For the third time this month, I have died. The good news is that at this point I'm getting used to it. The bad news is that America's political reporters seem to have a personal grudge against me. First The New York Times does me in with a focus group of jus' folks Republicans whose personas appear to be dependent on whatever they saw on Fox News, and now Politico is taking it upon themselves to again ask, truly, the question of our age: Will House Republicans somehow not do the most malevolent possible thing at every available opportunity?
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"Democrats pushed the boundaries of congressional power in their drives to investigate Donald Trump. Now Republicans who blasted that behavior are openly wondering whether to emulate it," goes the subhead, and we are off to the races.
Republicans are confronting a strategic dilemma as they prepare to unleash their new investigative powers on the Biden White House: Should they take a page from the Democrat-run Jan. 6 select committee?
The dilemma, you see, is that House Democrats plus the only two House Republicans who thought a coup attempt organized by a sitting president needed a legislative response mounted a deep-diving investigation into how exactly an armed and violent crowd came to be stomping through the halls of the U.S. Capitol, hunting for lawmakers and a vice president deemed hostile to Donald Trump. They found that Trump and his team organized a "march" to the Capitol on the exact day, hour, and minutes Trump's election loss would be constitutionally certified; that Trump personally knew the crowd was armed and took actions meant to keep them that way; that the White House explicitly twiddled its thumbs as the violence unfolded, delaying law enforcement response, and a whole bunch of other facts that when presented in federal courts continue to result in convictions for seditious conspiracy and prison time.
The important part of that is that juries have been concluding that the actions by the most violent and organized members of the crowd did indeed amount to an act of plotted sedition. House Republicans who aligned themselves with the conspiracy's own rhetoric can bleat about that all they want, but judges and juries haven't been confused on whether that day amounted to an attempted insurrection.
House Republicans, many of them themselves actively complicit in the attempt to nullify an American presidential election based on Republican-crafted disinformation and hoaxes, have been screaming that now that they're in charge of the zoo, at least for the next two years, they're going to use the same "extraordinary" powers of subpoena And So Forth that the last Congress used to investigate a violent attempted coup.
And they're going to use them to "investigate" a series of mostly-bizarre conspiracy theories premised on Rudy Giuliani's anti-Hunter-Biden theories, a supposed deep state plot to make Donald Trump's top sycophants look super-guilty of conspiring to hide information about Russian advances towards the Donald Trump campaign during 2016, a conspiracy of public officials who privately considered Donald Trump to be an absolute piece of shit and now need to be publicly punished for thinking so, and maybe look at President Joe Biden's taxes (which are public) to retaliate for people wanting to look at President Donald Trump's taxes (which he hid for his entire time in office and which "somehow" were left unaudited despite a federal history of more strictly scrutinizing the tax returns of sitting presidents because of course you would.)
The short version: House Republicans, many of them implicated by text messages in an attempt to topple the elected United States government, are now vowing to retaliate against the investigation that implicated them by launching investigations that span the whole of not-Republican government. They've been quite clear it's retaliatory. They've been quite clear that those lawmakers and public officials who played roles in impeaching Donald Trump over an international extortion scheme and, after, a seditious conspiracy will be especially targeted.
So the version of all of that being presented by expert political journalism is, of course: Yeah, but will they? Will House Republicans do this brazenly corrupt-sounding thing that they've been promising up and down and sideways that they'll be doing? Are House Republicans "who blasted" the investigation into Donald Trump's coup attempt "openly wondering" whether they really want to "emulate it?"
IT IS A MYSTERY.
Okay, before we go any farther let's just check in real quick on what House Judiciary Republicans' Twitter account, aka Jim Jordan's Gym Shower Thoughts feed, is up as we evaluate for ourselves the question of whether House Republicans will or will not, in any situation, do the maximally terrible thing.
What this has to do with House Judiciary matters is, as usual, gonna be a chore to suss out. Unless Splash Mountain gets nominated for a federal judgeship this would seem to be well afield of the usual Judiciary expertise. Unless an anthropomorphized lump of candy is under investigation for taking bribes in federal anthropomorphized candy court, this feels Commerce-related at best.
