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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Tomorrow, the Select House Committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot will hold its first hearing. We will carry it live here on WNYC. It's scheduled to start at 9:30 tomorrow morning. The committee, as of now, has only two Republicans, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger after House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy and Speaker Nancy Pelosi couldn't agree on which other Republicans would serve. Speaker Pelosi said this yesterday on ABC This Week.

Nancy Pelosi: Maybe the Republicans can't handle the truth, but we have a responsibility to seek it, to find it, and in a way that retains the confidence of the American people.

Brian Lehrer: In this atmosphere, does Pelosi have confidence the committee's findings will be accepted broadly by the American people?

Nancy Pelosi: My confidence is high. I do believe that the work of this committee, in order to retain the confidence of the American people, must act in a way that has no partisanship, is all about patriotism.

Brian Lehrer: Speaker Pelosi yesterday on ABC This Week. With me now on that and more on Monday Morning Politics is NPR national political correspondent, Mara Liasson. Thanks as always, Mara. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mara Liasson: Happy to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Can you give us a preview of what will happen in the committee hearing tomorrow?

Mara Liasson: Well, I can't tell you exactly what will happen, but we know that this is a committee that the minority leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, is basically boycotting. There are no Republicans that he's appointed on it because the two that he chose originally were Jim Jordan and Congressman Banks who Nancy Pelosi decided not to accept. Then he pulled all the other Republicans that he had appointed off. Now, there are still going to be two Republicans on the committee, but they are appointed by Pelosi, that's Adam Kinzinger, and Liz Cheney, both critics of Donald Trump, both people who have been pretty much rejected by the Republican Party establishment in the house.

Brian Lehrer: What do you see as the likely role of Cheney and Kinzinger? They certainly both have a record of being critical of Trump, but they are still Republicans. Do you expect them to play a particular role or just be indistinguishable from Democrats if we didn't already know their party?

Mara Liasson: I don't know yet. I think that they are as interested in getting to the bottom of what happened on January 6th as all the Democratic members. They're not interested in making the committee look like a partisan witch-hunt, which certainly other Republicans want to do. They'll do it from the outside now, they're not on the inside. I think there are a lot of questions that Liz Cheney wants answered, just like the Democrats, what was Donald Trump's role on January 6th? What were the contents of his conversations with House Republicans including Kevin McCarthy and [clears throat] don't forget Jim Jordan who was once almost on the committee will probably be subpoenaed to testify before the committee.

There's going to be a lot of investigation. Obviously, the Republicans who are not on the committee will try to make this out as a partisan exercise, but I still think a lot of facts can be uncovered by this committee.

Brian Lehrer: Why would Jim Jordan Conservative Ohio Congressman be among those subpoenaed?

Mara Liasson: Oh, because of conversations he had with White House officials because he might have some information about how the organizing for the rally occurred and also, what happened on that day.

Brian Lehrer: Do you have a sense of who else might be subpoenaed or what kind of witness lists?

Mara Liasson: The first people we're going to hear from are Capitol police officers and we know that several of them were brutally beaten by the rioters that day. That's going to be the first day. This is the kind of a committee that is just guaranteed to be covered live on television. This was a dramatic day, full of violence, and these were people who attack police officers and there's plenty of footage of police officers being beaten and there are also police officers who are going to come up and tell what it was like that day for them.

Brian Lehrer: To that point, I want to replay the second clip that we aired a couple of minutes ago of Speaker Pelosi on ABC This Week. Listen to the end of this when she invokes patriotism.

Nancy Pelosi: My confidence is high. I do believe that the work of this committee, in order to retain the confidence of the American people, must act in a way that has no partisanship, is all about patriotism.

Brian Lehrer: Do the Democrats and the Republicans have very different definitions of patriotism when it comes to January 6th?

Mara Liasson: Well, sure. Donald Trump has praised the people who breached the Capitol. He said they were ushered in by Capitol police officers, they were loving people, and he certainly called them patriots and a big chunk of Republican voters in polls say that they believe the people who were writing that day were defending freedom. Of course, there's a difference there, but look, this is the most partisan issue in America right now.

