Fine. Filibuster the 1/6 commission.

For those of us of a certain age, this iconic quote should be uppermost in our minds as the threat of a GOP filibuster over the 1/6 Commission consumes the airspace: "You can't win, Vader. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

Senate GOP whip John Thune says he has the votes to sustain a filibuster and scupper the commission. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is buttonholing his caucus, asking it to vote against the commission as a "personal favor".

Now, mind you, this commission would have a lot of buy-in from the Republicans. It would be substantially neutered. But even the investigatory power it has is enough of a threat of dragging down the GOP in the 2022 midterms that it must be stopped.

Here's the thing, though: Stopping the commission wouldn't stop the investigations. Speaker Nancy Pelosi would just empanel a select committee to look into everything surrounding and leading up to the insurrection. And this select committee would have more power, and almost no input from Republicans. Think the Watergate select committee—the committee which was about to return articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon.

By stopping a commission over which they would have some control, Mitch and his Merrie Marauders are handing an Hermes scarf wrapped in expensive paper to Pelosi and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. The only thing they have any control over is deciding whether or not the commission gets off the ground. The decrepit orange husk to which they've lashed themselves demands no commission, thinking this will stop all investigation. Of course he does, because he's a moron. But he's the one calling the tune, and the dancing monkeys of the GOP jig to his cacophonous beat.

Much like Darth Vader, by dispensing with an immediate problem the GOP is opening the door wide to something even worse. Democrats are not going to flinch from investigating the attempted coup. They gave the Republicans a chance to participate in good faith. But "good faith" is something not a single elected Republican has in any quantity. They are all willing, eager accomplices of a traitor who would think nothing of watching them hang. Some of them say they fear for their lives. Eliminating the gangrene would be one way to allay those fears. But most of them are counting on vote suppression to regain the House and Senate. A select committee working into 2022 on the insurrection is a far more damaging outcome than a bipartisan panel which would end its work on December 31, 2021. But when you're falling out of a window at a precipitous rate of acceleration, all you can do is flap your arms and hope you can fly.

The hope, of course, is that any select committee would be seen as a partisan stitch up. This falls apart when the fact is that a select committee was necessary due to GOP intransigence. And once new facts start being revealed, well, its genesis really won't matter. The nation will be riveted by the drama of the laying out of how the sitting president tried to engender a coup, with the aid of his party. 

The GOP, like Darth Vader, is blinded by its pathologies. That is one of the reasons we'll win.