Again we are reminded that the US is trembling on the brink.

The House speaker, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, announced on Wednesday that she would veto the two top Republicans appointed by the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, to the new select committee investigating the Capitol attack, saying the Trump-allied congressmen could threaten the integrity of the investigation.

That’s one of the reasons we’re trembling on the brink – the fact that some Republicans approved of the attack aka insurrection, and some helped it.

But the move triggered McCarthy to pull all five of the Republicans he had chosen off the committee if Pelosi wouldn’t seat the whole cohort – and threaten to set up their own investigation into the 6 January Capitol attack.

The move didn’t trigger anything; McCarthy decided to try to use it to push the US over the brink into being an authoritarian state.

The Republican House minority leader’s actions also spurred Liz Cheney, the lone Republican appointed to the committee by Pelosi and therefore not one of the five effectively withdrawn by McCarthy, to stand on the steps of the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon and decry his actions as “despicable and disgraceful”.

Cheney also accused McCarthy of trying to “prevent” Americans from knowing the truth of how the Capitol attack occurred.

“The American people deserve to know what happened. The people who did this must be held accountable, it must be an investigation that is sober and gets to the facts,” she said, adding that, however “at every turn the minority leader has tried to get the people not to know what happened”.

Well it doesn’t look good.

Pelosi said in a statement that she was rejecting Republicans Jim Banks and Jim Jordan from the panel because of their remarks disparaging the inquiry and their ties to Donald Trump, who will be the subject of the select committee’s investigation.

Jim Jordan ffs – that guy is the worst.

McCarthy had included Banks and Jordan – both outspoken Trump allies who voted against certifying Joe Biden’s election victory – among his picks on Monday, foreshadowing a bitter partisan fight over the direction of the inquiry.

Yes see that’s no good – voting against certifying Biden’s election is an anti-democratic move, an authoritarian move, a let’s be a failed state now move. It’s an attempt to overturn a legitimate election in order to re-install an evil corrupt authoritarian. It’s not acceptable.

House Democrats were outraged with Banks’s appointment in part because of a statement released on Monday night in which he inexplicably blamed the Biden administration for its response to the 6 January attack, which took place during the Trump administration, the source said.

During and as a result of the incitement of the Trump administration. It didn’t just happen on his watch, it happened immediately after he told them to go do it.

Banks also drew the ire of Pelosi and House Democrats after he arranged a trip for House Republicans to join Trump at a recent event at the southern border alongside an individual who participated in the Capitol attack itself.

That’s nice. That’s a nice touch.