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ATLANTA On a day when Washingtons partisan divide felt as deep as it has in decades, lawmakers from both parties gathered in an Atlanta church on Thursday to honor one of the U.S. Senates great champions of bipartisanship, Johnny Isakson.

Mr. Isakson, a moderate Georgia Republican who once called bipartisanship a state of being, was 76 when he died on Dec. 19, having retired prematurely from the Senate in 2019 because of health complications. He was battling Parkinsons disease.

In Washington on Thursday, most Republican legislators refused to take part in the commemorations of the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol by supporters of former President Donald J. Trump. But they came together at Peachtree Road United Methodist Church, in Atlantas Buckhead neighborhood, to honor Mr. Isakson.

Among the attendees were Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and Senator Raphael Warnock, the Democrat who was elected to Mr. Isaksons old Georgia seat last January.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, delivering words of remembrance, acknowledged that the funeral resonated in a spirit of comity that the Senate was once known for, but that has lately become more scarce.

I havent seen this big of a bipartisan group of Senators together off the floor since September, he said. That, he said, was the date of an annual, Johnny Isakson barbecue lunch, a social tradition that Mr. Isakson started and that lawmakers have continued in his absence.

Former U.S. Senator Saxby Chambliss, an old friend of Mr. Isaksons, also delivered remarks, noting that in his farewell speech to the Senate, Mr. Isakson said that he divided the world into two categories: friends and future friends.

Mr. Chambliss recalled that Mr. Isakson also quoted Mark Twains advice to do the right thing, on the grounds that It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

Mr. Isakson held firm conservative beliefs, opposing the Affordable Care Act and gay marriage, but he also bucked the partys status quo at times, and he was not afraid to publicly criticize Mr. Trump.

Along the way, he made numerous friends in both parties; Mr. Chambliss said that former Georgia Governor Roy Barnes, a Democrat, once quipped, If all Republicans were like Johnny Isakson, I would be a Republican.

The pews were packed with friends and admirers from both parties, including Mr. Barnes. The top statewide elected officials in attendance included Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, both of whom are facing tough primary challenges from pro-Trump challengers.

A folk duo underscored the tone with a rendition of Let There be Peace on Earth. When they sang God Bless America, the mourners stood up en masse.

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Republicans and Democrats Come Together to Remember Senator Isakson on Jan. 6 - The New York Times

The Ohioan hopes to repair cross-aisle relationships tattered by the panels politically charged investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and its subsequent prominence in Trumps first impeachment. Reorienting the panel toward its original mission of empowering the intelligence community, however, requires Republicans to reckon with the lightning-rod status that current Chair Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) maintains on the right.

Its an atmosphere that Turner himself has contributed to. Turner signed onto a 2019 letter calling for Schiffs removal, but repeatedly declined to endorse an ouster of the California Democrat in an interview this week a possible sign of a detente.

Obviously, Adam Schiff is not going to change fundamentally who he is. And that certainly is going to be a complicating factor, Turner told POLITICO. But on national security, I have a strong record of being able to work across the aisle and to try to advance whats important to our country. And Im going to continue in that vein.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy picked Turner to replace Nunes, who resigned from Congress earlier this week to take a job as the CEO of Trumps new media venture.

Turner, 61, generally shuns the press but is known for his occasionally combative witness questioning as well as his tendency to reaffirm the neoconservative foreign-policy doctrines that Trumps allies sought to eviscerate and replace with a populist, isolationist worldview. When Fox News host Tucker Carlson suggested in November that the U.S. shouldnt be taking Ukraines side in its territorial disputes with Russia, Turner tangled live on the air with the conservative icon.

Apparently you need a little education on Ukraine, Turner told Carlson. Ukraine is a democracy. Russia is an authoritarian regime that is seeking to impose its will upon a validly elected democracy in Ukraine. And we're on the side of democracy.

The exchange underscored that, on the substance, Turners ascension represents at least a partial departure from the committee's tumultuous Trump years.

I think itll be clear as to who on the committee is committed to making a transition to national security, and those who are more committed to the partisan culture that Schiff has promoted, Turner told POLITICO this week, turning his focus to overseas threats from Iran to North Korea. There are real adversaries, and we need to focus on those.

Turner lauded Nunes for his work running point on the Russia probe for the GOP. Even so, he signaled an eagerness to move beyond a period that often found Republicans dismissing or avoiding questions about Trumps more erratic tendencies as well as his campaigns repeated contacts with Russian nationals.

Im coming in at a time where the biggest threat to our country is our external adversaries, and making certain that as a country, we focus on those and rise to those occasions," Turner said, adding that Nunes was pushing back on narratives that were absolutely false about Trump.

