, pored over evidence, asked hard questions, listened to witnesses, and eventually applied the internal GOP pressure that forced Nixon to resign.
Today’s Republican senators aren’t even willing to show up.
Over the past month, beginning a couple of days ahead of the first public Jan. 6 hearing, I interviewed all 50 GOP members of the U.S. Senate. Only eight Republican senators report actively tuning in to some or all of the proceedings. Another 10 GOP senators told me they’re reading press clippings or plan to read the special committee’s report once they conclude their investigation. The other 32 Republican senators have actively tuned out the committee.
While some say they already heard House members present evidence in a formal impeachment trial after the attack on the Capitol, most dismiss the committee – including all the new evidence and witness testimony being released weekly by the committee – out of hand.
“It has nothing to do with reality,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) told Raw Story while walking through the Capitol. “I think it’s completely partisan.”
Even Republican senators who are tuning in to watch the Jan. 6 committee see it as a partisan affair, but they still see the benefit in gleaning new information from it. Not so for many of the Republicans boycotting this investigation into an attack on the office they hold.
“No. I have zero interest in what I think is an extended Democrat campaign commercial,” Sen. Josh Hawley (MO) – who infamously raised a supportive clenched fist to the soon-to-be insurrectionists on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021 – told Raw Story as he rode an elevator up to the Senate floor. “So boring.”
Still, other Republicans are vowing to erase the select committee’s findings – a substantive part of the historical record of the worst attack on American democracy since the British stormed the Capitol during the War of 1812 – if they capture control of one or both chambers of Congress this November.
“I think it’s an illegitimate committee. It’s a partisan witch-hunt and has no validity at all,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) told Raw Story as he headed to a Senate vote at the Capitol. “Hopefully in November it will all be completely erased and expunged from the history of Congress.”
But the Republicans who are tuning in are finding it eye-opening.
“I watched the first night. I thought it was well put together,” former Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), the recent former chair of the House Judiciary Committee who is now a Disney lobbyist, told Raw Story this summer. “Obviously it’s one side, but I think there’s a lot of facts coming out. Let the facts come out. Let’s sort things out after they finish.”
Democrats on the select committee have said from the beginning that their intended audience is the American public. Still, they would have expected their Senate colleagues to be more curious – studious even – than they are. While committee member Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) says only a few Republican senators are being honest, she also says their absence doesn’t impact their work.
“They can avert their eyes, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is real and happened,” Murphy told Raw Story after presenting evidence in Tuesday’s select committee hearing. “And it’s actually a bit of a dereliction of their constitutional duties to defend our democracy.”
DIVE DEEPER: Read all 50 of LCB founder Matt Laslo’s exclusive interviews with every Republican US Senator in the 117th Congress at Raw Story.