Whether or not you believe that Donald Trump was defeated fair and square. Now the facts are that he was, but he continues to insist that the election was stolen from him, big majority of Republican voters believe him and that's all wrapped up in what happened on January 6th because he encouraged his supporters to go up to the Capitol. He didn't tell them to be violent, but he did encourage them to go up.

He encouraged them to put pressure on members of the House to decertify or reject the slates of electors coming from the states. He wanted the election results to be overturned and that is what the insurrectionists wanted too. This is an extremely partisan exercise just by definition, but I do think that some basic facts can come out and they will.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned yesterday on Weekend Edition that polling shows 30% of Republicans sympathized with the rioters. Do you know what sympathized means? Do 30% of Republicans think the election certification that day should have been overturned by the force of a small amount?

Mara Liasson: I would put it differently. I think at least 30% of Republicans and much more think [clears throat] the election results should have been overturned by the House of Representatives. We know that because two-thirds of the House Republicans voted to overturn the results of the elections. We had a handful of members of the Republican caucus in the Senate. Yes, of course, they don't think they should have been overturned by violent rioters, but they certainly think it should have been overturned by Republican members of Congress. That's what Donald Trump was asking for that day and that's what a majority of House Republicans, two-thirds of them, voted for.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take your questions and comments for NPR national political correspondent, Mara Liasson, about the Select House Committee on the January 6th Capitol riot which will hold its first hearing tomorrow. We expect the show to be preempted in whole or in part tomorrow morning for live coverage of that hearing. Also, on the politics and public health of vaccinations now, which we'll get to, which Mara has reported on, or any other national politics that Mara may be following, (646) 435-7280 or tweet your question or comment @BrianLehrer.

I'm going to go back again to that clip of Pelosi from ABC This Week yesterday that we played. She said she has high confidence that whatever the committee ultimately reports will be broadly accepted across party lines. Do you see the committee has taken specific steps to maximize the chance that that happens among all these skeptical Republicans who we were just talking about?

Mara Liasson: I don't know exactly why Nancy Pelosi thinks that the committee can convince a whole bunch of people who believe the election was stolen that it wasn't, but we'll see. I think that the committee can establish facts. This is something that has not been investigated in public and you're going to have, as I said, police officers starting tomorrow talking about what happened that day.

There was a mob of people chanting 'Hang Mike Pence', there were people going through the halls of Congress looking for Nancy Pelosi, there was violence committed against Capitol police officers, and all that can be established. Whether this committee can change public opinion when you have 70% of Republicans agreeing believing Donald Trump's falsehood that the election was stolen from him, I don't know if the committee can change those minds, but she certainly has high hopes for it.

Brian Lehrer: I could also make a case that Pelosi shouldn't care that much who accepts it at first, it's just her job and the committee's job to get the facts on the table and public opinion will be what it is and it can change over time.

Mara Liasson: I think, in general, it's probably a bad idea to predict how you can affect public opinion, especially at a time when we're so deeply, deeply divided, and polarised.

Brian Lehrer: You said on Weekend Edition Sunday that the hearing could uncover a lot of what we still don't know. There's a lot we do know by now. What do you think are some of the main things that we don't know that the committee would try to uncover?

Mara Liasson: Well, I think were there any contacts conversations between members of Congress and the people who came up to the Capitol that day in advance? What were the conversations between house leaders and Donald Trump that day? We do have reports of a conversation between Kevin McCarthy and Donald Trump that came from Jamie Herrera Beutler, another Republican member of the House.

Where she said she recounted what she was told by Kevin McCarthy that he talked to Donald Trump about but we haven't heard about that firsthand. There are a lot of things that happened that day that we don't know about. Also, just the basic facts about why it took so long for the Capitol Police to get the reinforcements they were asking for hours and hours.

One of the things that Republicans want to focus on is why the Capitol wasn't defended well enough. Should they have anticipated a violent insurrection at the Capitol, why didn't they or if they did, why weren't they better prepared? There are lots and lots of things we still don't know.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Tyson in the South Bronx, you're on WNYC with NPR national political correspondent, Mara Liasson. Hi, Tyson, thanks for calling in.

Tyson: Thank you, Brian. Mara, I just want to say you are one of the icons of NPR and I just love the fact that you're still with NPR.

