The truth they don’t stress enough is that US institutions held

Donald Trump stirs up his supporters in Washington on January 6, 2021. Picture: AFP

The final US House of Representatives January 6 committee report – at 845 pages – contains no surprises, and we’ve already assessed its lack of evidence to prove criminal behaviour by former president Donald Trump.

The committee’s demonstration of his moral and political culpability – and shameful refusal to act immediately to stop the riot – is damning enough.

But the report shouldn’t pass into history without noting what the evidence reveals that the media largely ignores. To wit, the failure of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election shows that US democratic institutions, and their checks and balances, held up well. Despite today’s partisan polarisation, Trump’s effort had no chance to succeed because it was opposed by nearly all Republicans in positions of authority.

Trump’s allies in his effort included relatively few White House staff, some second-raters at the Justice Department, crony-cranks like Roger Stone (who took the Fifth Amendment before the committee), a few members of congress without influence, some backbench state legislators, and dubious legal advisers like John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani. Talk about a crew of banana Republicans.

Now consider those who opposed the Trump effort, or examined his claims of election fraud and rejected them. They included: his own White House counsel and legal staff; attorney-general William Barr and other leaders at the Justice Department; his entire cabinet; senior military officials; most GOP state legislators; GOP governors and secretaries of state; all but a handful of GOP senators; federal judges appointed by Trump; and, most famously, his own vice-president Mike Pence.

The January 6 committee acknowledges this GOP opposition in its effort to show that Trump knew his fraud claims about the election were false. But the committee suggests that the president’s attempt to overturn the election was a close-run thing.

It wasn’t. The opposition by members of Trump’s own administration, and his own party, was too broad and deep to have had any chance.

Even if Pence had tried to delay or reject the electoral votes, he could not have succeeded. There wasn’t enough support in the contested state legislatures to overturn the popular vote count. And even if enough states had done so to deny Joe Biden 270 electoral votes, house speaker Nancy Pelosi would not have reconvened the Congress to count them.

The Supreme Court would have eventually intervened, and our guess is that it would have ruled 9-0 against Trump.

None of this absolves Trump from his actions, but it does underscore the strength of US democracy and the dedication to it by most elected and appointed officials. It also shows the value of having had men of principle like Pence and Barr willing to take on the duty of working in the Trump administration.

They were criticised as Trump-enablers when they made decisions the left didn’t like. But those decisions were made based on the policy merits and the law. And when it mattered most, when Trump sought to overturn an election, the country was lucky to have had these men and others like them in office. It’s a shame the January 6 committee and the press won’t give them the credit they deserve.

The Wall Street Journal