By John Kanelis / johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can count votes as well as any politician who’s ever served on Capitol Hill.

With that knowledge in the bank, she is planning to ask House members to vote on choosing a select committee to do something the U.S. Senate choked on: investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection against the U.S. government.

What do I think about this? I believe Pelosi is going to proceed where she must go, but I also believe she is going to invite ferocious criticism from those who think she is stacking the deck against any sort of impartial finding into what transpired on that terrible day.

A mob of terrorists stormed Capitol Hill. They crashed through windows, beat cops nearly to death. They wanted to stop the certification of the Electoral College victory that President Biden earned in the 2020 election. They attacked our governmental process. They threated the lives Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence.

But the Republican caucus in Congress doesn’t want a probe to look into it.

So, Pelosi is going to ask the slim Democratic majority in the House to approve establishing a select House committee.

The committee won’t comprise just Democrats. Pelosi is slated to ask House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy to select GOP members to join this panel. I am quite interested to see who McCarthy picks, whether he finds Republican moderates or taps the shoulders of GOP conspiracy goons to muck up the works.

Speaker Pelosi is doing what she must do, given the Senate Republicans’ refusal to do what they should have done in proceeding with a bipartisan commission to examine the riot, its consequences and recommend ways to prevent this kind of insurrection from recurring.

I also hope that Pelosi’s select committee, presuming the House approves it, will be thorough and will offer recommendations for preventing a recurrence.

As for GOP resistance to the work that will commence, let ’em gripe. They only will undermine their own credibility as the nation seeks to understand the cause of what we all saw develop as the terrorists launched a frontal assault on our democratic process.