Mara Liasson: Thanks. 150 years later. [laughs]

Tyson: [laughs] Keep on going. I really appreciate you and bringing this to light. I have a two-part question. Number one, I heard on NPR and WNYC that former Governor Kaine believes that there should be an independent commission. The second part of my question is, how can America unite itself when all the republic can't seem to totally disregard the truth, even though their lives were at stake on January 6th? Also, where is the Democratic Pitbull to beat back all the lies and falsehoods that continue to plague our country?

Mara Liasson: I'll try to take them in order. In terms of independent commission, that was voted down, Republicans rejected that. It was passed by the House and in the Senate, it was rejected. That's why there's not an independent committee or commission. That's why Nancy Pelosi created the Select Committee, which republicans also voted against.

It's a house committee so that you didn't need the Senate for that, that's why there's no independent commission. I've heard that it's possible that President Biden could have created one, but I think he wants to leave this to Congress. He feels that's the rightful place this should be investigated. In terms of-- Pardon, go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: I'm sorry. No, you go ahead.

Mara Liasson: Oh, and in terms of how to bring the country together, that's a real tough one, especially when you have so many people who believe something that just isn't true, that the election was stolen, that there was massive fraud. In a democratic society, we have a referee, and it's called the judicial branch, and when there's a conflict when people disagree on facts, you go to court and you resolve it. There were at least 60 court cases around the election alleging fraud. Some of them said they were alleging fraud, and then had no evidence of fraud, and not a single one was found to have significant voter fraud in these elections.

There have been many, many audits of the votes, recounts in battleground states that were key, and there just hasn't been any evidence of fraud. Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, and he continues to insist on this. I don't know how you convince his support supporters otherwise. In terms of the Pitbull, I don't think there is going to be one single democratic Pitbull. I think they're just going to be a lot of Democrats who are trying to convince the public about what happened that day.

Brian Lehrer: Vicki in Tudor City, you're on WNYC with Mara Liasson. Hello, Vicki.

Vicki: Good morning. My question is this, since the crowd seemed to have a plan, or the mob, I should say, to "depose" the Vice President Pence and Nancy Pelosi. If they had been taken down the way that they were being targeted, would that have created martial law? Would that have enabled the former president to somehow overturn the election and declare himself the winner?

Mara Liasson: Geez, those are a lot of hypotheticals, and I just don't know the answer to that question. That's a lot of ifs, I just don't know.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think that the committee will investigate how far down that road organizers of the riot, whoever the organizers were, and for that matter, Donald Trump, who is still the sitting president at that moment? We've certainly heard things about, including in the new book by the Washington Post correspondence, Rucker and Leonnig, the other day on their show, how Trump may have been interested in sowing so much chaos in one scenario or another. That there would be enough of a violent backlash, that he could then try to justify declaring martial law.

Mara Liasson: I don't know if the committee is going to get the answers to those questions. They might, especially around the question of why when requests were made to the Pentagon to send in reinforcements that it took so long for that to happen, for the National Guard to come. I don't know if the committee can answer those questions. There's no doubt that during his speech on the ellipse before the crowd marched up to the Capitol, he did make some vague comments as if he was gesturing to the police and maybe some members of the military, "It would be great if you could join them," comments like that. It was unclear what he was trying to make happen at that point.

I think it's really hard to tell what would have happened if the insurrectionists had succeeded in finding Nancy Pelosi or any other member of Congress or for that matter, Mike Pence. We do know that there are a lot of court cases going on, and there are people who have been indicted who posted threats on social media about what they wanted to accomplish that day.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Mara Liasson, more of your calls on this and other things, including the change in politics it looks like in the last week on vaccinations in the United States. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC with NPR national political correspondent, Mara Liasson, (646) 435-7280, or tweet a comment or question @BrianLehrer. Mara Liasson, on vaccinations and the Delta variant, you noted on the network yesterday, that in some conservative-leaning states like Florida, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, vaccination rates are now higher than the national average. You noted that follows the rise in new COVID cases, more now in counties that voted for Donald Trump, since Trump was the original promoter of Vaccinations Operation Warp Speed and all that, how do you see Trump supporters as having become the anti-vaxxers to the extent that they have?