Oh, right—these are just the worst people you know shrieking aloud, constantly, about companies being a millimeter more inclusive than they were fifty years back because they think it’s an existential crisis worth burning all of America down over.
I said "millimeter" on purpose, by the way. I could have said "inch," but saying "millimeter" has a good chance to send House Republicans scurrying to denounce millimeters for a news cycle or two and that'd be a nice little treat for all of us. Can’t wait for Marjorie Taylor Greene to announce that there’s been a millimeter infestation in Capitol cloakrooms, and how dare The Left put up with the slithery little things.
All right, back to Politico's crack politics team wondering how this complete Republican capitulation to their worst (and most seditious!) elements is going to go.
“They’ve almost changed the rules,” House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) told POLITICO. “[Are] we going to continue that pattern? Look, we want to get as much information as we can get, and they’ve written a new playbook, so we’ll have to talk about it as a committee and as a conference.”
Well, House Republicans put Rep. James Comer in charge of this stuff now and he's not been shy in bragging to Fox News that he's gonna investigate the heck out of the Biden family, to the point where even Brit Hume thinks he's getting out over his skis. That does seem to indicate that the inmates are—sorry, that the seditionists are in charge of the courtroom.
And the Politico counterweight to Jim Comer's promises to investigate the bejeebers out of Hunter Biden's something something?
“I think mostly what the Democrats did as precedent is weaken Congress … I don’t think they did a very good job,” said Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-N.D.), who is joining the Oversight Committee. “If we get into a tit for tat — I don’t think that will serve Republicans, Congress or the American people well.”
Well that's the about the most milquetoast statement one could imagine. That's not exactly a bold political stand, it's the expired salad elected officials hand reporters when somebody asks them to take a political stand and every nerve cell in their bodies is tingling with fight-or-flight reflex. This is the cloud of ink that lawmakers spray so that they can confuse reporters long enough to reach an elevator.
If your first reaction is Who The Hell Is Kelly Armstrong, by the way, join the club. Kelly Michael Armstrong's Wikipedia page is sparse to the point of concerning, listing a grand total of three policy stances taken during the whole of his congressional career.
One of them was the rare Republican dissenter's opinion, days before the Jan. 6 coup attempt pushed by many of his colleagues, that well by gum it's quite likely that the 2020 election was fraudulent but House Republicans maybe don't have the power to nullify the election's results based on imaginary electors that Republicans think should be counted instead, so, sure, point taken. "Moderate" these days means you'll give a happy little nod to Republican hoaxes fomenting violence and falsely discrediting American democracy, but draw the line at attempted coup. We'll take it where we can get it.
But this is it, in the Politico piece. This is the only quote from any Republican anywhere expressing the most saladific of statements suggesting maybe the American people do not want to see the Hunter Biden show elevated to Republicanism's new and only reason for being.
Everything else consists of Republicans saying heck yeah, we're going to do the worst possible things and we're going to do the hell out of them.
So far, Republicans have embraced two plays Democrats used: First, McCarthy is vowing to prevent Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) from getting Intelligence Committee seats, something he can do unilaterally as speaker due to the nature of that panel.
If you're keeping track, McCarthy is vowing to do this because former speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi nixed McCarthy's nominations of Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 coup because both Trump allies were already implicated in the events they were supposed to be investigating and Banks, in particular, had loudly announced his intention to disrupt the probe.
Because Democratic leadership refused to seat two Republicans who were themselves engaged in the plot to nullify an American election as their own investigators, McCarthy is promising to retaliate by blocking two coup opponents from the House Intelligence Committee.
It doesn't really sound like the Kevin McCarthy Is Going To Be Reasonable Club is going to need a party platter at their next meeting.
Secondly, Republicans green-lit a sprawling select subcommittee that will probe the “weaponization” of the federal government, including current federal investigations, the Justice Department, the FBI and the intelligence community. The controversial panel, a demand by some of McCarthy’s hardline detractors during the 15-ballot speakership fight, will be under the stewardship of Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
I mean I'm just throwing this out there, but I would say the best point of evidence for "Republicans are going to do the most malevolent possible thing" is the creation of a new Republicans Doing The Most Malevolent Things Possible subcommittee, headed by the coatless longtime poster child for Republicans who want to do the most malevolent things possible. Gonna say that’s a pretty strong sign of where things are going to go in reality, if not in political journalist-land.