Schiff's communications director, Lauren French, said: "Even amidst the necessity of investigating the former president, the Committee continued to meet its immense responsibility of overseeing the intelligence agencies and keeping the country safe."

Our work will go on with the new ranking member, and we hope it will be productive, French added. We will not allow false personal attacks to distract us from conducting the important business of the committee.

Nunes was a loyal foot soldier for the Trump cause on Capitol Hill and a trusted confidant of the ex-president. During his final months in Congress, though, Nunes grew disengaged from the committee, skipping hearings and briefings while preventing the passage of a bipartisan intelligence authorization bill that the panel has long prioritized.

Democrats and Republicans alike say they expect Turner to be much more active than Nunes, given his interest in the committees core duties chiefly, oversight of the intelligence community.

I think this year is a good chance for Mike and Adam Schiff to reset the relationship, said former Rep. Mike Conaway (R-Texas), a former member of the committee who retired from Congress in 2021.

I have a lot of respect for Mike Turner, said Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, a senior Democrat on the panel whom some Republicans see as a potential successor to Schiff. He gets into the substance of national security in a way that I think is really good. And I know hes committed to it. Ive been sad to see [Nunes] sort of pull away.

Rep. Mike Turner speaks during a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on Nov. 19, 2019. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo/Pool

Turners new position is unlike any other panel leadership role; the Ohio Republican will join the so-called Gang of Eight, the group of senior lawmakers privy to the most sensitive classified information. The group includes party leaders in the House and Senate, as well as the top Democrat and Republican on both chambers intelligence committees.

Inside the committee room, however, Republicans believe the hard work of restoring the panels bipartisan nature likely will require a full leadership shakeup that replaces Schiff as well as Nunes. Discussions have occurred within the GOP about potentially removing Schiff from the intelligence committee if Democrats lose the House majority this fall, despite Turner's unwillingness to entertain that prospect.

While Republicans seem to be more serious about yanking another member from the panel Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), another popular bogeyman for his political opponents Schiff is not off the table if he again assumes this committee role. But making any move against panel Democrats after the midterms would undoubtedly risk throwing the committee back into partisan war footing.

And that's not how Turner, first elected in 2002 with a background as a mayor and trial lawyer, tends to play his hands. GOP colleagues see him as poised to try to rebuild the panel's bipartisan reputation, with or without Schiff leading its Democrats.

His flashes of independence from Trump will help him there: The Ohioan condemned the then-presidents infamous 2019 phone call with Ukraines president, which sparked impeachment proceedings. Earlier that year, Turner blasted Trump for racist tweets about four female lawmakers of color, in which he said they should go back to the crime infested places from which they came.

After their combative interview, Carlson went after Turner on Twitter for voting against Trumps bid to defy Congress by redirecting funds for a southern border wall that were initially appropriated for military construction projects.

While he's willing to buck prominent conservatives, Turner is also prepared to singe Democrats. During a more recent appearance on Fox News, Turner slammed Schiff as largely discredited and accused him of pushing the Russia hoax a favorite phrase of Nunes' for political purposes.

Turner said the California Democrat had transformed the committee from its focus which is protecting our national security and the intelligence community, to being a vendetta against the Trump family and even the Trump campaign.

That Nunes-like language aside, those who have worked with Turner believe he'll take a sharp turn toward the previous legacy of the panel.

That committee is really important and really powerful, and has a lot to do with why we live the way that we live, said former Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.), who served on the intelligence committee with Turner. And I think that it's just better served to go back to being a special committee that works well together.

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House Intels next top Republican prepares a sharp turn from the Trump years - POLITICO

After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, the Republican National Committee published what became known as the GOP autopsy report, an effort to identify and address the partys ongoing political weaknesses. But eight years later, after losing another close race, the GOP appears wholly uninterested in reviewing or reforming its agenda. In fact, despite capturing the presidency, the Democratic Party has been far more interested in developing an attractive issue agenda. There is only one political party that is terrified of losing an election because it looks too extreme, said Seth Masket, a FiveThirtyEight contributor and political scientist at the University of Denver. Theres a huge party asymmetry.

But despite the fact that the GOP is quite unpopular and that much of its current agenda such as overturning the Affordable Care Act or advancing restrictive immigration policies does not appeal to a majority of voters, the party is in an enviable position heading into the 2022 midterm elections and beyond. What is to make of this glaring disconnect?

On the one hand, the GOP is fundamentally opposed to the type of legislation that tends to garner widespread public support: generous social-welfare policies. Most Americans want a single-payer health care system, paid parental leave and a higher minimum wage. But most Republicans are ideologically opposed to these policies either because they do not believe they are the federal governments responsibility, or because they think that these policies will ultimately prove counterproductive. A Pew Research Center survey from May 2021 found, for instance, that more than three-quarters of Republicans said that the government was taking on too many roles that were better left to private citizens and businesses.

