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canyonwalkerLast week was the first week of the new GOP majority running the House of Representatives in Congress. Fresh off selecting House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on a nearly unprecedented 15th round of voting in the wee hours of Saturday morning then rushing home to salvage the remainder weekend, Republicans got to work on Monday. What did they do with Week One? Here's the score, and it looks like a rout for any constituency of truth or good governance.
Five Things:
Fortunately the nonsense bills the GOP House is passing won't go anywhere. They're unlikely even to be brought to a vote with the slim Democratic majority in the Senate. And even if they did, and somehow won, President Biden would veto them. But the committee assignments and rules are done deals, and those plus even the dead-letter bills are examples of the lying and naked subversion of justice we'll see for at least the next two years.
Five Things:
- In the rules package McCarthy agreed to in partly secret negotiations to win crucial votes to become speaker, Republicans voted to gut the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE). They removed 3 of the 4 Democratic members in the name of "term limits" and made it all but impossible for their eventual replacements to hire any staff. Why is this so bad? One immediate consequence involves Rep. George Santos, accused of lying about pretty much everything on his resume. Leadership can refer him to the OCE, confident that no meaningful investigation will actually happen. Way bigger picture, a toothless OCE will not investigate the ongoing election lies of the majority of the Republican majority who voted to overturn the 2020 election on January 6, 2021, and who still claim openly that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent.
- The rules package also created a new subcommittee charged with investigating "the weaponization of the federal government". It's been promised this subcommittee will investigate the January 6 committee and witnesses, prominent public health leaders such as Anthony Fauci who spoke about the dangers of Covid, and representative and investigators involved in the impeachments of Donald Trump. In short, it's going to be 2 years of partisan conspiracy-theory horseshit.
- The first bill the new GOP majority passed was a measure to strip funding from the IRS for hiring new agents. Republicans have painted this as saving money, and saving honest ordinary people from overreaching government thugs, by not hiring 87,000 "enforcers". In truth extremely few of the 87,000 staff the IRS plans to hire would have police powers of badges and guns. The IRS has become woefully understaffed the past several years. Hiring staff would net-net reduce the government deficit, not increase it, as the extra staff would be able to catch tax cheating in excess of their salaries. Whatever happened to the GOP being the party of "law and order"? And BTW, it's phony populism. The IRS spends little time or money "going after" middle class Americans. Tax cheating is largely the province of big corporations and the 1%.
- Another GOP vote made illegal an abortion procedure that basically doesn't exist. Conservative fabulists have decrying for month, even years now, "born-alive" abortions. They rile up the far right base, who are primed to believe basically any horseshit their thought leaders tell them, with the notion that abortion rights mean women and doctors are allowed to kill babies surviving outside the womb. Such a procedure doesn't exist and it's never been legal anyway even if it did. But by golly, the GOP made sure of that last week.
- Finally there are the committee assignments. 11 of the 17 committee chairs Speaker McCarthy appointed are members who voted to overturn the popular election on January 6, 2020. These people have no business leading Congressional committees. Possibly the worst pick among them is Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who'll chair the powerful Judiciary Committee. As the January 6 committee showed through witness testimony, Jordan did more than just cast a vote to overturn the election; he was involved in planning the attempted coup with President Trump, senior White House officials and advisors such as Rudy Giuliani. The people who tried to destroy our Constitutional form of government two years ago should not be entrusted to run it today!
Fortunately the nonsense bills the GOP House is passing won't go anywhere. They're unlikely even to be brought to a vote with the slim Democratic majority in the Senate. And even if they did, and somehow won, President Biden would veto them. But the committee assignments and rules are done deals, and those plus even the dead-letter bills are examples of the lying and naked subversion of justice we'll see for at least the next two years.
