The future of the Jan. 6 committee hangs on the outcome of U.S. midterm elections

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There are 506 major political races under way in the United States right now. 435 of them are for the House of Representatives, 34 are for the Senate, 36 are for various state governor’s chairs – and one is a desperate race against time.

That one might be the most important of all.

It is the race that the committee examining the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, is conducting, given the likelihood that the Republicans will retake power in the House after the Nov. 8 midterm elections and disband the panel in the first week of 2023. The GOP may even establish a counter-committee – one determined to investigate the motives and conduct of the seven Democrats and two Republicans who have subpoenaed Donald J. Trump and who believe the former president represents a threat against democratic values.

Perhaps never before in American history – not even in the five proceedings contemplating presidential impeachments – has a congressional committee had a more sober remit. Nor has a Capitol Hill panel faced the conundrum of acting in haste to preserve principles that, until recent years, seemed safely eternal.

“This committee faces enormous pressure,” said G. Calvin Mackenzie, a Colby College political scientist. “What happened on Jan. 6 was no small thing. It was not legitimate political discourse. And so it is critical that the American people understand the magnitude of what happened, and this committee is the best teacher we can have. This is a fundamentally important moment.”

A century and a half ago, when the U.S. had a population the size Colombia has today and possessed armed forces the size that Bulgaria has now, Otto von Bismarck said that “there is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.” That notion, and that sense of national invulnerability, persisted for decades. But as the members of the committee repeatedly suggested in last week’s ninth public session, the eventual pre-eminence of the U.S. and the preservation of its 235-year-old political system can no longer be taken for granted, or as a priority for Providence.

In that context, how the committee proceeds in the next several weeks – and whether its findings prompt legal action against Mr. Trump by the Justice Department, which is separately considering charges growing out of presidential documents at Mar-a-Lago – is vital.

Equally vital is how Mr. Trump, much of the Republican Party and political commentators critical of the entire undertaking, rebuff the committee and portray it as a runaway jury worthy of a John Grisham legal thriller novel – or, as the former president argued in a rambling, 14-page letter he released a day after the latest hearing: a “Committee of highly partisan political Hacks and Thugs whose sole function is to destroy the lives of many hard-working American Patriots, whose records in life have been unblemished until this point of attempted ruination.”

The committee’s perspective is the antithesis of the Trump view: “He tried to take away the voice of the American people in choosing their president,” panel chair Bennie Thompson said of the former president at the conclusion of the last public session, “and replace the will of the voters with his will to remain in power.”

The chasm between these two interpretations is as large as any division in the country’s history between members of Congress and a former president of a different party. The only remote equivalent is how Herbert Hoover, blamed for the Great Depression, deprecated Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for his broad New Deal legislation – a “march to Moscow,” Mr. Hoover argued, after Mr. Roosevelt defeated him in the 1932 election.

These contemporary clashing convictions represent what the French journalist and political figure Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber described in a far different context as The American Challenge. The provocatively titled 1967 book spoke of the problem of a U.S. on the rise. The contemporary American challenge is of a superpower that shows signs of being on the decline, or at least one on the defensive.

All of this is being played out on a calendar that also includes midterm congressional elections in about three weeks. Almost every indicator suggests that the Democrats’ 222-213 margin of power will topple, with Republicans gaining control and, with it, the prerogative to subpoena Democratic officials and President Joe Biden himself – and to work to craft a separate, conflicting narrative of what happened the day Congress convened to seal his victory in the 2020 election.

Several participants in the day’s mayhem have been convicted and sent to prison. But committee members have argued that Mr. Trump and his top allies in the fight to retain power have thus far avoided taking responsibility for their part in the uprising.

“Our nation cannot only punish the foot soldiers who stormed our Capitol,” said Representative Liz Cheney, a Republican and Trump critic.

“Without accountability, it all becomes normal, and it will recur.”