But the biggest reason why the GOP may not be pushing more popular policies is that recent history suggests its unnecessary. Former President Trumps startling 2016 election victory showed that an unpopular candidate with little interest in public policy can still win. For conservative activists disappointed in the outcomes of Romneys and the late Sen. John McCains campaigns, the lesson of 2016 was that political candidates with personal baggage or extreme political views are no longer a liability.

The current structure of the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate also allows Republican candidates wider discretion in eschewing popular legislation. For instance, former FiveThirtyEight reporter Perry Bacon Jr. argued last March that the GOPs structural advantages over the Democratic Party has allowed legislators to pursue more conservative policies than the average voter prefers. And as Laura Bronner and Nathaniel Rakich also wrote at FiveThirtyEight, Republicans have done this while often being in the minority: Republican senators have not represented a majority of the population since 1999 yet, from 2003 to 2007 and again from 2015 to 2021,Republicans had a majority of members of the Senate itself. That means that, for 10 years, Republican senators were passing bills and not passing others on behalf of a minority of Americans. Furthermore, gerrymandering, particularly in state-legislative races, insulates Republican members from popular sentiment.

Recent work in political science offers another plausible explanation. In an increasingly polarized political system, individual issues may matter less than partisan identity. In other words, partisan loyalty to ones own team is paramount. So instead of voting on issues, Americans appear to more readily adopt the views of party leaders. In a 2019 interview with The New York Times, Stanford political scientist Shanto Iyengar suggests that this is diminishing the relevance of political issues: There is a growing body of work showing that policy preferences are driven more by partisans eagerness to support their party rather than considered analysis of the pros and cons of opposing positions on any given issue.

There is one crucial caveat to all of this. If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, the 1973 opinion that established a constitutional right to abortion, the issue of abortion may provide the most critical test to the GOPs ability to defy political gravity yet. Even if Americans have conflicting views on abortion, few believe it should be completely illegal. Which is why a ruling that overturned Roe would put tremendous pressure on Republican elected officials to fully embrace the most extreme position the complete illegality of abortion. It would almost certainly become a campaign issue in 2022, and Republican elected officials would be forced to defend a position that is broadly unpopular.

The first and overriding goal for national political parties is to win elections. So if Republican candidates keep winning elections without offering an agenda that garners widespread public support, there is no reason to expect the party to change. The party is already poised to make gains in 2022 without putting forward a governing agenda. What would force the GOP to reevaluate? It would take a sustained series of election losses, said Masket. They would need to lose elections they didnt expect to lose.

Even then, though, its not clear whether a course correction would be the end result. If the GOP is able to keep convincing itself that election losses are due to voter fraud and/or electoral malfeasance, there is no reason to expect the partys agenda will change anytime soon.

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Why The Republican Party Isnt Concerned With Popularity - FiveThirtyEight

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images

Rep. Adam Kinzinger criticized his party in an MSNBC interview on Friday.

"We have a truth crisis in this party," he said.

Kinzinger is an outspoken critic of Trump and one of two Republicans serving on the January 6 committee.

GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois on Friday fiercely criticized his own party, telling MSNBC in an interview that Republicans need to return to the truth.

Kinzinger said the GOP is unrecognizable today because "what has changed is the use of conspiracy" and "the absolute lack of courage to call it out."

"It's sad because the Republican Party will exist," he said. "But it has lost, in a lot of people's minds, any credibility. And it's going to take a while to get it back."

"We have a truth crisis in this party," Kinzinger continued. "You can have different opinions. But you can't have a different truth."

The lawmaker also described "the fear" that's spread among Republican leaders "against a man that is basically insane sending out press releases from Mar-a-Lago," referring to former President Donald Trump.

Unlike many members of his party, Kinzinger has often publicly rebuked Trump and rose to prominence as a vocal critic of the former president, which he has faced backlash over.

Kinzinger also commented on the lies spread about the 2020 presidential election, which lead to Trump supporters violently storming the Capitol on January 6 last year.

"When you undermine [the voting process] through lies to people, violence is not a surprise," he said.

Kinzinger's remarks on Friday come as the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection digs into what happened in the leadup to and during the riot. Kinzinger and Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming are the only Republicans serving on the congressional panel. Several Republican figures, including Trump, have mocked the committee and its probe.

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In his MSNBC interview, the congressman also touched on this year's midterm elections with Republicans vying to take control of Congress.

"You have to tell people the truth. And right now, everybody's got their hand in the sand because they want to win reelection. What's winning reelection honestly worth if you can't actually do your job of telling people the truth, or you're ashamed to look yourself in the mirror?"

Kinzinger announced last year that he will not seek reelection.

