Taking the Capitol back after the Jan. 6 attack

I arrived in Washington, D.C. in June 1965 as an intern for my home district congressman, Rep. John B. Anderson (R-Ill.). Before checking-in at Anderson’s office I took a guided tour of the Capitol. It was my first time in our nation’s Capitol and I was as awestruck by the magnificence of the building as the other tourists in my group.

Four years later, on Jan. 20, 1969, I returned to the House as a fulltime staffer for Anderson. It was the day of Richard Nixon’s first inauguration as president and I joined with thousands of others in witnessing the ceremony on the East Front of the Capitol. It was a fitting reintroduction to our national government after living abroad for two years. My next 28 years on the Hill were the most professionally and personally fulfilling that anyone could hope for.

I’m sure that other former congressional staffers felt as I did on Jan. 6 when the Capitol complex was invaded, occupied and desecrated by a mob of domestic terrorists. More than anything, our hearts went out to all the members and Hill workers whose lives were literally in peril. Yes, we had lived and worked there, but we could not begin to imagine the sense of sheer terror they were experiencing over several hours.

To its great credit, once the terrorists had been removed from the building Congress reconvened to complete the essential work of counting the electoral votes and declaring the winning candidates for president and vice president. But, almost immediately, members’ attention turned to such questions as, why did this happen and, how can we prevent it from ever happening again?

Critical meetings and hearings began almost immediately in both bodies to address those and dozens of subsidiary questions. One of the first suggestions to surface was to create another 9/11-style bipartisan and independent commission as was done following the terrorist plane attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. in 2001.

Giving impetus to this idea were the chair and vice chair of that earlier body, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean (R) and former Indiana Rep. Lee H. Hamilton (D). In a letter sent jointly to President Joe Biden and the leaders of both parties in Congress, Kean and Hamilton endorsed a similar bipartisan commission made-up of distinguished citizens to get to the bottom of the Jan. 6 attack and how best to reorganize and equip government to prevent such future tragedies. (Full disclosure: The letter was facilitated by the Bipartisan Policy Center where I am a fellow.)

After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) quickly embraced the Kean-Hamilton suggestion, she subsequently floated the idea that its composition be seven Democrats and four Republicans, as opposed to the five and five ratio of the 9/11 commission. Kean and Hamilton immediately pushed back, stressing the need for complete bipartisanship through equal representation.

There will be further stumbling blocks and controversies as the commission proposal is developed before it comes to fruition, if it does. Republicans, now a minority in both houses, are understandably wary that they are being set-up to take the blame for the 1/6 attack because they challenged the electoral votes of two states.

Ironically, however, during the Jan. 6, 2017 electoral count, House Democrats attempted to challenge the votes of 10 states. The only difference was they were unable to get the requisite signature of one senator on any of them to send the contests into separate deliberations in each House. During their challenges they provoked the presiding officer, Vice President Joe Biden, to repeatedly gavel them to order for improperly debating their challenges by characterizing the reasons for them. Moreover, Biden had to twice summon the House sergeant-at-arms to clear boisterous protesters from the galleries.

There needs to be bipartisan agreement on the terms and language of any investigative commission or it will be dead in the water before the sail is even hoist. If there is no bipartisan consensus on the mandate and parameters of a commission, both chambers must still move forward with their separate inquiries and hearings to determine exactly what happened and why, and how Congress can once again return to some semblance of a safe, secure and relatively open Capitol. The people will expect nothing less than fully restoring to them what is their “shrine of democracy.”

Don Wolfensberger is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Bipartisan Policy Center, former Staff director of the House Rules Committee, and author of, “Changing Cultures in Congress: From Fair Play to Power Plays.” The views expressed are solely his own.