WASHINGTON -- The House is expected to vote next week on legislation aimed at preventing more attacks on the U.S. Capitol, seeking to establish a 9/11-style commission to study what went wrong on Jan. 6 while allocating $1.9 billion to address the security problems revealed by the insurrection.
The plan to form the commission was unveiled Friday after weeks of delicate negotiations. Modeled after the investigation into the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the bill would establish an independent 10-member commission, evenly divided between the two parties, that would have subpoena power and an end-of-year deadline for completing its work.
"There has been a growing consensus that the Jan. 6 attack is of a complexity and national significance that what we need is an independent commission to investigate," said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, announcing that he had struck a deal with the panel's top Republican, Rep. John Katko of New York. "The creation of this commission is our way of taking responsibility for protecting the U.S. Capitol."
The legislation still must be passed, first by the House and then by the Senate before it is sent to the White House for final approval. Thompson said the legislation likely would be considered by the House next week, but it is unclear when the Senate might take up the bill.
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While Democrats and some Republicans cheered the announcement, GOP leaders remained dismissive, arguing that a commission had to be empowered to investigate more than just the insurrection if its intention was truly to make the Capitol and its people safer.
"If this commission is going to come forward to tell us how to protect this facility in the future, you want to make sure that the scope that you can look at all that what came up before and what came up after. So that's very concerning to me," House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy of California told reporters shortly after Friday's announcement. "[House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi has played politics with this for a number of months. You've got to look at what the buildup before and what has been going on after this."
Efforts to set up the commission had previously stalled over partisan differences, with Republicans -- including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell -- arguing that its scope should be widened to look at violence in cities around the country in the past year in reaction to the police killing of George Floyd. Republicans demanded that the panel look into far-left radicalism as well as the right-wing and white-nationalist groups that promoted and populated the rally former President Donald Trump held outside the White House on Jan. 6 and subsequent march on the Capitol. But the new bill appeared to be a breakthrough after Pelosi said the legislation must be bipartisan.
The emergency spending bill also was released Friday, a product of months of reviews about what is needed to "harden" security at the Capitol after the mob of Trump supporters pushed past police officers and broke through windows and doors on Jan. 6. That legislation would include money for new retractable fencing around the building; added training and resources for the Capitol Police; and better security for members of Congress, among other measures.
Pelosi said that protecting the Capitol and the people who work inside it is of "the highest priority," and that a commission is imperative "to examine and report upon the facts, causes and security relating to the terrorist mob attack."
While both bills are expected to pass the House, it's unclear how much Republican support they would receive. McCarthy said Friday that he had not read the details of the Jan. 6 commission bill and did not signal whether he would support it. In a letter to Pelosi earlier this week, McCarthy said that any panel should not have "any predetermined conclusions or findings" and suggested that money for security should wait until after the commission issues a report.
SENATE HURDLES
The announcement of a compromise suggested that Democrats were prepared to simply go around Republicans. That would force GOP lawmakers to make a difficult choice between embracing an investigation of a violent attack inspired by Trump, which is likely to anger the former president, and opposing an accounting for the deadliest attack on the Capitol in centuries.
The insurrection is an increasingly fraught subject in the House GOP conference. While almost every Republican member condemned the violent mob that day, and many criticized Trump for his role in egging his supporters on, a growing number of them have downplayed the attack as time has passed. At a House hearing this week investigating the siege, one member denied there was an insurrection at all while another said a woman who was shot and killed by police while trying to break into the House chamber was "executed." Many other Republicans have tried to change the subject, saying Democrats should focus on the violence in cities instead.
The bill's path forward is uncertain in the 50-50 Senate, where Republicans have been quiet on the commission in recent weeks. McConnell objected to an initial proposal by Pelosi that would have included more Democrats than Republicans on the panel and said the scope should be widened to investigate the rioting in cities. But he has not spoken about it since Pelosi endorsed the new language that would make the commission an even partisan split.
Katko, who was one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the insurrection, said in his own statement that the commission was "about facts, not partisan politics."
"An independent, bipartisan commission will remove politicization of the conversation and focus solely on the facts and circumstances surrounding the security breach at the Capitol, as well as other instances of violence relevant to such a review," he said.
The legislation does have one other prominent GOP supporter: Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, who was kicked out of House GOP leadership this week for calling out Trump for his false claims that the election was stolen from him. Cheney also voted to impeach Trump.
"In the aftermath of national crises, such as Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, or September 11th, our nation has established commissions so the American people know the truth and we can prevent these events from happening again," Cheney said in a statement.
SUBPOENA POWER
Like the 9/11 commission that investigated the terrorist attacks on the U.S., the Jan. 6 commission would be granted authority to issue subpoenas to obtain information, requiring the bipartisan agreement of both the chairman and vice chairman of the commission or through a majority vote.
The commission would be authorized to issue a final report by Dec. 31, giving it it only about six months -- if Congress approves the commission in short order -- to complete its work, along with recommendations to prevent future attacks. By comparison, the 9/11 commission took 20 months to publish its findings.
In a departure from Pelosi's earlier proposal, President Biden would not have a say in appointing any commissioners.
The security spending bill would seek to make security improvements in the meantime, creating a quick-reaction force that could respond quickly in the event of an attack. National Guard troops were delayed for hours on Jan. 6 as police were beaten and overwhelmed by the rioters who broke in.
The bill includes money for new fencing -- either retractable or "pop in," according to Democrats -- that would protect the grounds while removing the dark black fence that has surrounded the Capitol since Jan. 6. The legislation says that the money cannot be used to install permanent aboveground fencing, reflecting the wishes of most members of Congress that the area should be open to the public.
Other improvements would be to better secure windows and doors, install new security vestibules and cameras and protect members with increased security at home and in Washington. There is also money to protect federal judges who are prosecuting the rioters and have received threats.
The legislation renames a wellness program for the Capitol Police department as the Howard C. "Howie" Liebengood Center for Wellness and adds mental-health counselors and resilience specialists for trauma support. Liebengood was a Capitol Police officer who took his own life shortly after the attack.
Information for this article was contributed by Mary Clare Jalonick, Kevin Freking and Lisa Mascaro of The Associated Press; by Karoun Demirjian of The Washington Post (WPNS); and by Nicholas Fandos of The New York Times.