(Dobbs) The Height Of Hypocrisy
What we’re not supposed to notice is, the Republicans have willingly, intentionally, let other crises fester.
Yesterday was a huge day on Capitol Hill. HUGE. The Republicans in the House undertook not just one action that will save the world, but two.
The House Judiciary Committee formally voted to hold Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress for refusing to let them skewer him in a closed-door hearing in connection with their campaign to impeach President Biden. Meanwhile, just down the hall, the Homeland Security Committee formally opened its hearing to impeach Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security for enforcing the president’s policies at the southern border.
Where do I even start?!
Why not with Hunter. The president’s son is in trouble. He faces tax charges, he faces gun charges. Those are serious. This contempt citation is not. It is posturing. It is nonsense. Hunter Biden has promised several times to testify in an open hearing so the Republicans cannot selectively misrepresent his words from behind closed doors— he actually showed up at the hearing yesterday in person, willing to testify, the second time he’s done that….
…. but they said no. They had subpoenaed him for a closed-door hearing and that’s what it must be.
This is the height of hypocrisy in so many ways.
First, because when this whole business started, Chairman James Comer of the House Oversight Committee— one of three Republican-led committees that has targeted the president— said of witnesses they would call, “We can bring these people in for depositions or committee hearings, whichever they choose.” Whichever they choose unless they are Hunter Biden.
Second, because when it comes to refusing to honor a subpoena, the Republicans today are the poster boys for such contempt. Four allies of former President Trump ignored subpoenas to appear before the January 6th Committee, including Jim Jordan, the current chair of the Judiciary Committee… the very committee that voted yesterday to hold Hunter Biden in contempt.
To prove a point, Democrats on the committee moved yesterday to cite both Jim Jordan and Hunter Biden for contempt, which the Republicans predictably turned down.
Third, the MAGA mouthpieces on the committee berated the president’s son for refusing to talk with them without the public looking in. Representative Nancy Mace, who of course never complained about her own colleagues who ignored congressional subpoenas, said that he should be placed under arrest right then and there. As he sat in the audience, she asked Biden, “What are you afraid of?,” then crudely told him, “You have no balls.” Had they let him speak, he would not have been out of line to say the same thing to them: “What are you afraid of if you let me go on the public record?” Then when Marjorie Taylor Greene got the microphone, he got up and walked out. She then said of Biden, “He can’t even face my words.”
But he didn’t walk out because he couldn’t face her words. He got up and walked out because at another hearing six months ago, Greene suddenly and crudely held up poster boards with explicitly nude pictures of him. I’d have walked out on her too.
Fourth, it’s the height of hypocrisy because the Republicans on all three committees looking toward impeachment want so hard to nail the president for bribery and corruption that they are moving full speed ahead even though they haven’t yet presented persuasive proof for either. This is in contrast to reams of persuasive proof that Donald Trump committed impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors, and did it twice during his presidency— in 2019 when he tried to extort Ukraine’s President Zelensky by withholding U.S. funding until Zelensky could come up with something to tarnish Joe Biden, and in 2021 when he helped instigate the violent insurrection of January 6th. But none of these paragons of virtue who run the House today, none of them, voted back then to impeach.
Now to yesterday’s other impeachment proceeding, the one against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
It is another exercise in hypocrisy. The charge against him is, he has willingly failed to enforce immigration laws and opened the door to the crisis at our southern border. In other words, that he has overseen a policy of open borders. Homeland Security Chair Mark Green opened the hearing by declaring, “What other conclusion is there but that this is an intentional crisis.” What we’re not supposed to notice is, the Republicans have willingly, intentionally, let other crises fester, including funding for the border as well as funding for our beleaguered ally Ukraine.
The ranking Democrat on the committee, Bennie Thompson, responded to Green, saying, “You cannot impeach a cabinet secretary because you don’t like a president’s policies.” But we don’t need a member of the opposition to complain about the Republicans’ tactics. We can depend on constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, who was the key legal witness speaking for Donald Trump in his first impeachment.
Turley began a commentary Tuesday in The Daily Beast with this: “Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has been denounced as dishonest, duplicitous, and derelict by his critics. In my view, all of those things are manifestly true.” But that, he argued, is not grounds for impeachment. “Being bad at your job is not an impeachable offense. Even really bad. Even Mayorkas’s level of bad.”
His argument is, “There is… no current evidence that he is corrupt or committed an impeachable offense. He can be legitimately accused of effectuating an open border policy, but that is a disagreement on policy that is traced to the President.” He went on, “Policy-based impeachments could open up endless tit-for-tat impeachment politics.” What’s more, in a challenge to President Biden’s policies, the Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that the president does have the authority to set them.
Turley’s conclusion on Mayorkas? “I hold the Constitution more dearly than I despise his tenure.”
Most of us would place the Constitution above politics. But not the Republicans in charge of Congress. Last month new Speaker Mike Johnson wrote in USA Today that “the House has a full plate of pressing issues.” Given their faulty foundations, neither of its actions today deserves a place on that plate. Let them act on what matters. If they know how.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
I wish sincerely that we could deport every single MAGA Republican in the USA in exchange for a Mexican, Guatemalan, Honduran and every other person who wants freedom to work and earn a better life in the USA. But which country would take all the MAGA Republicans? Russia and China have lots of room in Mongolia and their most far flung remote provinces!
Thank you Greg for calling out this manifest hypocrisy. I wonder whether anyone not already a committed maga zombie even cares.