Although the whole debacle comes at absolutely no surprise, it still hurts like a sonofabitch. There was some torturous hope that somehow there would be some GQPers who’d flip to the truth — six did, however, but still short — and maybe, just maybe, could then continue on in life without a shitload of shame.
No way.

In a horror of modern American political life:

JUST IN: Senate Republicans just blocked a bill that would have created an independent and bipartisan to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that left five people dead and about 140 officers injured. https://t.co/Ip7nDNZM4i

— CNN (@CNN) May 28, 2021

Beyond the six Republicans who voted for the commission — Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Bill Cassidy, Rob Portman, and Ben Sasse — 11 other asshole Republicans didn’t even show up for the way-rare Friday vote, ‘some of whom said they had scheduling conflicts.‘
WTF!

Our system of goverance is way-antiquated buffered by a Republican party that’s so fucked it can not function, even in doing routine work, and a commission to investigate a most-dangerous day in American history should be routine, a vital aspect of democracy in withstanding an insurrection/riot, the worse in 200 years.
Some background on the vote via The Washington Post just a short while ago:

The 54-to-35 outcome, six votes shy of the 60 needed to circumvent a procedural filibuster, followed hours of overnight chaos as lawmakers haggled over unrelated legislation. The vote stood as a blunt rejection by Republicans of an emotional last-minute appeal from the family of a Capitol Police officer who died after responding to the insurrection, as well as an 11th-hour bid by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to save the measure by introducing changes intended to address her party’s principal objections.

In its wake, many senators who had supported the commission were openly angry, as even the Democrats’ most moderate senator blamed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for killing a bill in order to score political points, instead of doing what was right.
…
The commission legislation was a product of cross-party negotiations among leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee, and it had galvanized significant support among Republicans in the lower chamber.
Last week, 35 GOP House members joined all voting House Democrats to back the creation of a Jan. 6 commission, to be modeled after a similar independent panel formed in the aftermath of 9/11, and charged with producing an objective account of what fueled the day’s violence.

But in the Senate, Republican sentiment soured after McConnell dismissed the commission as needlessly duplicative of ongoing congressional probes and as a Trojan horse that would help Democrats in the next year’s midterm elections.
…
Over the past week, GOP senators voiced concern that even if the commissioners’ ranks were bipartisan, the panel’s staffing might not be. They also argued that if the commission did not produce a final report before the end of the year, Republican lawmakers would have to spend much of the 2022 campaign season responding to its revelations about Trump’s past ills and trying to sidestep his outbursts, when their aim is to make the next election cycle a referendum on President Biden and the Democrats who control Congress.

Point right!
Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine this afternoon also pointedly spots the reality:

The logic of the party’s about-face on the January 6 commission is ultimately pretty simple. When they first conceived the idea, they imagined that they would be moving into a post-Trump era, and an exploration of the former president’s culpability would not impair their political message.
It might have even aided it — after all, a key element to the right-wing backlash against President Obama was the pretense that Republicans had learned from George W. Bush’s errors and could no longer be blamed for them.

But once they realized they couldn’t repudiate Trump, at least not without a cost, the political math of the commission no longer penciled out.
Now such a spectacle threatened to indict a man still very much the party’s face.
The vote has become another symbolic demonstration of the party’s continued fealty to its self-styled president in exile.

Add to the T-Rump ass kissing, the horror of the Senate filibuster:

The only place on earth where 35 wins against 54 https://t.co/AS4MV9nfaD

— Molly Jong-Fast (@MollyJongFast) May 28, 2021

I can’t believe in the modern era this piece of shit still exists, which gives a minority the asshole-logjam to stop bills they don’t favor from passing — the GQP loves it.
The AP supplied a background/definition a couple days ago — some items:

Unlike the House, the Senate places few constraints on lawmakers’ right to speak. Senators can also easily use the chamber’s rules to hinder or block votes. Collectively these procedural delays are called filibusters.

Senate records say the term began appearing in the mid-19th century. The word comes from a Dutch term for “freebooter” and the Spanish “filibusteros” that were used to describe pirates.

Filibusters were emblazoned in the public’s mind in part by the 1939 film, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” in which Jimmy Stewart portrayed a senator who spoke on the chamber’s floor until exhaustion.
In a real-life version of that, Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., stood continuously by his desk for 24 hours and 18 minutes speaking against the 1957 Civil Rights Act, the longest Senate speech by a single senator for which there are records of speaking length.

Those days are mostly gone.
Senators usually tell Senate leaders or announce publicly that they will filibuster a bill, with no lengthy speeches required.
Their impact usually flows not from delaying Senate business but from the need to get a supermajority of votes to end them.

And one asshole Senator stands in the way — Joe Manchin:

It’s remarkable that Manchin could’ve lived through the Obama and Trump eras without already learning this lesson https://t.co/Qj5PQSy8oO

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 28, 2021

Manchin is a total fuck. The disaster of the vote today rests on his shit-shoulders.
He’s the problem — via MSNBC this morning:

Manchin, asked Thursday whether he might finally vote to end the filibuster if Republicans used it to block the commission, responded reflexively: “I’m not willing to destroy our government, no.”

But the senator has it exactly backward — it is the filibuster that is destroying our government.

And Manchin might become ‘very disappointed‘ with stonewalling-asshole Republicans, but he’ll still be too scared to really do anything about it.
America is in shitty Senate hands right now.

Jimmy Stewart will ‘Not yield’ — as the country goes down in flames:

Huh?

(Illustration: Vincent van Gogh’s ‘Old Man in Sorrow (On the Threshold of Eternity)‘ found here).