IT'S JAN. 6 WEEK. Thursday marks the one-year anniversary of the Capitol riot. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats are planning a series of events to observe the occasion. President Joe Biden will make a speech. Former President Donald Trump will hold a news conference. And the media will talk about it all week.
But the biggest thing going at the moment is the House Jan. 6 committee. Above all, the House Democrats who created the committee want to use it to get Trump — either by ensuring that he is legally prohibited from running for president in 2024 or, failing that, by damaging him so much politically that he will lose if he does manage to run.
How to do that? With their first impeachment of Trump in late 2019 and early 2020, some Democrats explicitly expressed the hope that he would be so tainted by impeachment that he could not win reelection. Then, after Trump did indeed lose in November 2020, followed by his refusal to accept the election result, and then by the Capitol riot, they hoped a second impeachment would result in him being barred from ever holding public office again.
It didn't happen. Trump remains, at the moment, the leading potential candidate in a 2024 Republican presidential primary. And that is where the Jan. 6 committee comes in.
