Jan. 6 hearings expose the coup attempt in 2020, and one being planned for 2024

Congressional hearings into the Jan. 6 insurrection seem to be resonating, and for good reason. Witness by witness, document by document, the select committee is filling in the picture of a high-level effort, echoed in the day's mob violence, to nullify the national election based on Donald Trump's false allegations of voter fraud.

Calling this an attempted coup is now amply justified.

The most dramatic and newsworthy chapter so far emerged Thursday when the committee's focus turned to Trump and his enablers' outrageous effort to prod and bully Vice President Mike Pence into subverting the constitutional counting process. After rioters breached the Capitol, Trump condemned Pence's resistance on Twitter, as he'd already done with nasty vulgarity in private.

Rioters threatened to kill Pence. We learned they got within 40 feet of him.

Much was clarified by the sworn statements of expert witnesses and Pence's former advisers: Under the 12th Amendment, a vice president's role in January of an inauguration year has always been to ceremonially preside over the count of the Electoral College vote.

As was already known, Trump and a few loyal lackeys propagated an absurd argument that Pence could reject electoral votes or send them back to the states. According to sworn testimony from Pence counsel Greg Jacob, the Trump lawyer John Eastman, who tried to prod Pence on Trump's behalf, admitted if his "theory" were tested in the Supreme Court it would be overwhelmingly or even unanimously rejected.

REPEATEDLY TOOK FIFTH

If vice presidents could do this, Jacob asked, why wouldn't a previous VP from a losing ticket have tried doing the same? Eastman wasn't about to enlighten the committee on any of it. A video played at the hearing showed him repeatedly taking the Fifth when asked the most basic questions. He did so a hundred times, said Rep. Pete Aguilar.

Those are important highlights. But this isn't about what's already occurred.

Called as a witness, former judge J. Michael Luttig, a conservative legal icon once considered for the Supreme Court, spoke most urgently about the specter of 2024. “If the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate were to lose that election,” Luttig warned, “they would attempt to overturn the 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election.” 

Let's all carefully listen: Luttig says this poses a constitutional crisis like none other.

For the public, regardless of party leanings, this is the very reason to keep track of what's seen and heard and asked and answered in the next televised sessions scheduled for Tuesday and Thursday, at 1 p.m. 

There has been a disgraceful dearth of cooperation from the GOP side of the House, headed by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Fortunately, the committee has a CrimeStoppers-style phone-in number for anyone with information to share. McCarthy, who saw and knew a lot that day, probably won't call. But he should.

These hearings have a stunningly different dynamic from the party-line exercises that the two Trump impeachments were fated to be. As the committee's work evolves, the testimony of longtime right-leaning Republican figures such as Luttig, ex-Attorney General William Barr, counsel Jacob, and others are key to the panel's credibility and research.

That's significant — as is the role of Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who has been front and center as vice chair of the select committee. For his part, Pence is a deeply religious evangelical Christian conservative whose aides shared Bible verses while trying to stay safe on the Capitol loading dock on the dangerous day in question. 

NEED TO GO PUBLIC

Earlier last week, Barr testified he was “livid” when discussing with Trump the concocted claims of voting fraud after losing the 2020 election. He said he thought his boss had "become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff."

Unfortunately, Barr and other now-confirmed skeptics of the coup attempt inside the White House failed — in the weeks after the election but before the certification — to directly challenge Trump's “stop the steal” lies in their public statements. That's the value of close questioning under oath.

If this drama can be viewed as a trilogy, one could say the curtain has come down on Act 2, leaving the nation in suspense at to whether there is a criminal case to be made against the former president and perhaps future candidate.

As angering and alarming as all the evidence may be, Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson is right not to commit now to a criminal referral to the Justice Department, which is probing the events on its own.

Top extremists from the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have been booked for seditious conspiracy. For those further up the political food chain, the legal meaning of the words fraud, incitement, obstruction and even treason will surely draw thorough consideration and debate.

Luckily, the Trump faction's ugly, menacing and destructive attempt to rig the 2020 election results crashed and burned. The question now is how to make sure any future power-mad plots don’t work — as soon as two years from now — and start measuring what punitive options the proper authorities in a free republic should take.