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GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger says Republicans have a 'truth crisis' and 'got their head in the sand because they want to win reelection' - Yahoo News

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthyKevin McCarthyMcCaul tests positive for COVID-19 in latest congressional breakthrough Ex-McCarthy staffer: GOP leader's strategy dictated by 'most extreme' wings of party Pelosi leads moment of silence for Jan. 6 with no Republicans except Cheneys MORE (R-Calif.) will most likely be nominated and elected Speaker of the House a year from now when Congress convenes in January of 2023.

Here are ten things he should start promising that he will do when he takes the gavel from House Speaker Nancy PelosiNancy PelosiWoman at Jan. 6 Capitol attack involved in fatal car crash Pelosi invites Biden to give State of the Union address on March 1 No, Jan. 6 wasn't worse than 9/11, nor is democracy at risk: Here's why MORE (D-Calif.).

First, he should insist on regular order.Doing things procedurally correct wont exactly light a fire under the GOP base, but voters instinctively understand that things have gone seriously off kilter during the reign of Pelosi.Do a real budget, devolve power back to the committees, pass the appropriations bills on time, go to real conferences with the Senate.Allow members to do their jobs and represent their constituents.

Second, he should end proxy voting.Both Democrats and Republicans have made use of this device that allows members to give their voting cards to other members while they sit at home and do who knows what.Members of Congress are paid to do their jobs by the taxpayers and they need to show up to do those jobs.

Third, he should immediately open the House buildings and the Capitol back to visitors and those who want to petition their government, as protected under the Constitution.The fact that members have been allowed to retreat behind the walls of Congress and keep the American people largely on the outside looking in is an embarrassment to this country.

Fourth, he should promise the Democrats that they can put whatever members from their caucus on whatever committees they want.He should make clear that what Nancy Pelosi did in kicking off members of the Republican Conference from committees was an outrageous abuse of power that had no precedent in House history and will not be replicated as long as Republicans are in power.There is no need to make a martyr out of Rep. Ilhan OmarIlhan OmarThe Memo: Threats to democracy are stark one year after Jan. 6 Feehery: What House Republicans should promise when they take over The 9 politicians who had the most impact in 2021 MORE (D-Minn.). Let her serve on whatever committee Rep. Hakeem JeffriesHakeem Sekou JeffriesFeehery: What House Republicans should promise when they take over House clears bill to raise debt limit House votes to hold defiant Meadows in criminal contempt MORE (D-N.Y.) deems appropriate.

Fifth, he should immediately launch a special committee to find out what the hell happened with our response to the COVID-19. Why has America done substantially worse than just about any other country?Why dont hospitals still have the capacity they need and still dont any good treatment protocols?What kind of propaganda campaign was launched by the Chinese communists?Why were voices of those who raised real questions about the strategic direction silenced?

Sixth, he should promise to pay the fines of those who broke autocratic rules of Nancy Pelosi, including those who refused to wear masks on the House floor and those members who refused to go through metal detectors.

Seventh, he should have the Judiciary Committee investigate what exactly happened with the violent protests of 2020, who funded those protests, how George Soros paid for the elections of prosecutors who refused to prosecute violent offenders, and how that led to the murders of the thousands of innocent civilians.

Eight, he should promise to hold Big Tech to account for stifling free speech.He should work with Democrats to find legislative solutions to break their monopoly power.He should launch an investigation into the fact-checking operations of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.What conflicts of interest were present that compelled these companies to create narratives that led to more panic and less reasoned debate when it came to our COVID-19 response?Why did Twitter ban Alex Berenson and Donald TrumpDonald TrumpRon Johnson to run for reelection: reports On the Money US reports meager job growth to finish 2021 Jan. 6 chair says panel will move this month to ask Pence to testify MORE?

Ninth, he should have the Budget Committee and the Appropriations Committee launch a join investigation into what happened with all the money that was shoveled out the door in 2021. How much money was lost through fraud?How much money has been left unspent?How much did the states waste because they didnt know what to do with it? I betcha we will find that the federal government under the Biden administration wasted hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money.

Finally, the Speaker should launch a task force, led by the Education and Labor Committee, to find out what exactly has gone wrong with our public school system.While much of this should be done at the state and local levels, the fact is that the National Education Association has an outsized influence in education policy and that influence has proven to be destructive to hopes and dreams of many young children.

Feehery is a partner at EFB Advocacy and blogs atwww.thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former House SpeakerDennis HastertJohn (Dennis) Dennis HastertFeehery: What House Republicans should promise when they take over Democrats mull hardball tactics to leapfrog parliamentarian on immigration Feehery: A better than even shot of flipping a Texas district MORE(R-Ill.), as communications director to former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas), and as a speechwriter to former House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).

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Feehery: What House Republicans should promise when they take over | TheHill - The Hill