| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi exercised her option and rejected two of the Republicans selected by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy for the Select Committee of the House of Representatives that will investigate the events of Jan. 6. McCarthy then decided to boycott the committee altogether, withdrawing his other three picks. So unless something changes, the committee will be made up of several Democrats and the Republican Pelosi had already chosen, Wyoming's Liz Cheney, who immediately blasted McCarthy. - This is no small decision by the speaker. It's the second time this year that she and the Democrats have used their majority to interfere with Republican choices for staffing committees — recall that Democrats had previously tossed new Georgia member Marjorie Taylor Greene off of all her committee assignments. It's hard to believe that the House could become even more of a majority-party-run institution than it had been before this Congress, but that's the effect of those two decisions. Overall, that's bad for the House.
- Was it the right call? I don't know. Pelosi is correct that the Republicans she rejected, Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Jim Banks of Indiana, had no business serving on the committee, given their support for former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn an election he had lost and the certainty — by their own admission — that their only goal would be to disrupt the efforts of the committee to get to the bottom of the Capitol riot. Jordan, at least, was probably a witness to some of the events the committee will be investigating. The problem here wasn't of Pelosi's making; it was caused by Jordan, Banks and McCarthy. The committee will function better without them, and it's important that it uncover as much as possible about the insurrection, including how politicians and organized groups were responsible. Whether that's worth the damage to the House, or whether the damage had already been done by Jordan, Banks and McCarthy, is a tougher call.
- Part of the trouble for McCarthy is that few members of his Republican conference want to play the important role of the loyal opposition. There are quite a few (a dozen? 60?) House Republicans who seem to have lost interest in supporting democracy at all, and almost all of the rest prefer crawling under a rock to doing anything that might offend any of the malignant people and groups that have influence within the party. That's not counting Cheney and the handful of other anti-Trump House Republicans; for these purposes, they're not the opposition, but allies of Democrats in a battle to save and strengthen democracy. It's the other dozens and dozens of House Republicans who aren't willing to serve on the committee and accept the basic premise that the insurrection was a bad and dangerous thing and that presidents should not try to stay in office after losing elections, but at the same time being ready to offer defenses of Republican actions when plausible and criticisms of Democrats when they go wrong.
- I hate to pile on, but the initial reaction from some in the neutral media was … not good. To pick on one pundit, CNN's Chris Cillizza immediately declared that Pelosi's decision "dooms even the possibility of [the committee's] eventual findings being seen as independent." But "being seen as independent" isn't the same thing as coming up with accurate findings, which seems like a more important standard to set — and one that is by no means undermined by restricting the committee to those who sincerely want to get to the truth. The success or failure of the committee will mostly depend on whether it's able to access the information it needs, and not on spin or interpretation. But the success or failure of the plain-sight coverup that Republicans are trying to engineer will depend, in part, on whether commentators insist on treating it all as a superficial partisan battle in which the facts are less important than the spin.
1. Daniel Carpenter at the Monkey Cage on the credibility of the Food and Drug Administration. 2. Arindrajit Dube reports on the effects so far of cutting off expanded unemployment benefits. 3. Kevin Johnson on restoring separation between the Justice Department and the White House. Good. 4. Fredreka Schouten on the danger to election administrators, which could become a danger to elections. 5. Nick Timiraos and Andrew Restuccia on the fight over Biden's coming decision about who will be the next chair of the Federal Reserve. 6. And Annie Lowrey on criticisms from the internet. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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