In my many years, I have come to a conclusion that one Republican is a shame, two Republicans are a lobby firm, and three or more Republicans are a broken Congress!
-- paraphrasing John Adams from the 1776 musical
We started this year with a dysfunctional House of Representatives thanks to a clueless, inept, rage-driven Republican party. We're ending this year with one of the worst ever Congress sessions because that House GOP couldn't do a goddamn thing except shoot themselves in the collective foot. Some details from Li Zhou at Vox:
Just one week into 2023, House Republicans had already endured a humiliating leadership race full of infighting and chaos. And while that was a low point for them, things arguably went downhill from there.
Since then, the GOP followed up its first wave of speaker drama with another equally tumultuous contest, expulsion votes on one of its own members, failed attempts to get much of its policy agenda out the door, and floundering investigations of President Joe Biden.
Spending a year dealing with political and personnel problems left the party with little to show for itself policy-wise ahead of an election year in which Republicans hope to expand on their narrow House majority. And it has given Democrats plenty of ammunition to use in making the case the GOP shouldn’t be trusted to govern...
It should be noted most Far Right voters enjoy the fact that their own party can't govern, because it means the ineptitude prevents anything useful getting done (and they HATE useful governance).
According to the New York Times, this is the most unproductive the House has been in years, even compared to other instances of divided government. In 2023, the House passed just 27 bills that became law, a far lower figure than the 72 it passed in 2013 when Congress was similarly split.
They're barely showing up to do the work that legislatures are supposed to do. Instead they've been too busy hosting fund-raising rallies for their campaign managers' six-figure salaries, and showing up on Fox Not-News and other Far Right media outlets to accuse drag queens and Democrats of 'grooming'.
This isn't some new development, either. There's been a long history of reactionary Republican Congresses being nothing more than posturing forums letting the world burn while they perform their manufactured outrage.
Harry Truman famously described his GOP opponents as a "Do-Nothing Congress" and won over voters in 1948 who agreed with him. And THAT session of Congress actually passed 388 pieces of legislation.
Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone - before he turned out to be a creep - kept reporting how lazy and useless the Republican-controlled Congress of the 2000s behaved (the articles are paywalled). Caught taking long weekends, failing at oversight regarding Bush the Lesser's reckless management of two battlefronts and refusing to rein in an illegal torture regime, and letting debt and deficits run amok while pushing for more tax cuts and deregulation: Even that congressional era was more productive than this era's Freedom-Caucus controlled House.
(The Democratic-controlled Senate by the by tried being more functional this year, but both ends of Congress have to pass legislation and with the House in its partisan gridlock there was little the Senate could do. Even then, wingnut hacks like Senator Tuberville delayed and held Senatorial functions over bullshit partisan agendas)
What's happened has been the gradual degrading of conservative ideology from actual thought - genuine ideas and attempts at reforms they believed would work - into preformatted talking (more like screaming) points obsessing over irrational and unfounded Culture War fears. The party leadership - as much as the ill-informed voting base still supporting them - could care less about actual law-making when they can fulfill their agenda just accusing their enemies of wrong-doing and getting re-elected on the gaslighting.
The modern Republican Party has honestly devolved into this... monster incapable of governance because actual work interferes with their grifting. Passing any kind of legislation - that has to get past vetoes and court challenges, and then has to function as part of the nation's legal and social structure - could put that grifting to risk.
Pretty much the only thing the House Republicans can do anymore is rail against the federal social safety net, rail against IRS reforms trying to get rich corporations to pay back taxes, rail against supporting NATO and Ukraine (to appease their culture war ally Putin), and rail against President Biden to weaken his re-election chances.
The House grandstanding efforts to impeach Biden is pretty much the only thing they did all year, and even then they screwed that up. Philip Bump over at the Washington Post tracked an entire calendar of House Republican follies (might be paywalled):
This is not how Comer’s first year running Oversight worked out. Instead of using his majority to methodically flesh out the existing allegations against the president, Comer and his allies — including Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee — found themselves offering up baseless or debunked allegations to a conservative media ravenous for them. Throughout 2023, Comer, Jordan and their allies made little progress toward Comer’s stated target — but did manage to significantly erode their credibility...
By March, Republicans were ready to begin releasing a slow trickle of information about the monetary interactions between Hunter Biden, James Biden and their business partners. In the middle of the month, Oversight released the first of several “bank memos” that detailed money received by the Bidens or their associates and some of those who received it. None of those recipients was the president.
The Post would later walk through many of the allegations — including claims of millions of dollars flowing to the Bidens and of numerous “shell companies” — and would reveal them to be overstated or false.