Mara Liasson: This is a really interesting phenomenon. One of the reasons that vaccination rates in those red states are up is because they were so far down before. The vaccinations have become completely politicized and there's a partisan divide on vaccinations. If you look at Trump counties and Biden counties, the vaccination rates are much lower in Trump counties. Now, there's a little bit of an uptake, We've seen some conservative governors come out and really encourage their voters, their constituents, to get vaccinated.

In terms of the disconnect between Donald Trump's crowning achievement, and he legitimately can take credit for getting Operation Warp Speed up, and running as fast as he did, and getting the vaccine on board as fast as he did, he has not been a loud voice encouraging his supporters to get the vaccine. He said he thinks it's a great thing, but he always says, "I believe in your personal freedoms."

He has decided to follow his base not to lead it. There is tremendous vaccine resistance among the conservative base for a variety of reasons, disinformation is one of the biggest ones. What you have now, I originally thought, wow, all those conservative anti-vaxxers, that's a stunning display of disloyalty to Donald Trump since he considers the vaccine his crowning achievement.

This is one of those cases where Donald Trump has not taken the opportunity to be what some Republicans have told me would be, he would be the savior of the country if he could get all of his supporters vaccinated because right now, we have a pandemic of the unvaccinated, 99.7% of people who are being admitted to hospitals with COVID are un-vaccinated. Now the big challenge is how to get people in red states, how to get people who are resistant to the vaccine, mostly because for at least partly because of what they're hearing on conservative media to change their minds and get it

Brian Lehrer: In a way, it's consistent with Donald Trump's career of running to the head of the parade of right-wing populism and saying that he leads it.

Mara Liasson: In this case, though it's interesting because there's a big split between people who don't want to take the vaccine and Donald Trump who made the vaccine happen, as fast as it did. That has to be resolved.

Brian Lehrer: All red-state politicians changing their tunes closer to the ground governors and local leaders.

Mara Liasson: It certainly looks that way. Kay Ivey who's the Republican governor of Alabama, she's always been pro-vaccine but lately, she said something that was shocking. She said, "It's time to blame the unvaccinated for the pandemic". Now that's something that didn't come out of the mouth of Mitt Romney or Joe Biden. That was a very conservative governor of a very red state.

In Utah, the governor there has accused conservative talking heads of, "Killing their listeners with misinformation". Of course, you had Sean Hannity go on the air and say that he was pro-science, pro-vaccine, the next day he confused his message by saying he isn't telling anyone to get the vaccine. There's no doubt that there's been a change in messaging among some conservatives.

Maybe one of the reasons is that they've gotten the same public health briefings as everybody else has. Which means when there is an uptick in infections, which is what we're now seeing among the un-vaccinated, there always follows three to four weeks later, a huge surge of hospitalizations and then deaths. Right now, remember Jared Kushner said famously, the pandemic was a blue state problem. Well, that's just not the case anymore. It's really more of a red state problem.

Brian Lehrer: You talked about Governor Ivey. Alabama, according to the CDC, is the state with the lowest vaccination rates. That is also an indication of how misleading the rate of growth statistic can be on almost anything. If we're saying that the red states, including Alabama, now have the fastest rate of growth of people getting vaccinations, if you only have 2% of something and it goes up to only 3% of something, you've got a 50% growth rate.

Mara Liasson: That's the key thing. The reason that the vaccine rate is so much higher in these red states is because it was so low, to begin with.

Brian Lehrer: I'm curious, by the way, if this fits in to your portfolio as a national political correspondent, maybe this is more local politics, how you see the new politics of restoring mask mandates for public indoor spaces or requiring vaccinations by city workers in a few places. In fact, let me pass along some breaking news that listeners, as you may be hearing right now for the first time, this just happened a little while ago, Mayor de Blasio just announced that he will require either vaccinations or weekly negative COVID tests for all city workers.

That was not the case as Friday, it was just going to be workers in the health and public hospital system. Now it's going to be for all city workers after Labor Day. I think very few other cities have gone that far so far, Maya, San Francisco, and Pasadena, and I'm not sure if anywhere else. Is this a national political issue for DC or purely a local issue in each locality?

Mara Liasson: I think it's going to be more local. The White House has said they're not going to make federal mask mandates, they're not going to push for federal vaccine mandates. This is going to be up to the states and localities. Obviously, LA re-installed, I think it's indoor masks requirement. Up until most places have been leaving it to individual businesses and employers.

