New top story from Time: Republicans Sink Proposal for a January 6 Commission

https://ift.tt/3wHhZyS

This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday.

As the clock ticked past 2 a.m. this morning, Sen. Dan Sullivan stood before a mostly-empty Senate chamber. Ostensibly the Alaska Republican was talking about the pending tech bill, but those watching in their offices knew their colleague’s filibuster was about everything but a tech bill on the floor. “We must face this challenge with confidence and strategic resolve,” Sullivan droned on as he took his turn gumming up the legislative process in a 19-hour filibuster. Just so long as facing that challenge wasn’t investigating the failed insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Senators today rejected a planned commission to study what led to a mob storming the Capitol while trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The Democratic-led House had already passed its version of a bipartisan commission. But Republicans in the Senate would not go along with this because it likely would have codified that the deadly protest on Jan. 6 was a direct result of then-President Donald Trump and his promotion of The Big Lie—the false claim that he’s the rightful President instead of Joe Biden. In the end, only six Republican Senators joined Democrats in asking for the inquiry, short of the 10 required to break a procedural roadblock.

The commission to track down an official accounting of what happened on Jan. 6 now seems beyond resuscitation. Its cause of death? Partisanship.

“The Republican Party minority just mounted a partisan filibuster against an independent commission to report on Jan. 6,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said today on the Senate floor, his contempt hardly hidden. “Out of fear or fealty to Donald Trump, the Republican minority just prevented the American people from getting the truth about Jan. 6.” Moments later, he sent a letter to Democratic colleagues vowing to find answers, perhaps through a special select committee.

It’s a partisan jab, for sure. But he’s also not wrong. For the last 24 hours, moderate Republicans have been begging their colleagues to step up and make a stand against The Big Lie. Over lunch yesterday, Sen. Susan Collins of Alaska challenged her colleagues to do their jobs and push ahead with an inquiry. Not one to leave that unanswered, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rose immediately to offer his rejoinder: any panel looking at Jan. 6 would be bad politics for their party, which stands to make inroads next year when one-third of the chamber is on the ballot and the map seems to favor the GOP.

It’s a cold political calculus in light of the terror he and his colleagues experienced less than five months ago. During normal times, the certification of the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6 would have been a bland vote of process, one that merited a handful of words buried in a few newspapers, and unremarked-upon in most others.

But Trump insisted on convening a rally a mile away from the Capitol that day. He whipped his supporters into a frenzy and urged them to march upon the Capitol. Once there, they breached security barricades, bashed windows and ransacked offices. They were unsuccessful in overturning the election but they shook many assumptions about government and its durability.

The ensuing riot sparked Trump’s second impeachment. He survived, of course, because Republicans feared crossing him. In the months that followed, his grip on the Republican Party has not faded. He is still a galvanizing force inside GOP politics and he seems to remain a king-maker inside the party. Which means the default position of ambitious Republicans will be to fall in line with what Trump demands. And, at least at the moment, that means burying their heads in the sand and ignoring the mob that tried to overtake the Capitol just a few months ago. It seems insane that a Republican Party that campaigned so hard on law and order in 2020 now is trying to mute a probe into a mob, but it’s that same party that needs the mob’s mascot to survive primaries.

Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the daily D.C. Brief newsletter.

Comments

FOX NEWS: Dog earns Guinness World Record for longest ears This dog can definitely hear it when people say he’s a good boy.

Dog earns Guinness World Record for longest ears This dog can definitely hear it when people say he’s a good boy. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/3zKc8tR

MLA hostel in Mumbai evacuated after bomb scare https://ift.tt/3n307dK

An MLA hostel in south Mumbai was evacuated after the city police received a phone call about a bomb being placed in the building, an official said on Tuesday. However, no bomb was found after a search in the premises and the phone call turned out to be a hoax, he said. The incident took place on Monday night when an unidentified person called the police, saying a bomb was placed inside the Akashvani MLA hostel, located near the state secretariat, the official said.

New top story from Time: The Rolling Stones Open Their American Tour, Paying Tribute to Drummer Charlie Watts

https://ift.tt/3o7cVTy ST. LOUIS — The Rolling Stones are touring again, this time without their heartbeat, or at least their backbeat. The legendary rockers launched their pandemic-delayed “No Filter” tour Sunday at the Dome at America’s Center in St. Louis without their drummer of nearly six decades. It was clear from the outset just how much the band members — and the fans — missed Charlie Watts, who died last month at age 80. Except for a private show in Massachusetts last week, the St. Louis concert was their first since Watts’ death. The show opened with an empty stage and only a drumbeat, with photos of Watts flashing on the video board. After the second song, a rousing rendition of “It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll (But I Like It),” Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood came to the front of the stage. Jagger and Richards clasped hands as they thanked fans for the outpouring of support and love for Watts. Jagger acknowledged it was emotional seeing the photos of Watts....

New top story from Time: In the Gently Moving Minari, a Korean Family Finds Home in America’s Heartland

https://ift.tt/3ksxkyn Most stories about immigrants adjusting to America take place in cities, environs where a newcomer may already have family or friends, or at least be able to find a community. The family in writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari takes a different route: Jacob and Monica (Steven Yeun and Yeri Han) have come to America from Korea to seek better opportunities—we don’t know much more than that. But we do learn that Jacob has a dream of growing things, of being a farmer. Jacob, Monica and their two young children, David and Anne (Alan Kim and Noel Cho), have lived for a time in California, but as the movie opens, we see them driving to what will be their new home: A blocky rectangle of a house propped on cinderblocks, adjacent to a stretch of land that looks like paradise to Jacob—but not to Monica. She says little at first, but her stern silence tells us what she’s thinking: Why have you brought us here? This is 1980s Arkansas; there may be a few Koreans ...

