The big lesson to take from the Jan 6 committee ahead of 2024

“I think it’s been devastating,” President Joe Biden said following the ninth public hearing (plus one preliminary session) of the House of Representatives committee looking into the events of 6 January 2021. “The case has been made, it seems to me, fairly overwhelming.”

That “case” being the accusations put forward by the committee, using the testimony throughout the hearings, that former president Donald Trump personally helped incite the Capitol insurrection and sought to overturn the 2020 election. As you might expect, Trump – whom the committee voted to subpoena – has called the hearings a “charade and a witchhunt”.

Thursday’s vote is likely to have been a coda to the public hearings, depending on what happens regarding the subpoena, and will certainly be the last one before the November midterms. But the vice-chair of the committee, Liz Cheney, was very clear in the opening statement of the hearing that the impact of this work will be felt into the future. Not least the next presidential election in 2024.

“Our institutions only hold when men and women of good faith make them hold,” Cheney said. “We have no guarantee that these men and women will be in place next time.”

“With every effort to excuse or justify the conduct of the former president [Trump], we chip away at the foundation of our republic,” she also said during the hearing. “Indefensible conduct is defended, inexcusable conduct is excused. Without accountability, it all becomes normal, and it will recur.”

Recent work by CNN highlights that in at least 11 states the Republican nominees for the job of overseeing elections in the midterms (normally as secretary of state) have either questioned or rejected the results of the 2020 presidential election, following Trump’s repeated falsehoods that he had won the vote.

One of those people is Jim Marchant, who wants to become Nevada’s secretary of state (and has been endorsed by Trump). Marchant said this at a “Make America Great Again” rally in the state, earlier this month: “When I’m secretary of state of Nevada, we are going to fix it, and when my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected we’re going to fix the whole country, and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024.”

It seems that it would be sensible to pay heed to those words by Cheney, Biden and plenty of others across Washington.