I don't see a return to mask mandates or school shutdowns, but I definitely see a debate happening about whether people should be required to have a vaccine or a negative COVID test to do certain activities, go to an NFL game or-- Certainly, flying on a plane you still have to be masked for federal transportation. Yes, I think that we'll see how bad this new surge is, but the worst it gets, the more you're going to hear about requirements like this.

Brian Lehrer: Back to the January 6th committee hearing scheduled for tomorrow. Stephen in Highland Park, you're on WNYC with Mara Liasson. Hi, Steven.

Stephen: Hello. How are you? Thank you for taking my call. Can you hear me?

Brian Lehrer: Yes. We can hear you. We got you.

Stephen: Hi. I'm wondering if it was a wise move of Pelosi to reject Jim Jordan and the other one, I forget his name. By doing so, does she play into the Republicans' claim that bipartisan, that you won't allow someone with an opposite view?

Mara Liasson: The opposite view she's not allowing is the view that the committee shouldn't have happened in the first place. I think that there's a real debate about that. First of all, this thing is so partisan, to begin with, it's hard to imagine how it could get any more partisan. I think the first reaction when she rejected those two members was, oh, she just handed Republicans a big piece of ammunition, it's going to be just a Pelosi committee and it'll be more partisan. There was no way you are going to get a bipartisan committee in the house because the vast majority of Republicans, including the leadership followed Donald Trump's lead and voted against having this committee in the first place.

I do think that the committee still can be useful in terms of uncovering what happened that day. There's no doubt that she made a decision. She felt that Jim Jordan would be disruptive, that he wasn't interested in finding out what happened that day, he was interested in undermining the investigation and she made her decision. I think once the House Republicans voted against having an independent commission and once the Senate Republicans pretty much put an end to that, it was hard to imagine how you were going to get any bipartisan inquiry on this.

Brian Lehrer: Jackie in the East Village, you're o WNYC with Mara Liasson. Hello, Jackie.

Jackie: Hi, guys. Thank you so much for the great work that you do. I would like to put to the table food-for-thought concept, if you will, that perhaps the larger mechanism that's at play here because, let's face it, the United States has never seen January 6th before. The drive for a coup has never been in place here and there's a reason why Donald Trump, after all of the evidence, insists that the election was fraud. There was a reason why two said the Republican people in Washington voted that the election should be overturned. My theory comes from the seed in the Bush-era of framing, which actually NPR covered.

When they started hiring as media services, these kids that were coming out of Yale and taking words like what happened in 9/11 and actually reframing the sentence passports through all of this time, to now that we have the social media mechanism, that's out of control and manifest in our society as clickbait, which NPR covered when they had the journalist recently who went and undercover.

That has recordings that are on his phone are now being used by the FBI, that he went into all those chat rooms. My surmise from all of this is there's clearly something there's larger mechanism, that's at play, we're missing the point here. In my own life, I have purpose of plate taking myself off of social media to curate my experience because I can't get a handle on it. I have-

Brian Lehrer: Jackie, I'm going to jump in for time. We're almost at a time and we have former police commissioner Bill Bratton standing by. Are you saying that you think one of the reasons for January 6th was not even so much that they thought they were going to succeed in overthrowing the government, but to create a vehicle for so much additional clickbait online, that it spreads their movement?

Jackie: I'm saying the missing part is the Republicans have the huge media machine that we don't know about as in we, myself a Democrat, I'm not part of it because I'm not receiving the emails that are being sent to my friend's mother, three or four times a day by these people that are saying that Biden is going to create one money thing. It's unbelievable.

Brian Lehrer: Right, it's amazing what's going around the misinformation. It's such a big issue, and Mara plays back into the vaccination, misinformation, infrastructure as well. We are just about out of time, you want to give us a quick thought in response to Jackie?

Mara Liasson: Social media, the algorithms that fuel social media, the business model of social media is just designed to be a perfect disinformation machine.

Brian Lehrer: NPR national political correspondent, Mara Liasson, who knows how to give a very brief closing answer when the clock is ticking. Thank you as always, we'll be listening on the network.

Mara Liasson: You're welcome.

 

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