Again, there is exactly one completely anodyne say-nothing quote from any Republican, anywhere, offering even the slightest pushback to Republican plans to devote the next two years to conspiracy theories scraped off Rudy Giuliani's enmoistened scalp. That's it. That's how we get get to the subhead wondering if "Republicans who blasted" the Jan. 6 coup investigation will emulate the insurrection probe's "pushed boundaries" in their new subcommittee predicated on investigating Hunter Biden's taxes and the alleged conspiracy of government officials who at one point or another had questions over whether or not Donald Trump, a man who had been under some degree of criminal or journalistic investigation during nearly every point in his sorry cheating lying perv-o-rama life, might be doing some of the crimes that even Donald Trump's own staff was constantly bragging to the press that they were mostly kinda successful in stopping him from committing, fingers crossed, and not for the lack of him trying.
Hang on, let's check back in on Jim Jordan's Twitter feed to see what the sex-crimes-enabling pro-election-nullification creep has had on his mind as we've been debating this:
Oh my god it's like somebody shoved Tucker Carlson's brain into a shaved Tickle Me Elmo doll. Yeah, this is the guy who's going to be able to pull back from the most paranoid conspiracy-laced crankery the party can muster.
What is with this compulsion, by the political press, to "just ask questions" every last one of us knows the answer to? The Republican Party's march to extremism, currently manifested by widespread support for erasing elections where they have power to do so, efforts to ban abortion even if it means closing state borders to American women to make it happen, societal panic about children reading any book that suggests 'Merica might possibly have some racisms or ones that give LGBT children reasons not to kill themselves, and ever-growing suggestions that vaccines, of all things, are plots against our bodily essences—where is this drive coming from, to portray Republicanism not as all the things it screams that it stands for?
Is this one of the stages of political journalist grief? We're stuck in Denial, as we have been since (checks calendar) the year of Our Newt, back in the pre-millenial days? No progress so far, check back next decade?
Or is this just a constant, constant need to pretend that the people political reporters work alongside all day are not, in fact, malicious cranks whose tolerance for democracy and voting is strictly dependent on who wins what?
Please stop this! Stop looking for the golden lining that would prove Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis isn't the most craven bag of self-promotion any of us have laid eyes on, willing to kill off Americans by the thousands or tens of thousands if it means being able to capture that sweet, sweet anti-mask anti-vaccine anti-decency vote. Stop pretending that Kevin McCarthy has a single vertebrae from skull to tailbone, as he aligns with every conspiracy crank and fervent seditionist the party has voted into office. Stop pretending Jim Jordan wouldn't sell his own mother for parts if doing so would get him on television one more time than he otherwise would have been.
You are murdering me here. Turn on the television and watch your own coverage, if you're confused as to where these people stand. They're the least shy people on the planet! They want you to know exactly what they're doing! And look, here they are doing it!
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We've got a special double-barreled, two-guest show for you on this week's episode of The Downballot! First up is Tiffany Muller, the president of End Citizens United, who discusses her group's efforts to roll back the corrupting effects of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision as we hit the ruling's 13th anniversary. Muller tells us about ECU's short- and long-term plans to enact serious campaign finance reform; how the organization has expanded into the broader voting rights arena in recent years; and research showing the surprising connection many voters drew between the GOP's attacks on democracy and their war against abortion rights.
Then we're joined by law professor Quinn Yeargain to gape slack-jawed at the astonishing setback Gov. Kathy Hochul experienced in the state capitol on Wednesday when a Democratic-led Senate committee rejected her conservative pick to lead New York's top court. Yeargain explains why Hochul's threatened lawsuit to force the legislature to hold a full floor vote on Hector LaSalle defies 250 years of precedent and what will happen if she eventually retreats—as she manifestly should.