New top story from Time: To Build Back Better, Tax Ultra-Wealthy Families Like Ours

https://ift.tt/2Y1lvIB After a summer of speculation, the contours of the deal needed to pass President Joe Biden’s popular “Build Back Better” agenda are becoming clear. To win key votes , Congress will have to find fresh sources of revenue to match new spending. Fortunately, there is an economically sound, overwhelmingly popular path that the President is endorsing: requiring ultra-wealthy families like ours to pay more in taxes. Doing so would mean reforming a tax code that allows the wealthiest to build and maintain fortunes without paying their share in taxes. Ultra-wealthy families further reduce their tax burdens to a pittance by deferring sale of their appreciated assets, borrowing against those assets and structuring their charitable giving. From 2014 to 2018, America’s 25 wealthiest people amassed a combined $401 billion, but in some years paid zero federal income tax, according to ProPublica . The Biden Administration calculates that America’s richest 400 famil...

New top story from Time: Jasper Johns: “Dying While on Assignment Doesn’t Seem Like a Bad Idea”

https://ift.tt/39PD2WS Jasper Johns, possibly America’s most famous living artist and still plying his trade at 91, launches two retrospectives on Sept. 29; one at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and the other at the Philadelphia Museum of Art . The exhibitions, known collectively as Mind/Mirror, illuminate the through lines of Johns’ large body of work: his fascination with such everyday symbols as numbers, targets, maps and flags; his sometime habit of limiting his color palette to red, blue, yellow and orange; and his exploration of such techniques as collage, hatching and scale. One section of the Whitney is dedicated to his variations on the motif of a Savarin coffee can crammed with brushes, which is widely believed to be the artist’s way of representing himself. Johns, who famously destroyed all his prior work before painting his first flag, lives in Connecticut and rarely gives interviews. He answered questions from TIME via email. [time-brightco...

New top story from Time: The Overlapping Worlds of Author Amor Towles

https://ift.tt/3AUkxMM Amor Towles had never actually been beneath the vaulted ceiling of an Adirondack lake house when he described the one in his 2011 debut, the best-selling Rules of Civility . He could only imagine the appeal of such an exalted communal space—“this great room where the family gathers”—until, while shopping for a second home with the money from that book, he found himself touring a property an hour and a half north of Manhattan. “I was like, This is it!” says Towles, throwing his arms toward a 30-ft. ceiling that, like the glistening lake outside, now belongs entirely to him. “It was this weird thing where I was kind of buying the living room that I had written about,” he says. “Which, in a Stephen King novel, would end badly.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] In the storybook life of Amor Towles, however, the new owner lays down thick Oriental rugs (thicker still where they overlap), sets his laptop on a long oval table by floor-to-ceiling windows and—...

New top story from Time: Here’s What We Learned From Three New Britney Spears Documentaries, From Secret Surveillance to #FreeBritney Infiltrators

https://ift.tt/3m9avBb A flurry of new documentaries centered on Britney Spears and her court-ordered conservatorship have shed more light on the immense hardship that Britney has faced over the course of the 13-year legal arrangement. The three specials—FX and the New York Times’ Controlling Britney Spears , CNN’s Toxic: Britney Spears ‘ Battle for Freedom and Netflix’s Britney Vs Spears —were all released in the week leading up to Britney’s highly anticipated Sept. 29 court date, a hearing at which Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Brenda Penny is expected to address Britney’s petitions to remove her father, Jamie Spears, as conservator and terminate the conservatorship as well as Jamie’s own unexpected petition to end the arrangement . [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Attention surrounding the hearing and the fan-driven #FreeBritney movement has continued to ramp up in recent days as reports of shocking new details regarding Britney’s case, as alleged by t...

New top story from Time: The 5 Best New TV Shows Our Critic Watched in August 2021

https://ift.tt/3kI4IBO Whether you know it as vacation season, hurricane season or wildfire season, August is a time when our natural surroundings can take on outsize importance in our daily lives. The same is true of this month’s best new TV shows, each of which conjures a vivid sense of place, from the brick edifices and manicured lawns of East Coast academia to the flat expanses of an Oklahoma reservation to desolate, gray beaches in France’s Nantes region. There are also two very different takes on a city that contains multitudes: New York. For more suggestions, here’s some of my favorite TV from July , June and the first half of 2021 . [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The Chair (Netflix) N etflix’s perceptive black comedy The Chair opens at what should be the proudest moment of Professor Ji-Yoon Kim’s career. She has just been named the first-ever female Chair of the English Department at venerable (and fictional) Pembroke University, where she’s also one ...

New top story from Time: Atlanta’s First Black Female District Attorney Is at the Center of America’s Converging Crises

https://ift.tt/2Y1oy3U So much of what is ugly and unhinged about America can be seen in the eyes of a mother whose 8-year-old is dead. But, on a Tuesday in August, at Atlanta’s downtown courthouse, that’s where Fulton County, Ga.’s district attorney, Fani Willis, is looking. She’s meeting with Charmaine Turner and Secoriey Williamson, the parents of Secoriea Turner , a chubby-cheeked Black girl with generous eyebrows, who liked to make TikTok dance videos and throw up peace signs in candid pictures. A bullet pierced her back and killed her last year after she attended a Fourth of July fireworks show. Secoriea’s killing was random, but part of a larger story. On June 12, 2020, an Atlanta police officer fatally shot Rayshard Brooks in the parking lot of a Wendy’s, setting off protests. By Independence Day, armed men—whom Willis takes pains to distinguish from protesters—had erected barricades nearby. It has since become public knowledge that city officials appear to have direc...

My precise view

Search This Blog