A member of the 9/11 Commission explains what the Jan. 6 committee should do next

One of the Jan. 6 select committee’s biggest challenges, from the beginning, was that Republicans opposed a bipartisan, independent investigation styled after the 9/11 Commission.

But in spite of that, and the ensuing Republican insistence that the investigation is a partisan exercise, a former member of the 9/11 Commission says that the Jan. 6 committee has skillfully created a public record of what happened that day.

Tim Roemer, who spent a decade as a moderate Democratic congressman from Indiana, told Yahoo News that the committee has helped restore faith in U.S. elections and has made it more likely that reforms are made to the Electoral Count Act. At the same time, he said it was essential that the committee’s ultimate report be written well, and simply.

“They have done a brilliant job of outlining the story and telling the facts about an attempt to overthrow our government. They’ve made it understandable. They need to write it simply and not get bogged down in the footnotes and Washington speak,” said Roemer, a former ambassador to India who is now co-chair of Issue One ReFormers Caucus, a good-government advocacy group.

The 9/11 Commission Report was a sensation when it was published in 2004, earning sterling reviews and landing on bestseller lists. It was even adapted into a graphic novel. The Jan. 6 committee is expected to issue a written report this year, laying out its findings.

“Tell the story plainly,” Roemer advised. “They have to write it in a report that the American people can digest and want to read. That will be key.”

The 9/11 Commission was composed of former lawmakers and former government leaders: five Democrats, five Republicans and a Republican chair, former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean. One of the five Democrats, former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, was vice chair.

In the weeks after supporters of then-President Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election, Congress came close to appointing a similar independent commission to investigate how the U.S. had endured such a traumatic attack on its democracy.

An independent commission would have had five Republicans and five Democrats. The measure passed the Democratic-controlled House overwhelmingly, 252 to 175, with 35 Republicans joining all Democrats in favor.

But in the Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., opposed the commission, and his resistance was crucial to the idea’s failure. The commission had the support of 54 senators out of 100, but not more than the 60-vote threshold needed to overcome the blocking tactic known as the filibuster.

As a result, the House created the select committee, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., appointed two Republicans — Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — to join seven Democrats on the panel.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., proposed adding five Republicans to the panel, but Pelosi objected to two of them, and in response, McCarthy withdrew all his picks and stopped participating in the formation of the committee.

Roemer said Pelosi’s decision to include two Republicans on the committee “showed her masterful legislative skills,” but said he would have liked to have seen her add more Republicans.

“I wish she would have picked four more [Republicans] in addition to Kinzinger and Cheney,” Roemer said.

He agreed with Pelosi that Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio — one of the two Republicans who Pelosi rejected — “would have probably blown up the entire committee.” Jordan played a disruptive role in impeachment proceedings against Trump in the fall of 2019.

Having avoided a partisan clash, the committee has “simply and succinctly explained the timeline and the story of Jan. 6. Pure, plain and simple.”

Jan. 6 “was not a 'dust-up,'” Roemer added. “It was an attempt to overthrow our government.”

“Our judicial system is sending people to prison for what they did, for three years, five years, seven years. Some trials may send people to prison for 15 to 20 years for seditious conspiracy,” he said. “The judicial system is showing and underscoring that this was an attempt to overthrow our government, with serious penalties.”

The committee chair, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said on Thursday at what may prove to be the final hearing, “The evidence has proven that there was a multipart plan led by former President Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 election.”

The committee has demonstrated, through extensive testimony primarily from Republicans and former Trump aides, that Trump knew he had lost the election and planned in advance to claim victory anyway; that he disregarded aides who told him the truth; that he sought to press forward with an unconstitutional and dishonest plot to throw out millions of Americans’ votes; that he knowingly incited the crowd in Washington, D.C., to engage in a violent assault on law enforcement at the Capitol; and that he then did nothing for hours to stem or stop the carnage.

One outcome of all this is that a diminishing number of Republicans in the country believe Trump’s baseless lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Polling by Yahoo News/YouGov in the course of 12 separate surveys in the 18 months after the Jan. 6 attack shows that the number of Republicans who believe Trump’s “big lie” has fallen from an average of 66% to 60%.

Roemer said that change in attitudes is meaningful.

“A 6% reduction is impactful and moving in the right direction. If they had had more Republican members, could they have moved it 12% or 15%? I think they could have. I still think 6% is progress. Six percent is good,” Roemer said.

But, he added, “our democracy is currently threatened by deniers and liars and distrust.”

“When you have a former president still saying these lies, a certain portion of the population which absorbs these lies, and people running for office who will implement these lies, we have a problem,” he said.

Reforms to the Electoral Count Act (ECA) are another outcome of the committee’s work, said Roemer, whose group, Issue One, has consulted with Congress on closing loopholes that would make it easier for bad actors to throw out legitimate election results in the future.

“I think it’s going to happen. We’ve been working assiduously for this reform,” Roemer said. “That process has been painstaking but very, very successful up until now. I think we’re going to get a very strong Senate bill.”

Roemer said he expects ECA reform to pass after the fall election, but before the end of the year and before a new Congress is sworn in in early January.

He also said he expects the committee to recommend security enhancements to the U.S. Capitol complex that “safeguards our Capitol without making it a fortress” and preserves it as “a place where Americans can meet with their legislators.”