The Chickenshit Caucus

WaPo: (pay wall)

Before Senate Republicans blocked the creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the events of Jan. 6, Gladys Sicknick, the mother of late U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian D. Sicknick — who lost his life shortly after defending the Capitol that day — requested meetings with every GOP senator to advocate for the proposal.

At least 20 Republican senators did not meet with Sicknick's mother, according to a list obtained by The Washington Post. Asked why they were not able to meet with Gladys Sicknick, who was accompanied by her son's former partner, Sandra Garza, several of the offices cited scheduling issues.

A spokesperson for Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) told us “the senator was not available due to scheduling conflicts, but a staff level meeting was offered.”
A spokesperson for Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said Burr “was already fully committed the day of the requested meeting and was unable to meet given the short notice.”
Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho) was “not able to accommodate a meeting on short notice, but indicated his openness to setting up a time to meet with Mrs. Sicknick following the recess,” a spokesperson told Power Up in an email.
A spokesperson for Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) responded that the top Republican on the Senate Rules Committee had instead “extended an invitation to meet with Officer Sicknick's family to discuss the findings and recommendations included in the bipartisan report on the January 6 attack that will be issued jointly by the Senate Rules and Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committees next week.”
A spokesperson for Sen. Shelley Moore Capito Moore (R-W.Va.) said that Capito would have liked to meet with Sicknick's family but was unavailable the morning they requested due to infrastructure negotiations.
“If they responded with additional days to meet, our office would happily review his schedule to see if something could work,” a spokesperson for Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) told us.
Sens. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), John Boozman (R-Ark.) and Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) also did not meet with Gladys Sicknick and did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.

Despite the last-minute request from Sicknick's family, several Republican lawmakers cleared their schedule to accommodate a request to meet. Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Mitt Romney (R-Utah), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) were among the GOP lawmakers who did meet with Gladys Sicknick before last week's vote on the commission — and ultimately voted to create it. But the commission was never established after it failed to pass the Senate's 60-vote bar, with only six Senate Republicans voting to create it.

Some offices did not respond to the requests from the family for a meeting, including Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), John Neely Kennedy (R-La.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.). Their offices did not respond to requests for comment on the matter.

After it became increasingly clear the commission proposal backed by 35 House Republicans faced long odds in the Senate, Gladys Sicknick requested meetings last Wednesday with every GOP senator in hopes of mustering enough votes to pass it.

“Mrs. Sicknick understands this is a last minute request but would appreciate any time the Senator can spare,” reads the email sent to schedulers on behalf of Gladys Sicknick. “We hope Senator NAME will make time to meet with Mrs. Sicknick considering the sacrifice her son made in defending members of the House and Senate, and our democracy itself.”

In an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper following the vote, Gladys Sicknick described the meetings she did have as “tense”: “I don't understand it. They are elected for us, the people, and they don't care about that,” she added. “They care about money, I guess, their pocketbooks. So they'll be in front of the cameras when they feel like it. They just don't care, and it's not right.”

“I said to him that he got lucky. He got lucky. It could have been very different that day,” Garza told CNN of her meeting with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) before the vote. “Those who want to run with this narrative that, 'Well it was tourists that day, and I didn't feel threatened' — they got lucky. That's the truth of it.”

“I'm disgusted that the Republican senators, that decided to vote no. It's a spit in the face to Brian, it's a spit in the face to all the officers that were there that day,” Garza told CBS News's Nikole Killion.

On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) ruled out the possibility of a presidential commission to study the Jan. 6 insurrection, “telling House Democrats that having President Joe Biden appoint a panel is unworkable even after the Senate blocked an independent probe last week,” the Associated Press's Mary Clare Jalonick reports. “She proposed four options for an investigation of the attack, according to a person on the private Democratic caucus call who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations.”

“The first option, Pelosi said, is to give the Senate another chance to vote on the commission.”
“The other options involve the House investigating the attack, meaning the probes would be inherently partisan. Pelosi suggested that she could appoint a new select committee to investigate the siege or give the responsibility to a single committee, like the House Homeland Security panel, which wrote the original bipartisan bill to create the commission. Alternately, Pelosi said committees could simply push ahead with their own investigations that are already underway.”