Immediately, though, it was hard to avoid comparing the business arrangements of Hunter and James Biden with those of Donald Trump’s family. The Oversight presentation of Biden’s culpability uniformly also applied to the Trumps — but the scale of the former president’s family’s interactions was far more substantial. Another difference was that the former president himself was an obvious beneficiary, even while in office.
It was also during March that the New York Times reported that Comer had spiked an ongoing investigation into Trump’s business arrangements...
May was a banner month for Comer.
Comer also partnered with Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) to claim that evidence existed of an “alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions,” as a letter sent to the Justice Department claimed. This evidence was in the form of an interview conducted with an informant who claimed to have been told about payoffs of $5 million to Joe and Hunter Biden.
Comer and Grassley spent most of May trying to get the FBI to release the interview; the Bureau declined, noting both that the allegation was unverified and that doing so would put the informant at risk. Instead, the FBI allowed legislators to view the document. Grassley eventually just shared the whole thing on social media, though he said he had no idea if the allegation was true. That the person making the allegation — Mykola Zlochevsky, the founder of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma — had also told people that he never had any contact with Joe Biden was ignored. No evidence beyond the informant’s description of the claim ever emerged.
There was an additional bit of intrigue here, though. At one point, Comer appeared for an interview about his investigation on Fox News. (He’s appeared on Fox hundreds of times this year, which is not unimportant for understanding what’s at play — nor is the fact that Comer is relentlessly fundraising on his status as theoretical Biden-toppler.) Host Maria Bartiromo asked him a weird question: where was this informant?
“Unfortunately, we can’t track down the informant,” Comer replied. “We’re hopeful that the informant is still there. The whistleblower knows the informant. The whistleblower is very credible...”
You might remember on this blog where I railed against Comer for not even having his witnesses secured and confirmed. How can the whistleblower - whom you've misquoted at best - be credible without the informant? You need your effing ducks in a row before you go public with this, ya moron! Anyway, back to Bump:
In July, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment targeting Luft, the director of a D.C.-area think tank. Given that Luft had offered to provide information about his interactions with Biden, the indictment was cited by House Republicans, including Oversight’s Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) as evidence of an attempt by the government to silence a potential anti-Biden witness.
But this was backward. Luft offered to present information about knowledge of Hunter Biden’s agreement with a Chinese energy company only after he’d been detained earlier this year. The indictment was unsealed in July but had been handed down last November. Luft was arrested in February and then skipped bail — which was why he was “missing” when Comer clumsily brought him up back in May.
Wait, was Luft the "informant"? This keeps getting ridiculous.
A similar pattern unfolded at the end of the month as Oversight prepared to interview Devon Archer, a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s. Just before that testimony, Archer received an update on his previous conviction on fraud charges and subsequent efforts to appeal, which had ended a few weeks prior: he would need to begin the process of reporting for incarceration.
Comer and others howled that this was an effort to lock up Archer so that he couldn’t testify. It wasn’t, as the government made clear in a subsequent letter with almost-audible eye-rolling. Archer testified...
Archer’s closed-door deposition was made public in August. Comer and his allies insisted that Archer’s testimony was damaging: that he described numerous occasions on which Joe Biden had called Hunter only to be put on speakerphone during business meetings and because he told investigators about a call placed to D.C. by Hunter Biden and Zlochevsky, the head of Burisma, on whose board Hunter Biden and Archer sat.
This was cherry-picking. Archer did say those things, though he agreed that the calls from Biden were non-substantive. Archer also testified that Hunter Biden had emailed him contemporaneously to note that they lacked the ability to leverage Joe Biden on their behalf. He testified that Joe Biden was at no point involved in their business. He even debunked the idea that Hunter Biden had been working with a Russian that had paid Archer money for a real estate deal — one of the allegations that Comer had referenced in his December 2022 Post interview...
Earlier this month (December), Comer used newly obtained documents to announce that Hunter Biden’s law firm had made a direct payment to his father — an attempt to intertwine Joe Biden directly in his son’s work.
But this fell apart before the close of business on the day the allegation was made. The payments, amounting to less than $5,000, were in repayment of a loan Joe Biden had offered his son to buy a new pickup truck. There were pictures of Joe and Hunter at the car dealership.
Nor were such payments from the law firm account particularly unusual. Comer and his allies had repeatedly hyped how many Bidens had received “laundered money” from Hunter Biden, but that included things like money paid to Hunter Biden’s child...
When you've sunk down to the interfamily transactions of buying cars for each other - and it wasn't a Porsche it was a freaking pickup truck - you're just scrapping for anything to make your fearmongering stick to the wall.
This is what the Republican Party is today: A bunch of witch-hunters unable to find actual witches. They're not even good at the one thing they're trying to do. How incompetent can you get?
