Jerry Moran and Roy Blunt had a big choice on Jan. 6 commission. They picked Trump
Roy Blunt and Jerry Moran, you broke my heart. I had held out hope you would prove your loyalties lie with the United States, not with Donald Trump.
Your choice to join fellow Senate Republicans in opposition to a bipartisan congressional commission investigating the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol showed just how foolish those hopes were.
We knew how the junior senators from Missouri and Kansas would vote. After the rioters were finally driven from the Senate chamber on Jan. 6, while Capitol Police received first aid for their wounds and broken glass lay scattered in the halls, Sens. Josh Hawley and Roger Marshall came back to the floor and voted to set fire to millions of Americans’ votes in the 2020 election.
Neither Blunt nor Moran played their colleagues’ dangerous, seditious game of political theater. So I thought there was a chance our states’ senior senators would surprise us this week. Both have lengthy, distinguished careers in Washington, with an almost 50 years’ combined service that long predates Trump’s takeover of their party.
And while they can show their partisan stripes with the best of them — Blunt dipped more than a toe into the Barack Obama birther waters — both men can also point to records of solid bipartisanship and legislative seriousness.
Blunt rose to the occasion with a fine, patriotic speech at the inauguration of President Joe Biden — an event Trump and his minions continue to decry as illegitimate. Moran notably remained a vocal Trump skeptic as late as May of 2016, concerned about the likely nominee’s ability to “unite the Republican Party around our common goal of securing a brighter future for our kids and grandkids.” Famed D.C. journalist Carl Bernstein named them both on his long list of Republican senators who secretly express “extreme disdain” for President 45.
Yet Blunt and Moran still voted to absolve Trump of clearly impeachable conduct. Twice. We should have expected democracy would strike out a third time on the commission. Today’s Grand Old Party, its base terrorized and lied to all day by the Fox News/Breitbart/Facebook entertainment-industrial complex, is no place for statesmanship — especially when the states you represent are as deep red as Missouri and Kansas. And with Facebook’s top-performing posts overwhelmingly dominated by ring-wing misinformation on a daily basis, that doesn’t look likely to change any time soon.
It’s not yet been even six months since the riot. We can’t begin to know what the inevitable investigations will uncover. But we can be certain the images from that disgraceful coda to Trump’s chaotic term — the mob marching from his rally to fly his flags alongside the Confederacy’s under the Capitol rotunda — will be seared into our national memory for generations to come, alongside the last chopper fleeing Saigon and the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
Roy Blunt and Jerry Moran, you had the chance to stand, for posterity, with Sens. Mitt Romney and others in your party who chose not to tie themselves to a two-time popular vote loser.
You chose otherwise. And the most enduring lines in your biographies have been written.
This story was originally published May 28, 2021 at 11:00 AM.