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One of the more telling moments from Tuesday’s meeting of the House Rules Committee came in commentary offered by Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.).
The committee was considering a resolution that would formalize the impeachment inquiry targeting President Biden, an inquiry that was informally initiated in September, three months and one House speaker ago. Reschenthaler valiantly did his best to defend his party’s efforts both before and since that informal launch, insisting that it involved a valid, fair process.
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“To say that we somehow lack transparency is laughable,” Reschenthaler insisted. After all, he explained, Republican Reps. James Comer (Ky.), Jim Jordan (Ohio) and Jason T. Smith (Mo.) — the chairmen of the House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means committees, respectively — “have been on TV. They’ve been in print. You can’t turn on a news program without seeing one of those three update the American people on this.”
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Maybe the news programs that Reschenthaler watches, anyway.
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Comer in particular has been omnipresent on cable news — at least on Fox News. Mediaite calculated that he had appeared on Fox News 200 times since January, the point at which he took over chairmanship of his committee. And that report came out in October; Comer has made numerous appearances on Fox News since then. Analysis from Stanford’s Cable TV News Analyzer indicates that he has appeared on or been mentioned on Fox News at least four times as much this year as he has been on CNN and MSNBC combined.
This isolation is not an accident. When Comer has dared to present himself to non-right-wing interlocutors, he has invariably fared poorly. (See recent examples from NBC News and CNN.) His challenge is that he consistently misrepresents his putative evidence incriminating Biden, sometimes to a staggering degree. Objective journalists point out the obvious flaws in his claims, leaving Comer sputtering and hustling back to friendly right-wing terrain where he can mope about how, say, the CNN audience has a “low IQ.”
Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) declined to specify the constitutional crime President Biden is accused of during a House Rules Committee hearing on Dec. 12. (Video: The Washington Post)
There has been a perennial question about this approach Comer and Jordan have taken, to make exaggerated or flatly dishonest claims in front of a ravenous Republican audience: Do the other members of the Republican conference know how far over their skis they are? Does Reschenthaler, for example, understand that those incessant Fox News appearances offer no serious adjudication of the claims — since doing so is desired by neither their audience nor Comer’s? Does he understand why even generally pliant allies are not echoing the argument that Biden’s guilt is demonstrated?
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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has offered no evidence that he’s cautious about this thing. Out of either loyalty to the team or a lack of curiosity about the claims, he is moving forward with the impeachment probe and the vote to make it a formality. He does not seem to understand that it is a vampire inquiry, dead for some time but still wandering around the political right, infecting new people with nonsense.
And withering in the sunlight. One would think that the disastrous impeachment-centered hearing held by Comer, Jordan and Smith might give their colleagues pause. Sure, they went on Fox News afterward to try to clean up things, but that hearing — the only one to occur during the nearly three months of the informal inquiry — made obvious what happens when they try to bring their delicate theories out for public discussion. Comer’s takeaway, when talking to reporters a few weeks later, was that he didn’t want to do any more hearings. I would imagine not.
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Related: Democrats on the Rules Committee noted that the language defining how the formal inquiry would move forward if approved by the full House excluded any requirement for public hearings.
Ahead of House GOP vote on impeachment inquiry, Hunter Biden defies subpoena
Many Americans have not been paying close attention to the effort to impugn the president that has unfolded over the year, and so they may not understand how flailing and hollow it is. Comer, Jordan and Smith have presented myriad allegations and lines of argument that have hit dead ends or rely on false claims. You can see the sprawling, catchall claims made by then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) three months ago as he announced the probe, allegations of Biden trying to aid his son Hunter’s business (which has not been demonstrated) or his intervening in the criminal probes his son faces (same). Close observers will note that the intervening three months have neither bolstered nor expanded these allegations.
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One challenge is that Republicans are very obviously beginning from the conclusion and working backward. They either believe or are acting as though they believe (again, it’s not clear how sold they are on all of this) that Biden did something worthy of impeachment, that he’s guilty of something. Now they just need to cobble together evidence sufficient to bolster that belief.
That’s easy for the Fox News audience, which shares their conclusion and, as with claims that the Russia investigation was corrupt and invalid, just need little wisps of assertion to feel justified in their belief. Homeopathic prosecution, if you will. But the real world, the objective world, needs a lot more than debunked claims from James Comer. And that’s the problem with making all of this more substantive: More people will very quickly discover how full of nonsense and how deprived of reality the existing claims are.
There are obvious reasons the Republicans do it. One is that it’s been a boon for fundraising, with Comer even fundraising off other people’s allegations.
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Jordan articulated another reason in a Fox Business interview this week. Host Stuart Varney — not one to challenge false claims involving Biden — asked Jordan to opine on polling showing Donald Trump “surging” in the presidential race.
“Well,” Jordan said, “the American people have common sense and they see what’s happening to President Trump.” With no shortage of irony, he suggested that the investigations Trump is facing were motivated centrally by politics. He contrasted Trump’s record with Biden’s in the familiar manner.
“And then, of course,” he continued, “there’s — there’s — this, this other issue of whether Joe Biden was involved in this, in his son’s business dealings that I think the American people are looking at as well. So I think all that together is why you see the numbers where they’re at.”
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The allegations against Biden have taken a political toll, with many Americans indicating they view his and Trump’s families as drenched in corruption. And this, more than anything, explains why Republicans want to move forward: At the very least, an impeachment probe fosters the idea that Biden has no morality advantage over his predecessor and, at best, they stumble onto something useful, as was the case with the Benghazi hearings nearly a decade ago (which McCarthy celebrated for hurting Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers).
Then there’s the other reason to press on. Were the clock to stop today, the history of the effort to investigate President Biden would show only that Republicans, cocooned in a friendly media environment, repeatedly exaggerated and lied about what Biden had done without having substantial evidence of wrongdoing. When it comes to showing that Biden did something significantly untoward, they have nowhere to go but up.
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