Senior Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt (R) on Sunday argued it is “too early” to create an independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol.
“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,” Blunt told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace. “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 argued that the 9/11 Commission was formed about 14 months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and said it would take several months for a similar commission to look into the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol to be created.
Last week, the House approved a Jan. 6 commission, with 35 Republicans joining Democrats in supporting the bill.
“I’ve actually opposed the idea of a commission from immediately from the very first because I think we’ll start waiting for a commission rather than moving forward with what we know we need to do now,” Blunt added on Sunday.
“There’s a bipartisan effort in the Senate with two committees to produce not only a report but also a number of recommendations, and we should be able to do that in the first full week of June, and we haven’t even waited for that to decide what a commission should do,” he said.
After the House approved the Jan. 6 commission, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he would oppose the “slanted and unbalanced proposal.”