Leave it to Speaker Kevin McCarthy to make it a point of pride for Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell to have been removed from the House Intelligence Committee. In 2021, House Democrats stripped Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of committee assignments because she spread conspiracy theories and endorsed the assassination of political opponents. In 2023, McCarthy got revenge on behalf of Greene, the woman he "will always take care of,” by blocking a key committee assignment for two longtime members of that committee, including its former chair.
McCarthy pretended to take the high road, writing to Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries: “I cannot put partisan loyalty ahead of national security, and I cannot simply recognize years of service as the sole criteria for membership on this essential committee. Integrity matters more” and claiming that keeping Schiff and Swalwell off the committee was necessary “to maintain a standard worthy of this committee’s responsibilities.”
But everyone knows what’s going on. The Republican base loves it because they hate Schiff and Swalwell for their roles in impeaching Donald Trump and because it shows how beholden McCarthy is to extremists like Greene. Democrats certainly know what’s going on—and did when they invited McCarthy to follow through on his threats by assigning Schiff and Swalwell to the committee. Given the choice of backing down to McCarthy’s threats or having yet another case in point of the extremism and dishonesty of House Republicans, Jeffries went for option B.
RELATED STORY: Jeffries challenges McCarthy on committee assignments as House, Senate get to organizing
McCarthy’s flimsy excuse for why Schiff isn’t worthy of the House Intelligence Committee is that he “openly lied to the American people.” In 2019, Schiff dramatically paraphrased parts of the phone call in which Trump tried to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into announcing an investigation into now-President Joe Biden, and he suggested that his committee hadn’t had contact with the whistleblower about that call before an official complaint was filed when in fact the whistleblower had approached a House Intelligence Committee aide about the matter, though had not been in direct contact with Schiff.
McCarthy’s flimsy excuse for why Swalwell isn’t worthy of the House Intelligence Committee is that in 2014, a suspected Chinese spy may have targeted him as part of an influence campaign. Swalwell cut off contact with the person as soon as he was alerted by federal investigators, which was back in 2015, but hey, Republicans needed an excuse to call an aggressive political opponent untrustworthy.
“It’s political vengeance, it’s too bad because that committee has always been a bipartisan committee, and he’s taking one of the most precious pieces of glassware in the congressional cabinet and smashing it, and the damage is going to be irreparable,” Swalwell said. And it’s not a double standard: “If a Democrat advocated for violence against another member of Congress, I would support getting rid of them.”
“If McCarthy thinks this is going to stop me from vigorously pushing back against his efforts to tear down these institutions, he’s going to find out just how wrong he is,” Schiff told reporters.
Meanwhile, McCarthy put Greene, a woman whose personal Twitter account was suspended because she spread COVID-19 misinformation, on the new Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Again, McCarthy’s actions are all about paying off debts—and he has a lot of debts after 15 speaker votes—and posturing to show the Republican base that he is who Marjorie Taylor Greene says he is, not who Matt Gaetz spent months saying he is. Also on that coronavirus subcommittee is Rep. Ronny Jackson, who has pushed his share of COVID-19 disinformation, including, in late November 2021, claiming that the omicron variant was a Democratic plot to promote mail-in voting during the midterm elections nearly a year later. Omicron, of course, went on to cause a huge number of deaths, and by the time the midterm elections rolled around, we’d been through a series of other variants.
McCarthy has nothing but political motivations for anything he does as speaker. Those political motivations aren’t just about partisan advantage for Republicans, though. As much as he’s trying to position Republicans for 2024 by elevating the likes of Greene and Rep. Jim Jordan and whipping up the base with committees on the pandemic and going after federal law enforcement for daring to investigate when Republicans commit crimes, he’s trying to protect his own extremely fragile position within his party by sucking up to its worst actors. This is all we can expect from the House of Representatives for the next two years.
RELATED STORIES:
Why Kevin McCarthy 'will always take care of' Marjorie Taylor Greene
'Unprecedented,' former Nixon lawyer says of planned House Republican committee
