Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) over the weekend declined to say if he is "putting country above party" by opposing a commission to study the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
In a Sunday interview on Fox News, host Chris Wallace asked Blunt why he is trying to prevent a new investigation into the events of Jan. 6.
"Well, I think it's too early to create a commission," Blunt explained. "And I believe Republicans in the Senate will decide that it's too early to create that commission. Commissions often don't work at all. And when they do work, like the Simpson-Bowles commission produced a good result -- nothing happened as part of that result."
Wallace pointed out that the former chairs of the 9/11 Commission had recently released a statement in support of creating a Jan. 6 commission that puts "country above party, without bias."
"The question is whether an independent commission -- no members of Congress -- could serve a useful function," the Fox News host said. "Can you honestly say in opposing this commission coming out down the line that you're putting country above party?"
Blunt didn't directly answer the question.
"In my lifetime, [9/11 and Jan. 6] are the two seminal moments where the country, the Capitol, the city itself under an attack that we wouldn't have anticipated," he said. "But I do think the 9/11 Commission had a lot more information available to it when it started than this one would have and we made a lot of decisions before the 9/11 Commission started that were important to further secure the Capitol, to further look at our intelligence failures."
"We need to be doing all of those things," he added.
