A vote today failed in the Senate on the January 6 Commission bill with 54 senators in favor to 35 against.
To overcome the Senate filibuster the bill needed 60 votes to pass.
The commission, comprised of five Democrats and five Republicans, would have conducted a comprehensive investigation into the events that lead to the January 6 insurrection on our capitol.
Even though Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell urged his party to vote no, six Republican Senators voted in favor of forming the bi-partisan commission.
Eleven senators did not take part in the vote, two Democrats and nine Republicans.
According to ABC news, “The mother of fallen US Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick met with more than a dozen Republican senators urging them to vote to establish the commission. ‘Not having a January 6 Commission to look into exactly what occurred is a slap in the faces of all the officers who did their jobs that day,’ Gladys Sicknick said.”
Reasons given by the Republicans for not voting in favor of the commission was that the investigation was too narrow and other entities were already in the process of doing their investigation, including the FBI.
Senate Republicans in favor of the commission voiced their frustration saying the real reason that McConnell didn’t want the commission was that it would produce bad optics during the 2022 mid-term elections.
“To be making a decision for the short-term political gain at the expense of understanding and acknowledging what was in front of us on January 6, I think we need to look at that critically,” Murkowski said told a group of reporters before the vote.