During an edition of Fox News Sunday over the weekend, host Chris Wallace questioned Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) about his opposition to the creation of an independent commission to investigate the riot at the Capitol in January, and Blunt — who will be out of office come 2023 following his planned retirement — didn’t exactly leave looking great. Eventually, Wallace directly asked him whether he was really putting “country over party” with his opposition to creating the proposed commission.
At one point, Blunt insisted:
‘I think it’s too early to create a commission. And I believe Republicans in the Senate will decide that it’s too early to create that commission. Commissions often don’t work at all. And when they do work, like the Simpson-Bowles commission produced a good result — nothing happened as part of that result.’
Blunt further elaborated that the independent commission formed after 9/11 wasn’t put together until further after that event than the country is now from January 6, but it’s unclear why that fundamentally arbitrary timeline should be applied here. Blunt wasn’t short on excuses — eventually, he even insisted that the answer of what was happening in the Trump White House during the riot will “ultimately… be out there” because of “all kinds of books being written.” In other words, instead of doing what could easily be considered his job as a member of the Senate, Blunt is opting to have Americans wait in part for a tell-all memoir that may never arrive.
Wallace subsequently cited a statement from the chairs of the 9/11 investigative commission, who — writing in support of the creation of an independent commission to investigate January 6 — noted that in their own work, they put “country above party, without bias.” Wallace asked as follows:
‘The question is whether an independent commission — no members of Congress — could serve a useful function… Can you honestly say in opposing this commission coming out down the line that you’re putting country above party?’
Blunt just had more deflection. As he put it, in part, in response:
‘I do think that the 9/11 Commission had a lot more information available to it when it started than this one would have and we made a lot of decisions before the 9/11 Commission started that were important to further secure the Capitol, to further look at our intelligence failures. We need to be doing all of those things.’
Check out Blunt’s deflection below:
