Republicans are gearing up their attacks on the Biden administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and it’s sure to be a festival of disinformation and dishonest attacks. On Wednesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability is setting aside its interest in Hunter Biden’s dick pics for long enough to hold a hearing on fraud and waste in federal pandemic spending.
Polling and focus groups already show that voters don't like House Republican priorities and want them to get stuff done rather than wasting time on investigations, yet this is what they’re going with.
Multiple government agencies are already investigating and prosecuting cases of COVID-19 relief fraud, but Rep. James Comer, the chair of the committee, thinks he sees a way to attack President Joe Biden, so away they go. Never mind that much of the money in question was passed by a Republican Senate and signed into law by Donald Trump—for Comer and Republicans, this is about Biden.
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There was a deadly pandemic that was killing huge numbers of people, keeping many people working from home, and had tanked the economy. The federal government, then with Republicans controlling the Senate and the White House, rightly sent a lot of money—more than $3 trillion approved in 2020—out to try to save the economy and protect people affected by the pandemic. And in the chaos, there was some fraud, which the government has been working to investigate, and where necessary prosecute, ever since. One of the people testifying at the House hearing will be Michael Horowitz, who chairs a committee created in March 2020 to oversee COVID-19 spending. So while there has been fraud, it’s not like the government ignored it. Yet now Republicans see it as a cudgel against Biden—even though a lot of what we’re talking about happened before he took office—so it’s a huge priority.
One thing unlikely to be investigated is the Paycheck Protection Program loan Comer’s own brother got in 2020, interesting context for Comer’s November rant against “the fraudulent PPP loan funds.” (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan.)
Using COVID-19 as a political tool is, more generally, part of the House Republican agenda right now. On Tuesday, they spent hours on messaging bills aimed at cutting off the last remaining shreds of a federal COVID-19 response beyond government officials saying, “Please get vaccinated? Please?” Predictably, that “debate” involved falsehood after falsehood, like claims that the government denied the possibility of vaccine side effects or that shortages of health care workers were due to vaccine requirements rather than an ongoing problem before the pandemic exacerbated by pandemic-induced burnout.
But the Republican base eats up the claims that they’ve been victimized by what Rep. Elise Stefanik on Tuesday described, falsely, as “extended covid lockdowns.” (In reality, no part of the United States ever had a true lockdown.) So between the desire to whip up their base by pretending to roll back restrictions that barely exist and by conducting more loud investigations intended to politically damage Biden, this is definitely COVID week for Republicans.
Don’t worry, though. Next week they’ll move on to some other manufactured outrage.
Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, President at NextGen America, is back to talk with us about young voters. She talks about whether the rising numbers of young voters we saw during the midterms are sustainable, and what still needs to be done to achieve more young voter participation in our democracy as we progress toward a better America.
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